Nth Society - honing the pitch, explanation of the mission

Don't know what Nth Society is? Check out this post first.

I came across this great talk from the Game Developer Conference 2017 (GDC 17) titled "30 Things I Hate About Your Game Pitch".

Brian Upton tells us what not to do when pitching to a games publisher, in a funny a frank way. Upton is highly credentialed, as game designer behind Rainbow Six and more recently a game designer in Sony.

The great thing about this talk is that it can be taken as general advice for early stage game dev focus. Upton talks a lot about what will likely change, what is good to focus on and what things are higher priority than others.

I also think a lot of the things he sees as problems are going to be the same things many people will think of when they first encounter the game ideas of the Nth Society game. Many of the these points are extremely relevant to someone who is considering investing their time in the project, because they want to be somewhat sure that it's actually going somewhere.

So in a sense we're always pitching to new people - you all. Gulp! 😅

Top priority

Upton sees the whole pitch as going towards answering these two questions:

1. Is this game worth making?
2. Can this team make it?

He goes on to list 30 pitfalls. I've picked out the ones I think are most relevant at this stage of the ongoing "pitch" to the community.

Source Giphy

# 4. Pillars are not hooks

• What is the hook? What is the unique thing?
• Why somebody without buy this game other than something else out there?

# 5. You never explained to me what the player does

• What is the moment to moment gameplay?
• Describe your dynamics. What's it going to be like for the player to hold the controller in their hand.

# 9. You never mentioned your glaringly obvious tech risk

• What's feasible or not? What's not?
• It's fine to do something technologically ambition, that's dangerous and hard.
• But what are you going to do to address your tech risk?

# 15. You're pandering to the latest tech craze

If you want to make a game with one of these platforms make sure that what you're doing with the new technology [...] actually makes sense in the context of the game.

Source Giphy

# 20. You have no idea how much money you need to make this thing

Or you have no idea how many people or much time. In other words, what's the scope of the game?

You could have a game or pitch that's really amazing but if you don't know what it actually takes to built that suggests that you're never going to be able to execute on it.

# 21. You don't have a team

You at least need to have a roadmap for how you are going to hire people. At least have an idea of who the leads are going to be.

Finally

• Be enthusiastic
• Be honest
• Sell your hook
• Know your scope

Source Giphy

Nth Society - my answers to some of these questions

Pillars and hooks

I really loved this section and I think the concept of pillars and hooks is really useful. I don't think I had the distinction so clearly in my thinking before watching this video.

The pillars of the game are some of the mechanics. It's a survival game, you can die, not just from PvP violence but from not maintaining your body, e.g. eating. It's a crafting game, you can combine materials and objects to create new objects. It is open world, storyless, goalless.

But what is the hook? One of the audience members asks in the ending Q&A how do you find the hook, and Upton laughs, saying

well, that's the 20 million dollar question, isn't it?
[...]
Take whatever your core game is and then push it in some way [...] off axis and see where that takes you.

Something with "a slightly different feel". This makes me realize the best candidate for the hook is as follows:

Life in a simulated world with other people where your life matters and there is no game protection for you or "your stuff".

Maybe I'm wrong about the way I put it. Please correct me in the comments. But think about the implications. There is barely a game out there that doesn't have a property locking mechanism. This is just simply not the case is real life and leads to all kinds of strange behavior and indeed entitlements. That's fine for make-believe, but what about negotiating these arrangements with other players? Isn't that what society is about?

In the vast majority of games your avatar is expendable. In the vast majority the level of strength and protection difference between players can be in the several orders of magnitude. This combination makes violence a first option. But in real life were are wet bags of flesh (to put it super grossly, sorry 😅 ) we are vulnerable, even as we are relatively strong. Violence is the first option for some, but for most (including most animals) it is wild displays, and exchange of sounds and words, with others sometimes getting in the way. Even when violence happens, it is taken seriously, and often only inflicted to the level to dominate. It's not just hack hack hack, shoot shoot shoot. Only in the most brutal wars.

So in other words, the hook is an unparalleled realism, and realism without tedious dryness.

What does the player actually do

This is also great. What is the gameplay like!? Such an easily overlooked but super fundamental question.

Here's how I see it right now, others may have there own idea:

You come to consciousness and realize you're a child, you realize you've been child for a while but you're just now noticing. Your guardian tells you about the world, tells you about the geography, etc. and takes care of you until you're ready to stand on your own as an adult.

During this time you explore. You walk around the homestead, looking for things which children can do. You walk into the grass and pick up sticks. You try to figure out how to put them together into something to play with. You can't go very far away because you're afraid of what's out there, you've been told there are bad and dangerous people, animals, bodies of water, steep cliffs. But you go anyway. You walk off and start getting hungry. As you walk you realize you'll die soon and your life will have been for nothing. You run back to the homestead.

