Game Documentation Guide - Professional Techniques for Video Game Writing - page 29

• The unique selling points that make this game distinct from other games.

• Possibly some concept art to fire the imagination of the reader.

The game pitch establishes the big, high-level ideas that define the game and
attempts to get everyone excited about how cool this game could be. It is more
marketing material than actual development information, and it concerns itself with
emotional punch over technical feasibility or details. Basically, the reaction you want
when someone sees your game pitch is a request for more information. You want the
reader to think, “This could be cool! Tell me more!�
Once your targets have been wowed by your stellar pitch, the gate is unlocked,
and you are allowed to go back to your computer to create a game treatment.

4.4 The Game Treatment

The game treatment is a larger version of the game pitch. It takes the ideas presented
by the pitch and fills them in with more information. It begins to take into account
more technical details, fleshes out the story being told in the game, and explores the
look and feel of the game's art and playability in further depth.

Expanding the Game Pitch
Expanding the game pitch into a treatment is a fairly easy thing. Normally, it takes
a lot of effort to take your game idea and put it into pitch format. You want to put
in the entire story, along with the ingenious new control map scheme and the spiffy
game mechanics. The pitch, however, is a teensy document meant to just whet the
appetite of the reader. Now that you are writing the treatment, you can let all those
ideas flow.
However, you still need to limit yourself. The game treatment needs to hover
around 20 pages or less. While the pitch document looked like a vacation pam-
phlet, the treatment is more like an “information packet.� It remains a fairly high-
level document, with its main focus on making your game idea seem both attractive
(which you did in the game pitch) and, perhaps more importantly at this stage,
doable given your resources. The game treatment should convince your readers that
your team can create this game in a reasonable amount of time given a reasonable
budget.
Following are some things you generally find in a game treatment.

Full Story Overview
In the game pitch, you covered the game's core concept. The treatment covers the
story in more depth. What was once, “A boy has adventures in his home-made
flying machine in a modern take on Gulliver's Travels,� now becomes, “Joshua, a boy
genius, has built a home-made aircraft to help him find his missing mother, who