Milestone 1 — Game Pitch
GAME 1303 · Week 2 — Tuesday, September 1 · Live in class · 5 points
The deliverable
Stand up in front of the class and pitch the game you intend to build this semester.
3 minutes to pitch. 2 minutes of questions. The timer is real. At 3:00 you stop, mid-sentence if necessary, and we go to questions.
This happens in Week 2 for a reason: everyone in the room needs to know what everyone else is making, and the semester's engine topics get weighted toward the genres actually being built. If nobody pitches a narrative game, we spend less time on dialogue systems. If four people pitch VR, we spend more time on comfort. Your pitch shapes the course.
What to bring
| Required | Notes |
|---|---|
| One reference image | On screen behind you. Your art, a mood board, a mockup, or a screenshot of a game yours resembles. One image, not a slide deck. |
| Your track | 2D, Puzzle, Narrative, 3D, or VR. Say it out loud. See project-tracks.md. |
| A working title | It can change. Having none reads as unprepared. |
Optional and encouraged: a paper prototype. If you are pitching a puzzle game, a physical version you can hold up and demonstrate sells the idea faster than any description. This is the single most effective thing you can bring.
No slide deck required. If you make one, three slides maximum.
What to cover, in order
1. The hook — 20 seconds.
One sentence. What the player does and why it's interesting. Lead with this; do not build up to it.
2. The core loop — 45 seconds.
What the player does over and over. Use verbs. Walk us through 30 seconds of play as if narrating over someone's shoulder.
3. Why it's different — 30 seconds.
Name the games yours resembles, then name the one thing yours does that they don't. Comparison is a strength, not an admission. "It's Celeste but you only get three jumps for the whole level" tells us more in ten words than a minute of abstraction.
4. Look and feel — 30 seconds.
Point at your reference image. Palette, style, tone.
5. Scope — 30 seconds.
How many levels. Roughly how many assets. What you are not building. Naming your cuts up front is the mark of someone who will finish.
6. What you're unsure about — 25 seconds.
One real open question. This is where the Q&A gets useful to you, and it is the part most students skip. "I don't know whether the time limit should be per-level or global" gets you five minutes of free design help from a room full of people.
Delivering it
- Practice out loud, with a timer, twice. Three minutes is much shorter than it sounds. Everyone who doesn't rehearse runs long and gets cut off during the scope section.
- Start with the hook, not with your name and a preamble. Housekeeping burns time you need.
- Nerves are expected and are not graded. Running long is graded.
- Take notes during your own Q&A. You will not remember the good suggestions afterward.
Rubric — 5 points
| Criterion | Pts | Met when |
|---|---|---|
| Hook and core loop | 2 | The room understands what the player does and why it's compelling, from your words alone |
| Visual reference | 1 | An image is present and you connect it to your art direction |
| Scope and track | 1 | Track named, scale stated in concrete terms, at least one deliberate exclusion |
| Delivery | 1 | Pitched within 3:00, covers the required beats, engages with Q&A |
Grades are posted the same day.
Common failure modes
- Backstory first. Two minutes of world lore, thirty seconds on gameplay, no time for scope. The room still doesn't know what the player does.
- Running long. The scope and open-question sections get cut, which is where the points and the useful feedback live.
- No image. It's one point, and it's the easiest one on the sheet.
- Pitching an MMO. Scope reality-check happens here rather than in Week 14.
- "I'm not sure yet." You don't need a finished design — you need a concrete proposal that can change. Pitch something specific and let the Q&A revise it.
After the pitch
Bring your notes to lab the same day. Your pitch, revised by the questions you got, becomes the One Sheet due in Week 4 — so the work you do here is work you don't repeat.
Changing your game after the pitch is allowed and costs nothing, up until the Core Game Mechanic milestone in Week 5. After that, changes are a conversation with the instructor first.