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• begins Monday, June 29
• lasts for ten weeks
• is online
• and free
• and all about designing games!

Therefore there are no reasons why you shouldn’t sign up for this awesome experience.

WordPress blog here > Game Design Concepts

A quick email and cheap book are all you need to participate.

Jelly Fish at the Monterey Aquarium

While being a girl might have helped a little bit, I believe that the clear, well-written quality of my post contributed largely to its success.   Good communication skills are an essential part to being a game designer, and it’s very important to be able to explain your ideas well.  It’s also important to explain why you would be a good person to work with.

To hopefully pass my success on to others, I’m going to break down the parts of my pitch and explain my thought process behind it’s overall structure.  Read on!

Original post is in brown, [ my comments are in blue brackets. ]

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– Beginning of game post –

Designer Seeks Collaboration With Programmer

[ A good, solid, non-generic or cliché title is VERY important.  Think of it as your typical first impression.  It should state who you are and who/what you are looking for. ]

Hello,

My name is Gwen and I’m a senior Game Development major at the Savannah College of Art & Design.  I’m looking to collaborate with a programmer to create games for our portfolios.  I have four designs in mind to work with, and I figure we can pick one to start with and see where it takes us.

[ Give your reader a very brief bio, that hopefully establishes some sort of school/professional experience related to gaming.  Why do you want to make this game?  What makes you think your design is worth being made?  It’s important not to come across as some dumb kid who wants to make GTA 5.  Repeat what you are looking for with a little more detail.  The idea is to start narrowing down candidates as soon as possible.  Your post will be read by a lot of people who “think” they can program or draw, and you want to sound like a bit of a challenge to scare off the people who don’t like hard work. ]

— Totem – an abstract, semi-tile based game where the player has to move blocks around the board and create towers.  In paper prototype stage.  Has elements of Rummikub. (I had more designs listed in original post but removed to save space.)

[ This part is a general idea of how the game is played, for example the genre, other influences and how much work you’ve actually done on the design.  If you’re bringing in programmers and artists, you better have a paper prototyped version that you have playtested with at least one other person.  And yes, ALL games are able to be prototyped non-digitally, some easier than others of course, but don’t use that as an excuse not to do your design homework.

What if you have a design idea that you don’t want to necessarily “give away"? You still need to tell the reader enough to make them interested in working with you.  Instead of describing exactly how the game is played, perhaps specify the genre and the player’s goal.  Give away any details that don’t compromise your design, for example the title, the number of players or if it’s card or tile based.

At this point, you’ll probably have several readers who are very interested in working with you because they really like your game idea.  Now is the time to reel them in and convince them why you would be awesome to work with. ]

Please visit my website at gwenmurray.net for more recent projects and to view my resume.

Here’s what I can bring to the table:
— creating and balancing game systems
— writing thorough design documents
— writing narrative content
— creating art assets

[ Website is important to showcase the various games/projects/whatever you’ve already done.  Provide examples of projects you have FINISHED, not just stuff that you got halfway through and dropped out of boredom.  If you don’t have a website, perhaps link to your blog or a game you have created (even if it isn’t great, again, it shows that you have completed a project).  I stress this so much because proving that you can stick through an entire production cycle is important.  It’s much easier to quit than finish something.

I also listed a few specific skills that targeted programmers and explained how working with me would be easy.  Experience with design documents shows I know how to thoroughly describe my design so it makes sense to a programmer, and art experience means the programmer won't be stuck opening Photoshop at 2am and wasting his/her time making assets.  Programmers should spend their time programming, not feeling bad about their crappy art skills.

If you are looking for a team of people to help create your game, you will want to provide skills that prove you’ve successfully managed teams of people before.  Prove to your potential group members that you will not waste their time by dropping off the face of the earth.  Again, if you have specific examples to back any of this up, don’t be afraid to use them. ]

I would ideally like to work with a fellow college student or anyone who is interested in coding as a career.  I’m familiar with Flash Actionscript 3.0, but if you’re a C++, AS2, Python, etc type of guy (or gal!) then I’m down with that too.  It would be cool to develop these games as Facebook applications.  Right now the only way I can compensate you for your work is with delicious cake.  However, if our games gather enough momentum and catch the eye of someone with deeper pockets than mine, you will be entitled to an even split of the profits.  I’m also keen on entering competitions, so you may eventually have awards to bulk up your resume.

