Week 13 is defined by Soft Opening. With final presentations just 2 weeks away, the goal of Softs is to showcase the final deliverable, and have just enough time to make any final changes. Our team was well suited at this point, with our pitch deck having already undergone many revisions and approaching a finalized state.
Softs Faculty Showcases
The most important softs meeting was with Dave Culyba. For better or for worse, Dave has seen the pitch almost every week for the past couple weeks, meaning he is not unfamiliar to our concept, but he could also bring outdated conceptions of our pitch to the table. Keeping that in mind, most of Dave’s feedback was with regards to the connection of gameplay and fantasy. One of the first thing he pointed out was there was a lack of clarity of how the player would actually play the duet – and then why playing the duet is actually meaningful in context of the rest of the pitch. Additionally, there was no sense of escalation, and no sense of climax and resolution through gameplay and mechanics. Mechanics such as magical immune system crystals seemed a little arbitrary and again not strongly connected to the rest of the musical whale concept. Overall, the setup and the story within the presentation were great, but the gameplay and actions don’t convey the same level of meaningfulness.
The next batch of faculty was with Ruth Comley, Mike Christel, and John Dessler. While much of the feedback that Dave gave was echoed in the presentation, each faculty member also brought their own perspective to the table. Ruth, as someone who integrates a lot of systems, wanted the platform and hardware to be more upfront so that it would be easier to get into the mindset of a potential publisher who has specific capabilities and restrictions. Mike, a stickler for examples and empirical artifacts, wanted to hear the music sooner in the presentation as well as see moments of gameplay. John, who often focuses on the bigger picture, urged us to think about the context of our game, and that we need to convince the audience that there is a vacuum and need for this game.
The final visiting faculty was Brenda Harger. In comparison to the rest of the faculty who listened to the pitch in full before asking questions, Brenda asked clarifying questions as the pitch went along. This allowed her to point out specific moments of ambiguity within the pitch. Overall, Brenda thoroughly enjoyed the concept and commented on how much further along it has come since halves. She also brought up some interesting ideas such as having the game repurpose music such as Bach fuges instead of composing each segment of music.
Softs Takeaways
As per normal, faculty feedback was wide and varied, and the requested changes were too far in quantity for what could be changed and what would actually fit in our deliverable. As such, our team decided to focus on only on the takeaways of progression and climax, since our pitch was largely already in a stable state. The rest of the feedback would be factored into preparation for questions that the faculty may ask during our final presentation.