And now back to our regular programming.

What did we learn?

This last few weeks have seen MindFlock hard at work on solidifying the concept for Box Mental. That hard work finalized in a pitch at Sony Liverpool’s studio one last thursday. The whole process of trying to prepare the pitch (which is really a pitch FOR a pitch) has been very interesting. Not least because it forced us to try and understand what was important to convey about the game and our vision of what it will end up as. There are a few practical issues that came up that are really hard lessons learnt:

• Don’t try and present something like a flashy video, unless you have a flashy video designer on hand
• If you are going to create some additional materials, make sure you prepare them well ahead of time
• People use powerpoint because its fast to produce SOMETHING

The truth of some of this effort, will become apparent in a few weeks when they announce the winners of the competition (it was a competition to win funds to create the pitch, so in essence it was a pitch for a pitch).

Never the less, we are forging ahead with new developments. Primarily cleaning up and refactoring the codebase a bit to ensure that it can be worked on by more people. That means securing it in a subversion repository rather than the current mercurial one. Also it means branching off for a couple of potential technology prototypes that need to be built to enable some of the gameplay.

Luckily, with all the get in the game stuff out of the way, the regular schedule can be resumed. Both on here and on britishindie.com (site about british indie companies funnily enough).

Next time, we’ll talk technology!

.Z.