Peering inside video-game pitches

James Goddard, CEO and founder of CrunchTime Games and professor of game development at the University of Advancing Technology, recently published the documents that got Shred Nebula the green light from Microsoft for the Xbox platform.

GameCareerGuide has his pitch paper and a manuscript required by Microsoft known as "60 seconds of gameplay." According to GameCareerGuide, Goddard said:

CrunchTime Games, Inc., is very excited to offer this reference to the vast communities of aspiring developers, students, educators, and peer in the industry, showing how we tackled the task of pitching Shred Nebula [which was tentatively titled R.I.P. ROCKET, and often referred to as such in the documentation] back in 2006. We hope this open sharing sets a standard for others in the industry.

Due to the normally ultra-secret nature of video game development, these documents are very interesting to see out in the wild.

I've written in the past that I think video games could be the next open-source frontier. But after reading these documents, I've realized that what will drive game development is collaboration, but not necessarily in an open-source way. As far as I can tell, the code isn't what drives the games as much as the user experience.

Generally speaking, I think there are far more great coders than there are great story-tellers, which is what makes video games so arduous to develop. Opening up design principles should help drive new games and new ways of user engagement.