Here it is.
Pitch day.

We know our concept got us this far and we have every confidence in it taking us to the funding stage of the competition… but could we carry it off!?

The pitches were all being held at Sony’s European headquarters in Liverpool, England.  The large, glass walled building was relatively easy to find – well, after getting lost, but I blame that on nerves!
I’m pretty pushy when it comes to being at events or meetings on time, in fact, I prefer being a little early – just in case!  We arrived with plenty of time to spare only to be told that many of the pitches before ours had overrun and there would be a short delay… when you’re already on edge, have chewed your fingernails to the bone and keep reciting your pitch over-and-over, any extra delay only heightens these already stretched emotions!

After what felt like a millenia, we’re in.
The panel for this pitch include Jamie Sefton (from Game Republic), David Hayward (from Pixel-Lab), some folks from Northwest Vision and Media, Phil Gaskell (from Sony [Update: Now with RebelPlay]) and several others…

The concept we were pitching is known as “Pathological” or Path’ for short.
Path’ is a unique concept in that it is a first-person, adventure puzzle game – if you wanted to assign it a genre.  The main difference between this and any other game out there (the only other first-person puzzle games that spring to mind are the fantastic Penumbra games by Frictional Games) is that we would make use of the Playstation Motion Controller [Update: we now know it’s called “Move”, but at the time this name wasn’t announced) and PSEye cameras.  As you physically moved around your play area, this would move the camera on screen 1:1… as you moved in the real-world, your character would move in the virtual-world.
Pretty cool, huh?
You could then use the physical controllers to interact with objects and thus, solve puzzles.

The presentation flew.
Now it was open for questions… as we were coming into the room, the team before us were leaving and told us they got grilled when it came to the Q&A after the pitches.
So we’re ready to be hammered by question-after-question, but they didn’t come.  We got one or two and that was it.
Was that a good thing?  Did we get our concept across so eloquently that there were no need for questions?  Or..?

Only time will tell!

[Update:  The dreaded phone call came, the one where you find out the truth… and unfortunately we weren’t selected for the funding stage with this concept.  Still, we’ve taken Path’ back to the drawing board, re-visited every facet of the design from the location and levels right through to puzzle design and characters.  We’re actively having conversations with publishers and financing types who are interesting in the new direction we’ve taken Path’.  More details on the Games page to come!]

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