[ In this paragraph I explicitly stated the technical requirements of who I wanted to work with and what skills I would like them to have.  I stated what types of languages I’d like to work with and explained that compensation was unavailable.  I don’t think payment details should be kept secret or confined to just the people who respond.  It comes down to not wasting people’s time.

If a freelance programmer or artist is browsing the forums looking for paying work, sees your post (that doesn’t state whether or not you can pay them) and contacts you – you could potentially be in the embarrassing position of having to explain that you cannot, in fact, provide compensation.  You feel bad for not being rich, they feel bad for making you feel poor.  Boo.

If you're also looking for artists, you might want to specify what kind of art style you are looking for, such as realistic or pixel art.  For composers, perhaps a general mood or link to a song that is similar to what you want for the game.  If you don’t have details like this nailed down yet, say you’re open. ]

If you’re interested in working together, send me an email at gwen.em+at+gmail.com with info about you and any projects you have previously coded.

[ Hopefully this phrase: “info about you and any projects you have previously coded” will weed out 90% of the bullshitters left who are still reading your post.  Being asked to provide details about their previous experience will make even the most determined lazyass think twice about contacting you.  As I stated above, it’s important to let your readers know that you’re serious about finishing this game.  Now you are requesting the same assurance from them.

Examples are important with both coders and artists.  Keep in mind that if you are looking for more than one artist, your game assets will probably look like they were made by two different people unless you get lucky. ]

Thank you for reading!
-Gwen =)
gwenmurray.net

[ Have a nice ending, and genuinely be thankful for your reader’s time. ]

– End of post –

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Keep in mind that this format works well for forums posts when you are looking for help with smaller, casual games.  If the project is bigger, you’ll want to provide additional evidence of work you’ve already done.  This could include a link to the game’s design doc, concept art or a list of people already on the team and their positions.

I posted variations of this pitch at the forums on gamedev.net, kirupa.com and Kongregate.  While you’ll get many people interested in working on your game, you may get a few responses from people who want YOU to work on THEIR game.  If you’re interested, ask for more details.  If you’re not (or don’t have time), politely tell them so.

I hope this helps someone with their game collaborations. Questions and comments are welcome!

– I am a 2009 GDC scholar
– Sloppy Ice is a current semi-finalist in the SXSW Screenburn competition
– Had a great interview with a phenomenal gaming company
– My new dishwasher is arriving on Monday

=)

I was having that experience ten years ago through pure text.

I first found Nilgiri, a dikuMUD, when I was about ten years old.  zMud and Telnet were mysteries to me at the time, and Nilgiri was the only MUD I could play because it had a Java web client that made it easy to log in and start playing.  Those immortal first words, “By what name do you wish to be known?” had me hooked from the start.  My first character was a cleric.  I made the mistake of jumping down a well outside my guildhall and falling into the sewers, where I was promptly attacked by a baby bat and almost died when it kept chasing me.  I abused my newbie privileges and spammed everyone for help, was promptly escorted out of the sewers by a friendly player and told not to go jumping down any more wells until I was at least level 10.  Thus began the epic chapter of my life where Nil became my newfound fascination and stayed that way for the next six years.

Playing video games in elementary school back in the mid 90s was totally dorky.  I had lucked out and found this place full of cool people to talk to, combined with the addictive nature of leveling my character into a bad ass. Discovering new areas and the monsters and new items therein was like crack.  I remember when my girl scout troop would come over to my house (my mom was the leader of our troop) and they’d want to play this one game I had where you could dress up dolls and decorate environments with “stickers.”  And that was fine, they thought that was fun and cool.  But I immediately realized that loading up Nil and showing it to them, much less trying to explain how it worked and why I found it fun, would be similar to teaching my grandma how to play a FPS with the 360 controller.  I could just imagine their responses.  “Who plays a game without pictures?” or  “You have to type to be able to do anything?”

So Nil sort of stayed my little secret for a long time, all the way into junior high a few years later. One day my neighbor came over and asked what game it was that I was always playing.   I started telling him about Nil, feeling sort of dumb, and surprisingly enough he totally got into it with me.  He would log on at his house and I’d be logged in at mine and we’d go romping around killing crap together for hours.

