Industry Panel Feedback

I reorganized my pitch from the first time I presented it. After seeing the pitch, one of our Professors, Roger said that there was too much text on my slides. I just read the things that were written on my slides, he said it was distracting, so it was a great note. I don't like presentations that do this, so I should have known better. It's the same reason I hate watching movies with captioning turned on. There must be something about our brains wanting to read text that's right in front of us, even though a person is telling us exactly what's written.

I took out most of the text and just left the images, it represented more the kind of presentation I like to see.  I felt it was much stronger. I then took the pitch to Cohort 4 at the U and presented to them. I received some great feedback, and rearranged my pitch again.  

The pitch to the panel didn't go as smoothly as I would have liked, some of the things I rearranged felt a little awkward, and I'm going to revert a couple things to the way it was originally. Other than that, and probably a little more nerves than before, it went ok, just not great.

One of our producers, Jen gathered the notes from the industry panel, super helpful. Here is the feedback:

• Pacman meets Defender with a twist.  like the idea of making levels that become challenging. need more puzzle development.  solve to have access. nerd challenge: how good are you? keep track of what's going on. make it scarier.
• Kernel of an idea: its biggest struggle and challenge/weakness. game of change: it can be a huge frustration,
• As things change I need to adopt strategy. why even try it.  all my work went to waste b/c stuff is changing.  lock part of the board or turn base thins so they can't change it.  
• I like the fast pace, simple mechanism. complicated levels. figure out strategy. have both kinds of levels would be overwhelming.  In a simplified game it would be a lot of fun.
• less frantic, slow it down.  more puzzley.  AI can be wandering around in more pattern base notion so see it and use to your advantage.  Lost it with platform. perfect for tablet I think mobile. I don’t see it work with console.
• I agree. nothing bad.
• I see this mobile. Not $5 on console.  limited control scheme on pad. keep simple, more success for mobile.  then add more features.   
• Meter them out. so they work for that particular level. game built on patterns and predictability. randomness crushes that.
• Randomness makes you feel cheated. hate it and don’t understand what happened.   increase strength of puzzle.  use it more as a puzzle, changing shapes, static, there are only certain ways, more puzzle and solution than randomness.
• Hate randomness.
• Pattern behavior and predictability
• Worry about color blindness
• Mobile. nice. on path and have clear document
• Nice pitch. kind of like randomness. combination
• Take a diff approach, take out shooting. have to tag each other. so its more of a puzzle. hate virtual D pad.  prefer swipe mechanics. input you can solve for mobile.
• You don’t need to control ball if ball rotates randomly--shoot other pieces. make it more time shots to hit ,,rotate faster/slower...level design...1 button really fun game.

The panel was fun, the panelists were very helpful, and about half of them are friends and former colleagues, so it was good seeing them. 

From the panel I received some great ideas and direction that I'd like to iterate on. Even though I don't practice this as much as I should, I believe a creative endeavor like this needs constant feedback, early and often. My tendency is to try to get things as perfect as I can before I show it to others. Inevitably there are changes that need to be made, and it's a lot more difficult to make those changes when I've spent so much time.