One of our nerdy secrets as a studio is that we love putting together pitch decks. We have some slide wizards on our team, and our studio founder, Evan, is one of the best in the biz when it comes to delivering a great pitch. After having some in-depth conversations about pitching and slide decks in our Discord, it occurred to us that it might be useful to share our expertise with a wider community.

Straight from the mind of Evan Jones, here are some of the most important tips when putting together a slide deck for your game.

Start with a Bang

Don’t get bogged down in a long introduction. A common mistake is taking the first couple of slides with dry information about when development started or the studio was founded. Lead with your strongest qualities, something that makes your game unique and exciting. Get your audience’s pulses racing right away.

Be Crystal Clear

Sometimes you only have a few minutes to get through a slide deck, and so you don’t want any of the information you present to be at all confusing or ambiguous. Err on the side of clarity. Make side by side comparisons literally side by side. Label everything precisely. It’s also advisable to have someone completely unfamiliar with your game to look over your presentation for you; if there is anything that confuses them, change it so it’s more precise or easier to understand.

Order of Operations

The order in which you present things really matters. Your deck should have it’s own narrative, just like your game does, and it’s important to reveal all the facts in the order that serves this story the best. This is relevant to both the overall slide deck and individual slides themselves; each slide should serve as its own plot point. By the end of your pitch, your audience should have a story about your game that they can walk away with.

Let Visuals Be Your Guide

You don’t have to be a great designer or visual artist to make a deck that is clear, concise and effective. Use visuals to convey the information you want, such as grouping points together in shapes, colours and or/text boxes. Also, lean on whatever visual strengths you do have, such as character models, environmental assets or concept art. Branding art, or box art, is especially good to include.

Be Funny

Listening to pitches can be as gruelling as giving one, and if you can be entertaining as well as informative, then you’re going to make a great impression. This doesn’t mean you have license to be crass or unprofessional, but rather take any pitch as an opportunity to demonstrate your cleverness and charm. Think about what makes your game fun, and channel that same spirit into your pitch deck.

If you’re also a pitch wizard, we’d love to hear from you. Do you think there are any key points that we missed? Were any of these suggestions especially helpful. Let us know, and good luck with all your pitches!

How to make a great pitch deck was originally published in stitchmedia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In lieu of future announcements, here are the top 6 tips that we’ve assembled from our own experiences. With the wisdom contained in this listicle, may you show up at E3 next year and totally crush it.

Get Accredited (and get in early)

If’ you’re a developer, make sure you get your industry credentials. It’s a little bit more effort, but getting accredited means that you can beat the crowds and get onto the floor hours before the general gaming public. Once you have your cred, use it. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself stuck in avoidable lines for hours, and you need all the precious time you can get!

Too Booth or Not To Booth? (Probably not)

If you’re not a AAA title or being hosted by one of the Big 3 (Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo), you probably don’t need your own booth. You can try to compete with the big show on the main floor if you really want to, but it is an easy way to get drowned out by 40-foot LCD displays showing the Death Stranding trailer on loop.

If your game is awesome enough to be a part of IndieCade, you should definitely try to exhibit with them. The IndieCade booth felt like the only place at the expo that small indie titles got a chance to shine. It was also a great place to rub elbows and talk about sweet games with other indie devs.

Set Your Schedule In Advance

Don’t wait until you arrive to try and get meetings. Instead, spend time in the weeks and months leading up to E3 booking time with everyone you want to chat with. Research the folks you want to talk to and start building relationships via email now. Don’t expect to be able to show up and organically meet a rep. Even if you do happen to run into someone, their dance cards are likely full and they probably won’t have time for you.

A (Moving) Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words

Instead of putting all of your energy into bringing a playable demo with you, consider bringing a video demo of your game. A curated, scripted, 30-to-60-second clip is an ideal showcase of what your game has to offer. Include in-engine footage and lots of gameplay. A solid, short video can communicate as much about your game’s aesthetic and style in a fraction of the time, and can be easily shown on your phone or iPad in a moment’s notice.