I have so many memorable experiences playing Nil I could easily fill a novel.  There was the time when a high level player loaned me an awesome sword, which was shortly stolen off my dead corpse by another high level player; hunting newts in Newtonia and taking out Sir Isaac Newton for the very first time (he had a nasty arsenal of spells); receiving a very powerful item as a gift and then trading it away for something stupid because I didn’t realize how rare it was (I seriously still feel bad about this one).  It’s almost obnoxious how many memories you can collect from playing a game for that long.

Although all of my various characters  start to blur together, my main character that most people would remember me by was a druid named Starmyst.  I got into all sorts of adventures with her, such as being one of the first druid PCs in the entire game (the druid class was added a few years after I first began playing), being the first player to have an in-game pet that followed me around (a white tiger named Kaelas), being invited to join the Friendly clan (we helped new players, a startling full circle to the very first time I jumped down that well) and eventually being nominated to become an Immortal in the game world.

A friend asked me recently why I didn’t get into WOW, since he thought it sounded like a game I would’ve liked. I replied, I know I would like it.  I would probably have a blast and meet some cool people.  But I know that the whole time, in the back of my head, I would be comparing it to Nilgiri, and that doesn’t quite seem fair — not to WOW because my bar has already been set so high from playing Nil for so long, and not fair to Nil because walls of text really can’t compete with graphical prettiness and all the polish inherent in newer games.

In time, I know I will sit down and play WOW and make it a point to enjoy it as a fresh experience.  I could  get as hooked on the game as I was on Nil, but now that I have priorities to my education and various other responsibilities I doubt I’d be able to make enough time for it.  Perhaps the deeper issue that lurks within this apparent stubbornness is my unwillingness to possibly tarnish such fond childhood memories with the game knowledge I have now as an adult. Eventually, I don’t think I’ll feel as compelled to protect my memories of Nil.  But for now, I’m not quite ready to replace those adventures with new ones.

Nilgiri, The Forgotten World
Do you dare enter this realm?

Pretty China

–overheard at the beach

I have listened to over 20,000 songs on my computer since March 06. Put end to end, the length of all these songs would circle the earth 70 times, which is supposed to make you say “wow that’s pretty darn far” but I wouldn’t know because I’ve never traveled around the world and therefore the comparison is a little irrelevant to me.


an acquaintance of mine once wrote a poem:
“the flowers in your garden lunged at me
one morning”
he read it aloud to the rest of the class and I liked it,
though I felt thoroughly disappointed later in the day
when a daffodil outside my window
would have nothing to do with me.

– the big sleep

My father, if you don’t mind my telling you this, ate the bagel.

– wikipedia

+ fluidity.of.movement +

You start off with a thought bubble that contains your core idea, and from there you can expand this idea with further levels of bubbles, all color coded and connected to each other.  You can also share thought maps with other people and let them collaborate with you.  It’s useful for team virtual, visual brainstorming when you would otherwise be stuck sharing ideas through Google docs or something.

I used bubbl.us to map out a web of all the characters in a story I am writing, and then connected each character with a bubble that explained the character’s relationship to each other, such as how they know and feel about each other.  The main characters and the larger, more complex plots they’re involved in naturally tended to drift to the center of the web, and side characters and side plots got pushed out further.  Additionally, I color coded the “relationship” bubbles so character connections that were very important to the overall story were brightly saturated, and sub plots and extra details less so.  It was cool to see it naturally evolve before my eyes.

My map had about 12 characters and over 30 bubbles connecting everyone together (and I still have more things to add!), but it was so helpful for me to see everything laid out cleanly as opposed to organizing and updating something monstrous like that on paper.  Hope this program is useful to someone else!

I worked at the Corleones booth today for the Savannah Gay Pride festival.  I am now an expert at selling pizza and cannolis (although I repeatedly advertised cannelonis, since it’s like the same friggin word.)  Lady Bunny was the headline act and she was fabulously raunchy.

Emotionless – Mario Sanchez Nevado

interes.tingness.com – cool flickr based site

But in the meantime, panoramas are awesome.