Video Archives - Reality is a Game

Immersive experiences come in many flavours, my specialty is the delicious world of escape rooms. The most important design within an escape room are the puzzles themselves. Puzzle making can be difficult and challenging even to just think about. In this presentation I cover ways to approach designing puzzles to create an engaging experience. Creating puzzles is just one of many steps. Putting puzzles into the right sequence to create flow is vital to a successful game, just like in a video game.

Beyond puzzle designs I go into ways that designers can get inspiration to make games from video games or other fields they are interested in.

The talk was given at FITC Toronto in the spring of 2017.

Looking for escape game designs? At Wero Creative we make boutique immersive escape rooms for anybody who wants one.

If you want to know more about escape room design then check out my book.

Video edited by (and special thanks to) Wish You Were Here Productions.

For any entertainment property knowing how to pitch it is integral to getting funding, backers, and sales.

A few weeks back, Paradox did an hour long stream on how to pitch to them. If you’re thinking of pitching to Paradox then you really need to watch it – or any other studio for that matter. They go into brand building, familiarity with consumers, and they reveal that game studios propose non-strategy games (90% of all pitches get rejected!). Be sure to know what a publisher actually publishes before pitching them!

Paradox takes board games pitches on based on their intellectual property, and of course the best way to do that is to send them a copy of the game. For more on board game pitches check out the panel we did with Bamboozle Brothers at Board Game Jam.

Never just pitch an idea – show something that reveals it!

You have to be really short and concise with you pitch! Panelists on the Pitching Secrets Revealed session at GDC 2013 all agree that you should use the minimum amount of time you need to describe your game, then use any remaining time to go into more details. For example, if you have a 15 minute pitch session you should use the first 5 to deliver your pitch and the rest of the time to answer questions.

Pitch for a card game

Similarly, at GDC Europe in 2014 Rami Ismail (from Vlambeer) gave a talk about how to sell and why it’s important to be able to do pitch well. Basically, if you don’t know how to talk about your game then you can’t sell it. And if you can’t pitch it then you can’t sell it. If you can keep the summary of your game in one sentence then that’s even better.

You can watch his talk on the GDC Vault, he starts talking about pitching at the 14 minute mark.

For creating a good pitch deck (AKA PowerPoint) see this early post about Bubble Gum Interactive’s template.