Master The Shortest Pitch

One of your best weapons is an excellent elevator pitch. Be able to explain your game in a single sentence in a way that is accurate, engaging and hilarious. And don’t be afraid to draw comparisons to well known titles. If it’s accurate to say your game is “like Splatoon meets Pikmin,” (cough cough) then say it!

The meetings you score might only end up being a few minutes long, so make every second count! Make sure you know exactly what you want to say ahead of time and don’t be afraid to cut right to the chase.

Sometimes E3 Changes Everything

Depending on how your conference goes, be ready to pivot suddenly and drastically. E3 has the possibility to really change things for you depending on who sees your game and what their reaction is. If a different way forward opens up, make sure you have the capacity to follow those opportunities wherever they may lead.

Take A Break

Of course you are there to get all you can out of the conference, but make sure you do something else while you’re in LA. There is so much to see and do in the city, so give yourself time to leave the convention hall, even if it is jst to take a walk, or visit a restaurant you always wanted to check out. For example, we went to a resto-cade called Button Mash and it ended up being a blast, and we are so glad we left the con to get some breathing room.

E3 is overwhelming, but it can also be a magical and life-changing experience. Whether you’re an industry vet or you’ve never been before, we hope your next conference experience is amazing!

6 Ways To Make The Most of #E3 as an Indie Developer was originally published in stitchmedia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the last week or so, the way Terrorarium looks in its latest form has leapt ahead dramatically. As we were refining the puzzles and physics and controls in the game, we were still using a grey-box environment and some placeholder art to stand in for the characters. These let us focus on what needed our attention the most: making sure the game was as fun to play as possible.

Meanwhile, our artists and animators were hard at work on the look and feel of the game. They crafted custom art assets for the level, from ground texture to unique space plants. The character designs for the Gardener, the Moogu and our terrible plant monsters were refined. Concept art became 3d character models.

Last week, we put everything we’d been working on back together. Instead of the placeholder characters, our fully rendered character models took their place. Instead of little mushroom icons, our fearless, fungal heroes ran and splattered and bred and died in their fully realized forms. There were particle effects and splatters, fire and smoke, destructible environments and towering beasts.

And suddenly it looked amazing.

We can’t share all of the fruits of our labour with you just yet; we’ll have a ton to report once we’re all back from E3. But right now, at this moment, we are all so proud of what we have built and are building. What we have to show you next is the best iteration of Terrorarium yet, and we can’t wait for you to experience it all. See you in a few days when we’re back rom LA, everyone!

#We’re Off To #E32018! was originally published in stitchmedia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We always knew that she was going to be a wily space grandma, exploring the galaxy while hunting for dangerous plants. But in the last few weeks, we’ve gotten to know her much more deeply. We’ve been exploring her personality, her motivation, her drive, and her flaws. We’ve discovered her deep ambition:the elements of her character that have led her to be single-mindedly focussed on winning the Blue Ribbon at the Intergalactic Horrorcultural Competition. We have discovered her profound enmity for her greatest rival, Dolores, and how that rage and hatred fuels her. We’ve discovered her brilliance, her resourcefulness, her pettiness, and her willingness to sacrifice anything and everything to reach her goals.

We’ve been refining her look, including her character model and her movements, to reflect the personality for her that has been emerging. We had a few potential designs for how she directed the Moogu, from a vacuum gun to a kind of leaf blower, but what we ended up settling on is the beautifully kinaesthetic simplicity of her just whacking the crap out of them with her cane. As soon as we put together this animation, we knew we had made the right decision. The gleeful violence of it fit her character perfectly.

Working on her walk, her movement, and her idle animations also helped us get to know her better. From the earthworm dangling out of her gigantic backpack to her unapologetic butt scratch, every detail revealed something new about who she is and how she interacts with the world. With every new aspect of her we uncover, she gets weirder and more feisty.

Perhaps, though, the greatest discoveries we have made about the Gardener have come from the process of literally discovering her voice. We decided that we wanted some voice over work present in the demo we took to E3, and having someone bring her to life in this way was incredibly illuminating. In making casting decisions, we learned a lot about who she was and who she wasn’t by the voices we were drawn to. She wasn’t a witchy old hag, but a hypercompetent scientist whose ambition had run away with her. She was intense, but not entirely off her rocker.

