Writing Pitch Docs and Exec Docs - Professional Techniques for Video Game Writing - page 22

Story
All games, even simple puzzles like Te t r i s , have a story. This may not incorporate text
in the final game version (as is the case in games for kids at pre-reading age), but it
provides a mood for your project and a coherence of emotional content. Naturally,
the story section for an epic RPG is going to be a lot more specific, and for a title
like that, this section of the pitch can be both larger and more critical to the overall
document. In a heavily story-driven game, the story section of your pitch will take
the form of a plot synopsis similar to the one-page synopsis sent by novelists to
prospective agents or publishers. For games of any type, all named major characters
should appear in this section of the document, with their names in bold in the text.

Competition Analysis
In the competition analysis, you display your knowledge of current market forces and
visually chart the necessary, amazing, so-crucial-it's- obvious nichethatyourgamewill
fill.

Although your game will have a vast panoply of essential and unique features,
for the purposes of this section you'll reduce those to a differentiating five to seven,
depending on the size of the game. These core features—such as one-on-one Inter-
net multiplayer functionality, sandbox-style freeform play, platformer action, or AI
minions—give a quick picture of your game as compared to others with which it will
compete for shelf space and audience attention.
The competition analysis chart for GoPets: Vacation Island, a sandbox-style social
networking pet game for the Nintendo DS, looked like this:

Game WiFi / Mobile Items 3D Enviro. Pet AI Community

Internet

GoPets DS X X X X X

NintenDogs X X X X

NeoPets X X X

Black & White Creatures X X X

Animal Crossing (DS) X X X X X

The competition analysis will concisely tell your prospective client what your
game offers that other games don't and what your game doesn't offer (but hopefully
doesn't need). It also emphasizes your core feature set, which will be critical in main-
taining focus as the development process continues. This chart may be followed by
further analysis of other competing titles, but the chart should only focus on a top
three to six, and the entire section should not be longer than about three-quarters of
apage.