Today was just awesome because I got to learn so much about running a business and the finance behind game development. First, we were supposed shadow one of their character artists today, but he isn’t back yet from his trip, so we instead got to hear about Ben’s career. He’s more of the businessman for Mighty Rabbit and so deals with stuff like management and finance over art design or programming. He claims it’s the same boring stuff an accountant does, but it was actually really interesting to hear about. First, he was busy in the morning, but he gave us a project to work on. We took the game idea that I’m working on – a 3d 2 player tanks battle game – and had to come up with a pitch to try and get money to develop the game. (see above for examples of our work) After we delivered this pitch, we got great feedback and how best to sell a pitch to get funding. You need to include artwork and an in depth view of your game in the pitch, but start the pitch with just a 2-3 sentence overview of the game. One thing that surprised me is that you need to have 75% of your game completed before a producer will consider investing in it. You need 75% because you need enough of your game to produce a “vertical slice” to show off to your producer. A vertical slice is basically a fully working demo of your game, like maybe a single level to show that this game will work and can be completed with funding. It was really cool to hear about, and for our last day tomorrow we will get to see character design and animation.