We now have a selection of voice lines for her, and listening to her cackle in glee, groan in frustration, or take sadistic pleasure in killing her first few Moogu, has brought her to life in a completely different way. We’re all becoming quite fond of our maniacal space granny, and can’t wait for you to meet her.

Finding The Gardener’s Voice (sometimes literally) was originally published in stitchmedia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

First of all, as the character animations start coming together, all brilliantly created by Maddi McDougall, the physical realities of the Moogu that were quirky before are now becoming… actively unsettling. We already knew that the bellybuttons were troubling, but not that we can see them in full motion, they are actively upsetting in the best way possible.

There’s not just one type of Moogu, of course. Each Moogu type has different abilities, and also a distinct look at feel. Some of the physical attributes of these various fungal creatures are more distressing that others. Somehow this bellybutton placement is even worse than the first, and we are both cringing and ecstatic.

Then of course, there is the miracle of Moogu reproduction. From the earliest version of the game design documents, we always knew that Moogu reproduced when living Moogu bred with dead Moogu, releasing spores and causing new little mushrooms to spring up. We did this because it was gross and hilarious, and also because it meant that to get more Moogu, you had to kill some of them making the gleeful destruction we had always envisioned for Terrorarium and essential part of the gameplay mechanic.

Well, now we have have a fertilization animation, and. Well.

We are at once proud and horrified by what we have done. Let’s be honest: mostly proud.

Speaking of reproduction, we’ve also been working to make killing the Moogu even more fun. Our new technical artist, Fred, just joined the team and every moment he’s been here has been dedicated to making Moogu death more delightful and disgusting. He’s been adding blood and guts, particle effects, and all kinds of mysterious liquids, so that now when a Moogu dies, it leaves a mark. A terrible, probably toxic mark.

As always, there is a long way to go, but seeing things move and bleed and squish and die is making Terrorarium feel more like the game we have always envisioned than ever before. We aren’t just finding the fun, we are finding the sheer gut-busting hilarity. Every single day in the office now, we find ourselves laughing uncontrollably, even as we are working super hard. Something that is this much fun to make has got to mean we’re on the right track.

The Joys of Grotesquerie (or, Bellybuttons We Have Known and Hated) was originally published in stitchmedia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At the same time, our art department hasn’t been sleeping on the job. Although our focus for the next build is the gameplay, huge strides have been made in terms of how the game is going to look, as well. We need to start transferring the visual identity of Terrorarium from our concept art, to our in-game assets.

The gardener has taken shape before our eyes, evolving from 2D sketches to 3D model. We’ve settled on her core look and accessories, developed a turnaround model, and soon we’ll be starting to animate her. Our space granny still looks a little too human at the moment, but as she gets painted and textured we think she’s going to look delightfully weird.

We’ve nailed down some things about her character and personality too. We don’t want to give too much away yet, but the jealousy and frustration that fuels the Gardener is starting to solidify in the narrative. We’ve also decided that in order to move the Moogu around the map she whacks them with her cane, sending them flying, which is going to be both hilarious and cathartic.

The Moogu have also progressed by leaps and bounds. Jeff, our Art Director, is still working on many iterations for the different Moogu types, but we have a base Moogu settled on and modelled. Aren’t they cute? Don’t you want to do terrible things to them?

Our character artist Maddi McDougall is performing 3D modelling and animation wizardry on the characters, and just today completed the very first run cycle animation for the Moogu. Seeing them brought to life is incredibly exciting, and makes every aspect of the narrative and gameplay seem more real. It’s one thing to talk abstractly about all of the puzzles, personalities, cuteness, and violence that we want to see in the next iteration of the game, but entirely another to see it taking shape.

We’re still focussed on how the game feels, and that is going to keep being our priority for the next build; but you have to admit, it’s starting to look pretty damn good too.

