Galaxy Nail Salon Update: Improved Video
Entering the 2023 Cardboard Edison Award competition
Hey y’all!
In good news, every Tuesday I get the itch to write one of these which wasn’t happening before, but I’m still only writing once in a blue moon. It’d be great to get more regular about these, but being a second-semester senior in college means I’m going to phone it in sometimes. (At the moment I’m knee-deep in my thesis in the Philosophy of Games field, so all my mental energy’s going to that for the time being.)
My last post was about a game I designed last summer for the GenCant 2022 Game Design Challenge. For that competition, I designed and entered Galaxy Nail Salon, a flip-n-write game in which players try to win the title of Best Manicurist in the Galaxy.
After entering Galaxy Nail Salon to competitions over the past few months (and losing each one), I was worn out from the process.
This is what I’d settled on: I’d continue entering game design competitions with new designs, because competitions are great for brainstorming. (Galaxy Nail Salon wouldn’t exist without the GenCant contest.) But, when I had a design that was ready to pitch, I’d just contact publishers directly.
So the plan was to send out GNS to publishers in January 2023. But one competition changed my mind: the 2023 Cardboard Edison Award, given to a promising unpublished tabletop game.
This competition in particular was worth entering because, even though there’d presumably be many entries, there were a lot of publishers sponsoring the competition and many judges who are high-up in additional publishing companies.
Since my plan for pitching games was to contact 1 publisher a week, entering would be a win-win. If I won, then I’d have a shot at getting published, but if I lost, 1 month’s time would rule out 20+ publishers at once instead of 4, so I’d prevent a lot of heartbreak.
The catch is that I couldn’t submit games to publishers while I’m still active in the competition. Fortunately within the next few days I’ll learn if I’m a finalist; their site said they’d announce who moves on in late February. There were 251 submissions this year, so I’m not holding my breath, but I’m still glad I entered!
To make GNS competition-ready, I reshot the pitch video that I made in the summer. Here are the main differences between pitches:
The summer version was almost entirely a video of me staring at the camera and talking about the game. While having a person in pitch videos can be valuable, it didn’t make much sense in this case. (And I was trying to memorize my lines so it took many shots to put together.)
I made the new version with Microsoft PowerPoint, per my dad’s suggestion. I’m not sure how to do it yet, but if I can embed videos of game demos into PowerPoint in the future, I’m never going to use any other software ever. Holy cow, it was so much easier to use than iMovie.
I think it took about equal time to produce each video, because the reshoot required producing a fancy PowerPoint presentation. But, it was totally worth it, and I was able to audio-record and put audio files directly, which took about 15 minutes total. Previously I had to use Voice Memos for the shots where I wasn’t facing the camera and the whole shebang would take an eon. I started out in Google Slides because I’m more comfortable with its software, but it was an easy conversion and surprisingly none of the assets were lost when I moved from Slides to PowerPoint.
Future changes that I still need to make to improve the video pitch:
I’m currently in-between copies of the prototype, so I still need to replace some images in the video with shots of the new components.
One of my roommates watched my video and said one slide was a tad confusing, so I want to replace that part of the video with a demonstration of how cards are flipped each round to clear things up.
Even though there are a few adjustments to make, the video is 94% of the way there. My intuition is that if there’s a publisher interested in it from the competition, they’d take the game on at 94%, so I feel comfortable ruling the publishers out if I lose.
In sum, the video pitch is coming along and I’ll sign up to be PowerPoint’s spokeswoman if given the chance. I don’t know how much my submission will be judged (I know there are lots of publishers and judges) but my pitch video only has a handful of views so it’s hard to gauge its success. (With 251 submissions and ~50 judges, each judge needs to score 5-6 games and each game’s score is averaged, but that’s just my speculation.)
Either way, I’ll let you know what ends up happening!
Cheers,
Jules