10/21/2022 GDA Patch Notes: What is a Good Pitch?

Welcome back! Today’s meeting was all about making a good pitch! As you may know, every year members can pitch games to GDA to decide what game we end up developing as a club. Today was dedicated to going over the do’s and do-not’s of a pitch.

What is a Good Pitch?

To demonstrate what a good pitch looks like, Austin Chang, who was the Game Lead and Winning Pitcher of our 2021-2022 game Asterion went through a quickened version of his own pitch. Click here to see what his pitch slides looked like! I’d also recommend taking a look at the meeting recording linked at the end of these notes to see his pitch in action. There were a lot of strong aspects of Austin’s pitch, but these were the ones that we want pitchers to focus on:

  • Engaging visuals
  • Mentions every department, so all members will know what they are getting into with your game
  • Considers scope, makes sure to not overshoot in terms of what can be done but keeps in mind stretch goals if development goes faster than expected
  • Goes into detail about the game and game mechanics, anticipating future questions
  • STAYS UNDER 5 MINUTES

This last one is especially important. Pitches will only have 5 minutes to pitch. Pleas keep that in mind when designing your pitch.

What is a Bad Pitch?

To better understand why a pitch like Austin’s was so good, we also went over a custom made pitch designed to be as bad as possible, presented impromptu by our president Robert Newlin. If you, for whatever reason, want to see the slides for that pitch, here they are. You also could see the pitch in action in the recording linked below. If you really want to. Much like how Austin’s pitch had a whole host of great qualities, this one had just as many problems. Namely:

  • The presenter was unprepared. To quote a wise man (it’s me, I’m the wise man): “A GDA pitch is only as strong as a pitcher is ready“. Make sure to memorize and prepare your pitch ahead of time. Even great slides can fail if the presenter is not ready. However, these were not great slides for a multitude of reasons.
  • Distracting visuals. You want to engage your audience, but engage them with the right things. This slideshow was filled with unrelated, nonsensical visual and audio elements that served no purpose to the pitch. Having visuals is great, but they should matter.
  • Too much text. Face it: gamers can’t read. The few who can can’t do it for very long. Big blocks of text with nothing else going on is boring and unengaging.
  • Be specific, don’t ramble. Parts of this bad pitch or overly vague/don’t really make any kind of point.
  • Once again, STAY UNDER 5 MINUTES! We were originally planning on having this pitch be over 5 minutes to demonstrate how bad it was, but Robert is so incapable of failing that he finished it in under 5 minutes. Still, this matters all the same

After those two examples, we took a break and split off into pitch feedback rooms. If you are a pitcher, expect to receive a new round of officer feedback in your email soon. With that, the meeting ended! If you couldn’t attend the meeting and would like to review it, here are the slides and here is the meeting recording. See you next week!