The pitch deck required some more work to make up for my lacklustre GDD.

I started by rewriting the summary in a more fun and advertisable way, titled the ‘about’ page. Throughout this section and the rest of the presentation, I used bold lettering to highlight important parts of the text and make it more digestible in a quick presentation.

I edited the ‘Tropenwald’ text at the top of the image I used for my GDD to say Tobeafrog as it was confusing.

I added improved/refined sections about the key selling points, the frog character, mechanics, and environment, and a page titled ‘other features’ for the narrative, onboarding and plant guide.

I added some new visual elements, most notably a new logo. I also drew a new concept piece for the pond that displayed the frog gameplay and created a couple more AI-generated images representing the different environments.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1L0xYR2XpUVvgq6zR4P2205oTubpQTeiBvjzSpyELYQg/edit#slide=id.g2b3f60f81da_0_9

My pitch deck went well and it was voted as one of the projects! In the first session where we were organised into our teams, we had a brief meeting with the members that were present: Josh, Julia, and Reece. We figured out our roles, although none of us present were familiar with Alex so that was uncertain. Josh suggested making the mechanics more unique by incorporating the frog element. His suggestion was to have charged jumps that the player would need to estimate to complete some of the platforming challenges. This was in contrast to my original idea centred around momentum, similar to that of Mario. While my idea could be more fun, Josh’s idea would have more calculation involved and also potentially be easier to program. I like this idea, especially if it makes Julia’s job easier, so I will incorporate it into the current mechanics with momentum as a later goal if we have the time.

We also discussed the modelling and texturing, of which Reece would be in charge. We established that the painterly style is something we’d like to aim for and should be possible to pull off using normal maps. This would need to be automated if we wanted to texture everything like this, although some manual painting could be used on important elements.

We organised an online meeting for the next day. I created a discord server for this to take place. I uploaded important resources including my original quick pitch, GDD and pitch deck, as well as a working GDD that would be added to for this project.

Before the meeting, I created a simplified movement mechanics list. This included goals in order of priority for Julia to start working on so we had a basis for the prototyping.