When last we saw our heroes… (Guest Blog: The Weather Factory, Dare To Be Digital 2011 Part 2 ) We had no Northern Irish team member and no application document with the application deadline looming. It was Thursday with the deadline at midnight on Monday. What I didn’t mention in the previous article was that the situation was even worse that I described. Not only did we not have a Northern Irish artist or graphic designer we had no bloody artists at all! (A quick explanation: Dare To Be Digital is a large and well-known game development competition. It’s held in Dundee at the University of Abertay, and it’s open to game development students of recent graduates. A large number of people from the industry itself are there to judge or help out, and the winner has a shot at winning a BAFTA.)

Our application supervisor Daire O’Broin, who had organized the videoconference, and had also provided the necessary prodding to get me to produce a game concept, emailed around the northern colleges. He also contacted the college’s (once the first article was posted I’d noticed that I had never named the college, the college in question is IT Carlow where I was a 4th Year Game Development student) Industrial Design course to see if any of those students were interested. This produced a number of interested students, of which the most enthusiastic was Daniel McMahon. He instantly got the idea, and the direction we wanted to go in.

For the northern member we really needed someone who was an artist or graphic designer and after some frantic emails we were very lucky to get Louise McConnell from The University Of Ulster to fill both roles, and we were also very lucky that she was able to see some merit in the slightly shambolic document we had at that stage.

So we had our Idea and after a very tense two days we now had our team. It’s now late on Friday and most of the team are heading home for the weekend. With this crisis over it was on to the next one: Put together a coherent application document for a game which we came up within 5 hours and don’t really know what it is yet.

I’ll briefly recap the steps in a Dare To Be Digital application.

• Step 1: Come Up With A Game Idea.
• Step 2: Put Together Team Of 5 Including One Northern Irish Member.
• Step 3: Write 800 Word Application Detailing The Game Concept, Team and Unique Selling Points.
• Step 4. Interview: If your application is successful you will be invited to present your concept to industry judges who will select the winning entry/entries (depending on your region).

Writing The Application

In the application you must address the Dare selection criteria:

• Innovation And Creativity
• Market Potential
• Quality/Mix Of Your Team.

In the application document you must explain your Game Concept and detail why it is innovative, why people would buy it and also detail the skills and of the team members. As well as the selection criteria you must also produce a 9 week project plan. This plan does not have to be too in depth but should show the major milestones that will be accomplished each week.

Our situation was that in trying to produce a Game Concept Document what we had really done was create an ideas bible, full of game mechanics, jokes and cut scenes. What we needed was an 800 word tight attractive pitch which would grab the judges attention. What we had was over 2000 words of half formed ideas and a series of compatible but not fleshed out game mechanics.

Trying to boil the ideas bible down into a tighter document was very painful as we needed to cut more than half the document. The challenge was to reach this target while retaining the sense of fun and comedy the ideas bible contained. It’s not something I have really had to do before and I found it very difficult. For me one of the most important aspects of the game and one that would make it even more unique was the personality and sense of fun we had built up in the ideas bible. Up until we received the judge’s feedback on our application, I believed we had cut all the fun and personality out of it, but to my surprise the feedback was terrific and focused the humour and style in the application.

In doing the cutting we were greatly helped by Daire, but in the end we had to reduce most items in the document to bullet points, cut scenes, most jokes and the introduction were removed.The application was crammed into the 800 word limit and sent off on the Sunday night, a week or two passed and to our surprise we were informed that we had been selected for interview.

In the next article, I’ll go through some tips I’ve found useful so far for good game and mechanics design, and I’ll have some gameplay examples too. Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter as @EdCampion!

Ed Campion

Ed Campion is a Game Designer/Writer, and Project Lead on the Irish entry for Dare To Be Digital 2011. http://daretobedigital.com/ You can follow him @EdCampion on Twitter.

Related posts:

1. Guest Blog: The Weather Factory, Dare To Be Digital 2011 Part 1.