Gradually you get stronger as you get older. You learn homecraft, cooking and building parts for houses, tending the garden. You can go farther from the homestead and learn to pick berries (the non-poisonous ones), maybe even kill a small animal. You've had brushes with dead but you survived. The day comes when you you realize you could leave and you'd probably survive on your own. Do you tell your guardian or just leave?

This is just the a snippet of the childhood part of life in a classic rural homestead. What about adulthood, negotiating property rights with people of with different ideas? What about the village, township or city? I'll leave others to write the imaginations for these, if you feel like writing one please do and tag it #nth-society !

Tech risk

We have a glaringly obvious tech risk: real time massively multiplayer gameplay on a decentralized server network (probably) based on a blockchain. On paper sensible people will say that this won't work. And they'd be right, in so far as using a single "normal" blockchain for this won't work, there's just not the required throughput, and the processing and storage requirements would be insane.

This is one of the points in most active discussion but we need more people familiar with blockchain and server technology to talk to. If this sounds like you please join the Discord and say hello. In one of my previous posts I addressed some preliminary thoughts on this. I think it will come down to fragmenting processing responsibility, using shorter storage windows (i.e. not the entire chain, like Bitcoin partial nodes), sub chains for various regions or perhaps some way to "zip" transactions per region. This need a lot of work but as Upton suggests we are very very aware of it and making steps to address it.

Some of the other problems are already solved and I feel like we're doing the right thing here by using as many free, open source resources as possible to address the solved problems. For example, using MineTest as the primary game engine gives us a huge head start and will let us focus on the very difficult tech problem outlined.

We're also working within a paradigm that is well worn at this stage: survival crafting simulation.

Source

Latest tech crazy

Cough blockchain cough

Yes okay, this one's easy. 😇 It's definitely using one of the latest most hyped technologies, probably the most hyped tech - blockchain.

Is it going to be really hard? Yes. It is necessary. Thankfully, yes!

This is for two reasons:

1. Decentralized ownership (i.e. ubiquitous servers) is important to avoid a few powerful mods / admins from controlling the game, playing god and setting the tone of the world. We need blockchain to achieve this (probably).
2. Using blockchain currency in game is not simply using a fad, it is used for several practical reasons. It's the only way for us to set up a system where players can engage in peer to peer transactions without paying fees to an intermediary, without someone running massive expensive servers.

How much money, time and what team is required to built it?

This is a really good one and probably one of the biggest holes in the project at the moment. All of these things are currently unknown and that can give the appearance of super vaporware.

I can address one thing: no one is going to pay you to join the Nth Society project and do work. I may put up bounties from time to time, and so might other people, and there are some generous votes going around, but there's no guarantee of remuneration.

The best way to think of it is investing in something you want to see and play yourself. It's not a completely unique idea, there are games like it, but in some key respects it is (see above).

As a potential player you can help by telling people about the idea that you want to see come to fruition, and encourage any developers, arts, designers, etc. that you know to check it out.

How long will this process take? I don't know. It won't be quick. But one of things I will be looking at is getting some consensus on milestones that we can use to develop a roadmap. But I have to be honest, we're still at the very first step, the proposal was only launched a few weeks ago.

TLDR; this needs development!

Source

Finally, advice for the future

There were some points that Upton made that are beyond the stage we're at now but would be good as advice for us going into the future.

# 10. Your proof of concept doesn't prove your concept

Show the things that actually matter in the prototype not, for example, that the character can open a door.

When you think about doing prototyping or proof of concepts, prototype what with showcase the hook of your game and things that may convince the person that you're pitching to that you're able to mitigate the risks that are inherent in what you're proposing.

You can often sell the look of your game with one really good image.

# 13. You polished too early

Detailed, final artwork should not come before the mechanics are in place.

# 19. I know more about your monetization than your mechanics

Nobody buys a game for a monitization plan. Don't focus on this as it will likely change during development anyway.

# 23. You sound like you'd be a huge pain in the ass to work with

This is more important thank you think! You're going to be working together a long time.

If you're an inexperienced team, say that! You're not going to be able to fool most people [...]

Note: Just to comment on this, I hope we come across as likeable folks! However I do think you need to have a hard skin on the internet sometimes. I do my best to be kind but also direct. I can't speak for anyone else on this, not even a little bit. But I encourage everyone to be cooool my dudes, be cool 😎

Finally finally

Thanks for reading this. Please join us on a Discord server I set up for Nth Society discussion, you can join here: https://discord.gg/mQWanSk