Pitching Your Game with Rebekah Saltsman

“My name is Becca Saltsman and I am one-half of Finji. so I do all the business development basically. Including the business contracts, legal finances, marketing, and a bunch of design work. Finji is a independent developer and also a micro publisher. We released Night in the Woods two years ago and now we're launching Overland and Wilmots Warehouse this year and we have Tunic coming sometime in the future.Adam and I have been doing this for a decade now. In a former life I did PR and media relations.”

“The questions you should ask yourself is ‘Why are we making it? What were the influences at the beginning? What are the feelings we're trying to generate out of the players? How do I want them to play? What ways can I get them to interact with others as they play either locally on a couch or over Twitch?’ Those are the things if you're talking just about to anyone, that's the thing that helps them share your content. If it's a confidential pitch document I'm looking at like five pages of what essentially looks like a magazine spread on like a keynote or something that I've burned off to a PDF that changes compared to the types of enthusiasm or excitement I get on a show floor.”

For Night in the Wood’s first demo, you have a really long conversation with the mom but as soon as you got out you had a fight with the old guy. Overland can sometimes take 7 to 15 minutes because it you'd need to get them into a position where they have a close call where they escape something that should have killed them. Then Tunic is even more different where you can run and swing your sword around and whack some bad guys. Put cute animations on it and the demo is done. The Fox is amazing because you understand it's a character with a sword so much to lean on. As long as your combat feels good. That's the important thing for Tunic. The combat is really sticky and the animation is whimsical and people are impressed with that and then the art is the frosting on the cupcake.

If you're talking to me, I got 30 minutes, and I need to be able to see it as fast as possible because I got something going on 15 minutes after our 30 minutes is up. Finding that sweet spot, I guarantee you you as a dev team you are probably not going to find it. You need to bring friends over. You need to sit down. You need to have them talk to you while they play. You need to listen when they tell you ‘This is not fun.’ ‘This is opaque.’ ‘I can't figure out what's going on.’

‘The UI is really tricky.’ ‘The buttons feel sticky.’ If you're going to take a game with gamepad controls and you have platformer or something, try to make that one level feel really good. Because imagine trying to play Super Meat Boy or something like a demo level and the controls suck. It would just be so frustrating. You just die over and over and over again. That is a reasonable ask because it could even be just one celestial level. That could be a vertical slice or you do two screens wide and the controls feel amazing. That way somebody who understands games or publishing they be able to be to say “There's something here. We could dig this out.’ ‘What are they planning on doing?’ Then the publisher would ask for more info.”

“One is to focus on the art style. I don't mean that in kind of a weird way but what's special about the art style and what makes it different? So if I look at a screenshot, I want to think about your game and not necessarily someone else's.Second don't sell someone else's game better than you sell your own. Like ‘this amazing thing that sold eight billion copies and this game that's sold eight billion copies…’ I would just feel like playing those other three games. You just sold them really well. Finji had to be really careful with this because journalists actually called Overland years ago XCOM meets Oregon Trail. Which is not true at all. I don't necessarily want someone talking about XCOM when thinking about Overland. The third thing is know your audience. I have sat in many pitches and watched many pitches and where somebody will literally say girls won't play my game. They'll make some sort of off-hand gender-biased comment about their players or they assume their demographic doesn't allow women players. Even though, as publishers, we know the strategy genre or the fighting genre there's a gender disparity. We don't necessarily want there to be one. We want to sell more copies of the game. If we think that you're already being exclusionary it makes us super sad. ‘Why would you think that nobody would want to play your game?’ In your brain, everyone should want to play your game, including my grandma and my mom and my in-laws. That's the kind of enthusiasm I want to see. But it's happened multiple times during a pitch that quote ‘girls won't play WOW.”