Saturday 4 February 2012

Pitching Shroud Isle

Shroud Isle is the name of a Dungeons and Dragons campaign I ran with some buddies over the course of two years. It's a complex story that unfortunately never even reached its halfway point at the gaming table, though I had planned well beyond that. It's got everything, from love to betrayal; from gunzerkers to jungle ninjas; from conflict borne out of individual racial prejudice, all the way to the potential for the players' to end the world.

After spending so mich time and effort building characters and planning encounters and even creating a basic language for the natives of the island, the San'Nakkai, I have subconsciously been keeping my eyes open for an opportunity to pay all that off. I got it this term with my Creative Writing class, where we are expected to pitch a story as our final project.

Pitching a game story is a lot like pitching a game, something I have done a lot of these five months. As a side note, I am more than a bit flattered and proud to have heard from a couple of fellow students that I'm the best speaker in our class. Anyway, I've had four meetings over the past two weeks to pitch my game idea to fellow GD students and some of the excellent guys from the VFS screenwriting program. I was unprepared for the first pitch, which was unfortuate since that meeting was with a guy working as a producer in Vancouver. He was all business, and the 60 minutez I spent with him were exhausting.

The next three meetings went very well, with one listener even going as far as to say that he loved my story and thought I should pursue it to completion. Never mind that the game would rival a BioWare title for length, complexity, and production costs, it was still incredibly gratifying to have someone buy my creative work so completely.

I owe that positive experience to knowing my story well, understanding what a listener needs to hear to to keep them centered on the plot, and being passionate about the whole thing. I broke the ice first thing by asking him about his schooling, something I sometimes struggle with, and drew a map on a handy whiteboard to keep him oriented in the world as I told my story.

Most of all, I owed that later success to that first failure. I made sure to do all the things in that second pitch that I didn't do in the first, and while I hope I won't have to screw up to learn at some point in my life, I'll never expect it to happen. You learn a lot from failure.

Anyway, I'll be presenting that story in a couple of weeks, and maybe in five or ten years you'll be playing Shroud Isle or zome derivative for yourself.

2 comments:

Hey there, thanks for commenting.