Thread by @joethephish

How do you explain your game to someone? Whether a friend, member of the press or just.. anyone?

While working on @HeavensVault and showing it to people, this approach has slowly evolved and emerged. Here's my PITCH PYRAMID!

THREAD:

1. Top of the pyramid: Heaven's Vault is a "narrative adventure". This is absolute minimum amount of information you need to convey to express what you're even talking about. If you start by explaining story, setting, etc you'll annoy people. WHAT ARE WE EVEN TALKING ABOUT

2. Next, VERY rough tone/setting: Now they have a skeleton to hang the meat off - we give them a flavour. The character, Aliya Elasra, is an archaeologist. She has a robot sidekick. Archaeology and sci-fi. No more detail needed.

3. Next, the Hook: This is where you really begin to sell the concept. What is the top thing that will inspire people about your game?

For us, it's that we've created an entire ancient language, and deciphering it forms our main puzzle mechanic.

(Further reading: the concept of finding a game's Hook and Kicker comes from @raveofravendale - I find it a really useful exercise. Read more here: gamesindustry.biz/articles/2017-…)

Depending on who you're telling about the game, how much enthusiasm they show for the hook, you'd almost certainly want to elaborate and explain what excites you about it in detail.

(You'd be surprised by how many people love chatting about linguistics!)

Optional: This makes me cringe, and some people might really hate it, but we find the crude "It's X meets Y via Z" can be genuinely useful. Asking people to smash games together in their head to make new ones can be good for clarification and reinforcement of a concept.

4. Talk about details and features: By the time you get to the details, you should (hopefully!) have them interested. You've laid down the springboard from which you can jump in and explain other areas in more detail.

Everything from the hook downwards would be explained in detail, dependent on who you're talking to and where they show interest.

Disclaimer: This framework definitely won't make sense for all games! But right now, it seems to be a good fit for @HeavensVault. Hopefully it's useful for your game too!

In addition to @RaveofRavendale's suggestion of finding your Hook and Kicker, this has also been inspired by @helvetica's "The Three Reads", as described in his GDC talk:

The "Kicker" for us is the story and how the narrative systems work. We can't MAKE you understand what's good about it, you just have to play it. The narrative fluidly reacts to everything you do, and organically evolves as you progress from scene to scene.