Can You Spot the Differences?

About a year and a half ago we did a Game in a Day, and from it the idea for A Kingdom for Keflings was born. NinjaBee will be doing another Game in a Day starting Thursday evening and all day Friday (okay, so it'll be a Game in a Day and a Few Hours) and I'll be blogging and twittering all about it. So in light of that, I thought I'd show off the initial pitch trailer and concept document for A Kingdom for Keflings. In order to keep this post shorter than 1 million words, I'll show you the trailer today and the pitch doc tomorrow. This part below was written by The Fox (Our art director Brent).

Part 1:

The first stage in game development is forming a rough concept. Before getting into all of the details everyone involved needs to understand the basic premise of the game. There are many methods of formulating and presenting a game idea. NinjaBee’s approach has been to create a “pitch document”. This document can be used to pitch the game internally or even used to evaluate the interest of a potential publisher.

We have two simple guidelines that we follow when we are creating these pitch documents:

• Keep it short. (Usually just a couple of pages).
If you can’t explain your game in a couple of pages it may be a bad design or it may need some more time in the oven. Also, executives won’t bother to read a lengthy design document unless you first catch their attention with a short pitch.

• Define the look and feel of the game
It is surprising how important art can be to illustrate an idea. No matter how much anyone says they can look past place holder art, they can’t. The best thing to include is a mock-up of what a screen shot may look like.

In addition to a good pitch document (which you will see in tomorrow's post), we like to create a trailer. When pitching a game, most publishers will ask for a working demo. However, we have found that a trailer is actually better than a demo of the game. For one thing, it would take months to create the effects/features in a demo that we can fake in a week in a trailer. Also, people are more easily convinced after seeing a good movie that shows what the game can do than a demo that crashes every two minutes or a boring bullet list of features.

And with that, here's the trailer that we pitched to Microsoft. As you can see, a LOT has changed...(for example, the working title was My Kingdom)