I don’t remember what I said I would do last week but what I did do was create several gigabytes of obscenely large GIFs.

I sent my pitch deck to a bunch of my coworkers to get feedback (all of which was very helpful) and the most significant note I got was that all of my images should be replaced with GIFs because they do a much better job of communicating the experience of a game than images. I knew this beforehand and had just hoped that no one would care, but after a couple of people told me to make GIFs, I broke down and started making them.

Originally I just made GIFs for things that seemed particularly significant or helpful to exist in GIF form, but not only were they not enough, but a lot of them were pretty messy because compressing the game down to an MP4 and then compressing the MP4 down to a GIF did some pretty unspeakable things to my game. This meant that I needed to replace all the images in my deck with GIFs and manually cut out particularly ugly frames from the GIFs that I was using.

All of this took basically the entire week as I went through GIF after GIF after GIF, trying to find the right ones. Only after I did all of this did I realize that I also needed a deck with no GIFs, so that I could create a PDF that wasn’t hideous, because PDFs don’t support GIFs (are you sick of all these three-character abbreviations yet, because I AM).

Anyway, I got it all done and it looks sick! I cut and cropped it all to look nice when shared via a view-only Google Sheets link just like this!

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Qv8eJvQ08ys7K_0z220Ec6wpIybXqI9jVA9Rr4OAuoA/edit?usp=sharing

Isn’t that easy? (Sorry, I know it takes several minutes to load, such is the cost of using GIFs that are all about 20-50 MB each.)

This is a pitch deck that I’m very happy with and that everyone I’ve shown it to seems to really like, which means I’m theoretically ready to start sending it to publishers 😨 (there’s a part of me that wishes there were still issues because the thought of actually sending things to publishers seems scary).

This upcoming week I’ll probably try to send out a handful of pitch submissions to get myself adjusted to the process. I’m not sure if I’ll make special slides for different publishers, but I’ll probably just reserve that for the publishers I’m particularly excited about. Beyond that, there’s some work I can do on the actual game as well, but there’s a decent chance that I’ll spend the majority of the week just sending out pitch submissions.