Indie Games: How to make a bad slideshow and give a fun lecture
Alternate title: “Impostor syndrome and struggling to succinctly explain your project in under an hour.”
Earlier in the year, Nate and Thomas from the ShelfLife Dev Team were approached by Raqi Syed (Programme Director of Master of Design Technology at VUW and a fellow NZFC IDF grant recipient) and asked to give a guest lecture to the Design Ideation class at Victoria University in Wellington about the ShelfLife project. In this humble blog, Nate and Thomas will reflect on their experience of giving a guest lecture. Enjoy!
“Wow, public speaking, now that is a cool and fun thing to do!” is the first sarcastic thought you have when you think about giving a lecture. Talking about a project you feel passionate about is a really cool and interesting experience, but it’s covered in layers of vicious existential dread and anxiety. Getting up in front of people and saying “Look; look at this cool thing we are making!” takes some getting used to. It is definitely something that you get better at with practice (and really we’ve only ever given two low-key public presentations about ShelfLife, so we’re hardly experts).
For this particular talk at Vic in Wellington, we ended up speaking to a fairly focused class of around 10-12 people. So it wasn’t like a “The King’s Speech” situation (haven’t seen that movie but it seems like there would be more than 12 people listening to the King). The main bit of obvious advice we have for anyone wanting to talk about their project or cool creative endeavour — create a slideshow to help illustrate your points and keep you on track, and make it a little bit funny. Even if your dialogue is only amusing to you, getting a quick nervous laugh out in the open helps relieve some of the tension of public speaking. Ha. Ha.
THE CREATIVE JOURNEY
You probably want to start by talking about your creative journey. If your talk isn’t too specifically targeted at one aspect of the creative process, you may have to cover a lot of ground, but not necessarily have the time to cover specifics with any depth. This often seems to happen with even really good GDC talks (obligatory link here) so we found the best solution is to establish a whole project overview and try to speak as succinctly as possible. Otherwise you get weird and emotional and sidetracked, and in the worst-case-scenario start bringing up your childhood or something (though there is definitely a case to be made for relevant personal anecdotes).
To keep things clear, we decided to break down our talk into these sub categories. We feel like this outline is a good progress tracker for many different kinds of creative and narrative-based projects, so maybe this kind of vaguely chronological categorisation will be helpful to other new indies who find their own development process nebulous and difficult to understand. Laying things out like this ended up being helpful for us in terms of seeing where ShelfLife sits from a progression standpoint.
STUFF TO BLAB ABOUT
Here’s our list of talk topics to cover if you are trying to give a good general overview of a creative or narrative based indie project:
1. Incubating your idea(s)
Discuss your process of coming up with an ideas that aren’t terrible. Think about your parameters, genre, scope. We mostly talked about how at this stage you want to just have fun brainstorming and riffing on ideas.
2. Creating a story world and pitch bible
Talk a bit about defining your setting and the content of the creative world you are going to be working in.
3. Developing within limitations
Go into a little bit of detail about what your strengths and weaknesses are in terms of your team members’ skills and experience, and how you work around these as well as the resources you have available (time, budget, space, software, hardware, tools etc).
4. Wearing your influences on your sleeve
Everyone has influences, it helps a bit to really take a close look at the content you love and want to emulate. We talked a bit about how there is an intelligent way to be influenced and inspired without just creating a flavourless clone of something. There is some value to the adage “good artists copy, great artists steal.”
5. Developing a brand
It’s always fun to talk a bit about marketing and brand identity! This will be an on-going process that ties in with how you present your work to others, and will carry on all the way through to your advertising and marketing collateral when you are launching your project. We talked about finding your brand voice and a unified way of presenting yourself (or your team).
6. The evolution of ideas
The ultimate discussion! How to be flexible and keep things fresh. In many ways this is the most important point for a long-term project. It is OK for you to get sick of, or find certain ideas and concepts without your project dull or less exciting with time. There are ways in which you can keep adjusting and iterating on your work as you go to keep things exciting. Don’t be afraid to change big story beats, nothing has to be 100% set in stone, so feel free to re-examine obvious parts of your work.
7. Taking your project further
Our last talking point for creative projects: put yourself out there. Ask for feedback, ask for help, ask for funding, ask for critique. Keep an eye out for opportunities to take your work to the next level.
RECEIVING FEEDBACK
We had a few moments to spare after our lecture that allowed students to bring up some of the points we had covered in our talk to ask for more clarification. We’ve included some of the questions we were asked below, because we thought they were pretty helpful/interesting. We’d advise anyone delivering a creative talk to be prepared to give massive kudos to a thoughtful question that is difficult to answer!
Q: How far along in development is ShelfLife, and what does your roadmap look like?
A: We’re aiming for a 40 minute demo by 2020 so WATCH OUT! Well, that is the plan at least. Some things tend to move more quickly or slowly depending on people’s other commitments, but we are pretty happy with the progress we have made this year overall. It’s fine to keep resetting expectations when it comes to the developmental / research stages of a project.
Q: Would you recommend working as a team when establishing the foundation of your project, or is it better to not have “too many cooks in the kitchen” when you are first incubating an idea for your project?
A: For our project we were pretty confident that it was better to build the foundation of our story world, including our characters and project concept with just the two of us. We work well together and have quite a lot of creative trust, as well as a lot of overlapping interests and experiences which means we are usually on the same page and can create content quickly and make decisions when pressed. Moving further into the project, what we’ve tended to do when building our team and bringing in new people is identify where we have gaps in our skill set and try to find people who are a good culture fit to fill those gaps (i.e music, programming, animation). Don’t feel like you have to bring additional people in too early.
Q: If conveying a New Zealand setting is important to you and your project, how do you create a fictional Aotearoa without falling into traps of cliches — and without being too influenced by American mainstream storytelling?
A: (This was a fantastic question and a difficult one to answer because it is personal and specific to any individual who has an experience of living in New Zealand.) We’ve looked to Television shows like Outrageous Fortune as examples of portraying certain elements of New Zealand life, and drawn a lot of inspiration from our hometowns of Blenheim and Christchurch with regards to setting. Having visited Japan fairly recently we found that coming back to New Zealand allowed us to pick out some of the differences of daily life here, at least in terms of tone and appearance. On a basic level, we think it is important to include New Zealand flora and fauna, bird life, Te Reo, Indigenous Maori characters, Pasifika characters, and people with a wide variety of backgrounds and identities. We assume a New Zealand setting might have coastal and beach elements, fish'n'chips, weird architecture, low population density… bad student housing. Once you start listing everything out it feel like you are just writing down conceptual ingredients for a grotesque McDonald’s Kiwiburger. Good question. Kudos.
Annnd that more or less wraps up our inexperienced experience of guest lecturing on an indie title! Massive thanks to Raqi Syed, Gisela Broom, Kevin Romond, Victoria University of Wellington and the Faculty of Architecture & Design for facilitating our trip to Wellington, for providing us with the opportunity to talk about our game.