It’s All About The Assets was originally published in stitchmedia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We have some pretty solid ideas about how we get there, many of which we articulated in our last post. We need to ramp up the gore and the physical humour, refine the physics and the controls until they’re a genuine pleasure to play, and make the puzzles more complex and ultimately satisfying to solve. But we know that there’s a lot that we’re missing, and so we’re doing research as well. We’re digging deep into what makes games fun, unexpected places that players and game makers have found joy, and learning how we can apply this to our own work moving forward.

We want to share some of the great things we have found so far with our fans too, both so folks can see which directions we’re travelling in on this game dev journey, and also in case it’s helpful to anyone else’s work out there. There’s been a lot of very good, very serious work done on the topic of fun, and what we’ve found is genuinely fascinating. Check it out!

“Finding the Fun” by Jane Friedhoff

This piece is a transcribed version of a talk Friedhoff gave at PLaycrafting NYC in 2015, and is still incredibly relevant. It provides some useful definitions and also some really excellent personal examples, as Friedhoff talks about designing the game Slam City Oracles for the first time and how challenging it was to make it as fun as it could be. We found the section on attuning fun mechanics particularly useful, and the lessons about how to identify what makes a mechanic fun and how to focus everything else in the game around that mechanic are definitely things we’ll apply to our own development process.

“Videogames: Too Fun For Their Own Good?” By Thomas Grip

This piece talks about how games can be so fun that the mechanics get in the way of good storytelling, but the way that enjoyment is described is super useful. The way that Grip explores the “fun of interaction” and the way that entire game experiences are built and bent around core mechanics is something we took a lot of notes on.

“How do game designers ‘find the fun” in their games?” By David Mullich

This whole article is solid, but it’s actually when Mullich quotes Tracy Fullerton of the USC Games Program that really stuck with us.

“In many ways, designing a game is like being the host of a party. You decide what music your friends will enjoy, what food to serve, what decorations to put up, what activities there will be. It’s your job as the host to get everything ready, and when it’s time for the party, ensure that all of your guests are having a good time.”

“The Fun Is In The Dying” by Josh Call

While this piece is focussed on extremely difficult games (mostly focused on the Souls games, which are unrelentingly punishing), we think there’s a lot to e learned from the way that call talks about death mechanics. Because we want our players to explore and fail and learn, and have fun doing so, this was really illuminating for us.

“Death and loss are merely an inevitable byproduct of moving through the game, and the game doesn’t simply end with character death. Instead, the player is returned to the nearest checkpoint, and loses any items or souls (the game currency for items and experience points). The message is clear: learn more and try again.”

“The overpowered, broken Prometheus Lens makes Destiny 2 fun again” by Wesley Yin-Poole

There have been a lot of changes to Destiny 2 recently that have counteracted many of the problems this article touches on, but this moment in the embattled multiplayer game’s history is extremely interesting. In a moment when too many of the weapons and mechanics had been over-balance into blandness, this broken gun shook things up and made the game fun and hilarious again. We think there’s a lot to be learned from this “mistake,” specifically that sometimes keeping things ridiculous is more important that making them correct or sophisticated.

Did we miss anything? Do you have an article on finding the fun that you think is really excellent that we should read? Let us know!

Finding the Fun in Terrorarium was originally published in stitchmedia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On Tuesday, May 1, we released the pre-alpha of Terrorarium to an eager group and early-access playtesters. It’s a very limited release, send out to folks who filled out our intake survey, chose to see the game as early as possible and were super excited to give us feedback right from the start. We’re thrilled to have been able to put something in the hands of our earliest fans, and we can’t wait to hear what they think.

(We also have an exceptionally pretty new website and press kit, which you should definitely explore.)

The last week and a half has been an intense rush to make the game as complete, fun and playable as possible before handing it over to players, and we are genuinely proud of what we accomplished. It’s a tiny cross-section of what we want Terrorarium to be, a conglomeration of a lot of experiments and a lot of what we hope are stabs in the right direction.

It feels very risky showing folks our work so early in the process, but we wanted to invite people in as early as possible. We know what we think is fun, and we have ideas about how people are going to play Terrorarium and what they want to get out of this kind of a game. But we’re inside that process, on the other side of the development curtain, and while those guesses are very educated they are still guesses. Playing what we have, right from the very beginning, verifies and challenges our assumptions so we can start making changes and adjustments right away.

It’s terrifying and exhilarating to hit this internal deadline we set for ourselves, but none of us are resting on our laurels. We are already starting to get useful feedback from our first players, and using that to make adjustments to the next build. We don’t know our timeline exactly for this next phase, and when we might be ready to share it with the world again, but we already have some concrete next steps that give us a lot of hope for the future. We can already see how the next iteration is going to be a vast improvement.

And what are these next steps, loyal readers? Well we are so glad that you asked!

We Need To Go Deeper

For the pre-alpha build, we decided to put a little bit of everything in. We cast our net as broad as possible, touching on things like mechanics and gameplay elements and puzzles, maps and environments and characters. This resulted in the game having a little bit of everything but none of it was developed very deeply. For the next build, we need to do the opposite. We need to explore each of those elements as deeply as we can, one at a time. We need to look at every game design element individually, focus on it until it is perfect, and do that over and over again until every aspect of the game is refined.

It’s Time To Get Gross

We’ve nailed the adorable part of our aesthetic, and now it’s time to take a look at the gore. Right now, when the Moogu die and breed it’s funny (new one pop out of corpses rather like popcorn) but it could be so much more satisfying and disgusting. Through a combination of new art, sound effects and permanent splatter marks, we need to push the gross factor much higher for the next version of the game.

It’s Complicated

Right now, the game is exceedingly simple. There are only two types of Moogu to toggle between, and the puzzles are relatively straightforward with few component parts. For the next build, we really want to dig into making these these puzzles a lot more complex, with multiple paths to the solution. We also want to leave open the possibility that players could come up with ways to solve the puzzles and beat the levels in ways we didn’t anticipate. There’s a ton of design work to be done here and a lot of work building out all the types of Moogu and how to combine them with all the different environments. We’re really looking forward to challenging our players once all of these ideas are much more fully realized.

We already know that there is so much work to be done, and that we’re in the very early days of development in a lot of ways. At the same time, it’s amazing to have something concrete and playable to show people, and to be able to ask what you think. We are synthesizing the feedback to make sure that we incorporate it into the next build. We are getting so excited about where project is heading, and can’t wait for even more people to see.

The Alpha and the Omega (or: we did it! what’s next?) was originally published in stitchmedia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We admit now that the perfect record couldn’t last.

Friday before last, we had an excellent livestream experience, sharing the first peek at the game we are making with the world. We learned a ton, we answered a lot of questions for twitch chat, and we had a solid plan moving forward. We thought that the next attempt would go even smoother now that we had extra experience under our belts.

Then last Friday rolled around, and we all met at 2pm to do a run-through with the latest game build, to get a sense of what we would be doing on stream at 4pm. So we loaded the latest build of the game…and discovered it was unplayable.

No problem, we initially thought. Surely a small thing has gone wrong in the latest update, we can fix it quickly. We made some tweaks, tried a different build, and to our dawning horror, things remained broken.

Over the next 2 hours, it was all hands on deck trying to get something playable for 4pm. Time ticked on, our usual streaming time arrived and we still didn’t have something playable. We kept trying to fix things, but nothing worked. Eventually Aaron streamed a live coding session while he continued to troubleshoot the issue.

This was a humbling experience, to say the least. As anxious or insecure as we have felt showing things in the past, we have always managed to pull it off. This time, though, the dark side of radical transparency caught up to us, and everyone got to see what it looks like when things go wrong. It felt terrible, we failed to put something together for a live deadline while people sat and waited for the stream in our twitch channel.

But the learning never stops, and this time we learned that this kind of failure isn’t so bad. It’s only a few days later and the game works fine again, with even more functionality than we had before. There are more art assets and the maps are more beautiful and more interactive than ever. Alex streamed a successful playthrough this afternoon in which he solved the puzzle and beat the game, while performing some pretty hilarious physics experiments.

In one week, we’re releasing the pre-alpha version of Terrorarium (Our sign ups are now closed, but you can join the waiting list!), and not only are people going to be able to see what we have been doing, but they’ll be able to play it. No matter how that process goes (and we think it’s going to go great), we know we are going to learn a ton form it, get loads of invaluable feedback, and end up with something we’re proud of.

Best-Laid Plans and All was originally published in stitchmedia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

And because we are sharing this whole process with the world, we immediately out our very first playtest on our Livestream. What’s radical transparency without some measure of risk?

The experience was both exhilarating and terrifying, and in the end we think it was a definite success. We had something we could play and explore, we got to share it with people, and we piqued some interest in our pre-alpha playtest signups. What was unquestionably the biggest win from this experience, however, was how much we learned from it.

Here are the most critical takeaways that we gleaned from the demo and the livestream itself, as well as the process leading up to it:

1. Deadlines are Important (even if they are for nobody but you)

Part of the reason we wanted to livestream this demo was a form of accountability. We said we were going to hit this deadline and we set up the live unveiling to make sure we would hit it, and it worked. Having that clear target to work toward focussed our efforts, reminded us about what was important, and made sure we were all working toward something immediate and attainable. We stuck to the goal even though some of our features were half-baked or had to be cut from the build to make sure it was playable, but having that experience now, when the stakes were low, helped refocus us for future benchmarks.

2. Meeting Deadlines is Great for Morale

Everyone in the office was absolutely thrilled about having something that we could pick up and play, even though the game is in its earliest incarnation. It gave us a chance to impress each other and congratulate each other, and see in a real-life hands-on way what we have all been working on. We can all get sucked into our own little work bubbles and getting the chance to see it all come together was great for the whole team.

3. Physics are Fun

Running around the map, falling off edges, throwing the Moogu into wind tunnels and kicking objects around was all blithely satisfying. We need to make sure that we keep focussed on how fun this is already and keep making it moreso. The environment we are building is very destructible, and we learned that that is very much a good thing. The more visceral we can make that destruction moving forward, the better.

4. Killing Moogu is More Fun (and we need to do it more often)

One of the things that struck us about playing the game, and watching the videos afterwards, is how little the Moogu die right now. We build some kill boxes, and we were able to play around with the mechanic that makes them breed from corpses in some ways that were pretty fun, but it was something we had to really try to do. The world didn’t seem quite hostile enough, and the Moogu didn’t die often or hilariously enough. We’re making this a priority for the next build.

5. We Need Gore, Enemies and SFX STAT

There were three things that we really noticed the lack of in the present build: gore effects, enemies, and sound effects. When the Moogu die, they should splatter (or leave smears of ash, or puddles, or other terrible things). Right now their deaths are rather sterile, and that tidiness sucked some of the joy out of killing them. Along the same lines, some great, meaty, squishy sound effects are only going to improve the texture and feel of the game, which is a but too smooth and features right now. Finally, the world we’ve built is a bit too Gardener vs. Environment, and we need to make sure there’s lots of terrible, hungry, violent creatures around to make things more challenging.

6. Go Into The Next Stream with a Call Sheet

The theme of this livestream was first-time exploration, as for many of us on the team were picking up the controller and trying it out for the very first time. Watching the video after the face, we realize that it took us a little while to figure out what to DO in the game — were so happy to just have a map to wander around in and blow up a little bit, we forgot that there were specific things we really wanted to show off. We got there eventually, but going into the next stream we’re going to have a more solid and detailed plan, complete with features and mechanics we want to show off and even feature-specific mini-games to play.

We are already busily working toward our next benchmarks and we’re going to have a new, playable demo ready to go this Friday. Out biggest and most critical goal, of course, is the pre-alpha release that we’re sending out to playtesters on May 1, but we’re eager to have even more features and elements integrated into the demo even sooner. We can’t wait to share it with all of you, and leave that process with a whole new set of lessons to carry forward.

6 Things We Learned from our First Playtest Demo was originally published in stitchmedia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.