Bad Family: Starting to develop a pitch

I need to figure out how to pitch and market Bad Family.

Andy Kitkowski developed a set of 19 questions to figure out how to market a game.

I'm going to fill in those questions as I get the inspiration and time. If you know anything about the game, I encourage you to help me in the comments.

The idea is to take the finished stuff to nzrag and gametime for further development, and then off to Story Games (the big leagues).

Here we go ...

Andy's Narcissist Self-Interview 20

PART I

1) Here is the name of the game, and how I came up with the name.

Bad Family.

I started with names based on the central mechanic of the game. So, it was stuff like 'Good or Bad', 'The Hand You're Dealt'.

Then I decided to focus on the family that is at the heart of the game, and at the same time introduce the idea that things will either go really well or really badly for them. So I had names like 'The Fortunes of the Joneses' and 'Lucky Jones'. That didn't sit well with me, and I began a search that may have lasted six months or a year for a name that worked better - and by better I mean I felt good about saying it out loud to other people.

Eventually I settled on 'Bad Family' - it's a riff on Bad Santa, it feels a bit current and catchphrase-y, and it clearly emphasises that it's about a family and that they may well do bad things to each other.


2) How would the "back cover blurb" for the game go? Imagine it being read by the "Movie Commercial Guy" ("In a World...")

Imagine your family - loving, complex, weird, and a little screwed up. Now imagine each of them having the worst day of their lives at the same time ... today. Imagine your family - you love them, hate them, and they're a little screwed up. Now imagine everyone in your family is having the worst day of their life.

Bad Family is the game about that day.

Bad Family: answering the question of whether you love the selfish jerks who are trying to stop you from getting what you want.

Alternatively, I have this:

Do you like animated sit-coms like The Simpsons or Family Guy?

Do you like stories about dysfunctional families, like The Royal Tennebaums, or Malcolm in the Middle, or Married with Children, or American Beauty or pretty much any TV show ever?

That's basically what Bad Family is about: together we'll create an episode of an animated sit-com about a dysfunctional family.

You'll play one of the Family Members, and as part of the game you'll set up a goal your Family Member wants to achieve by the time the episode ends. You win the game by getting what you want before everyone else does. You can increase your chances of winning by creating horrible situations for the other members of your family. Horrible situations like you'd see in any episode of a sit-com.

3) This is a brief example of what play might look like, involving three players and no more than 10 "lines" of text.

SIVA:
Okay, we're back to your turn Elise. Now, if I remember right, your character's Want is to 'Prove he's not gay'. Where did we leave him, and what are you going to do next?

ELISE:
The party had just gotten started at my parents house, and all of my friends from school had arrived. So I think the music's loud, we're all dancing, and everyone starting to get drunk. And that's when Katie shows up.

TOBIAS:
I'll play her. "Lee, great party! I've never been to your place before - it's not as weird as they say at school."

ELISE:
"Thanks ... uh, do you want to have a look around?"

TOBIAS:
"I'd love to see your bedroom. I mean get a look at where you sleep. I mean -"

SIVA:
I'll there. So the best case scenario is that you go up to the bedroom, and - who knows - you might get up to all sorts of horrible embarrassing hijinks in the course of proving you're not gay. My worst case scenario, on the other hand, is that Brian arrives. And he chooses just that moment to get down on his knees in front of you, and Katie, and everyone at the party, and declare his love for you.

ELISE
Oh shit. Okay, I'll draw a card ... Failure. Crap! ... Well I'm not going to let that stand. I'll spend a Bonus and redraw.... Failure. okay, okay ... I need to save my Bonuses for later so, crap, I guess Brian arrives and does his thing.

EVERYONE:
(in sympathetic embarrassment)
AARRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGRAGGGGOOOOH!!!

TOBIAS:
Do you want to spend a Bonus to continue the scene?

ELISE:
No. Guess I'll pass the turn to you.... Crap.

[Hmmm ... I'm not sure - does this come across as homophobic? It's based on a real moment in a playtest, and when we were playing it was awkward, sympathetic and felt true. I'm not sure how it reads, though.

4) This is my target audience.

+ People who want to play a comedy game.
+ People who want a complete game in an hour.
+ Board gamers, maybe.
+ People who haven't played an RPG before (I want Bad Family to be accessible and non-geeky).
+ Groups of friends who like to take the piss together.

This is a really important question and I need to put more thought into answering it.

5) These are other games, media, etc am I blatantly stealing from (or, what I am inspired by)

The Simpsons, Malcolm in the Middle, and Angel. In fact, Angel was the original inspiration because I noticed that in the show was never about how skilled a character was - they either succeeded or they failed when they tried to do something. I wanted a game that would be that simple.

Primetime Adventures is an inadvertent influence - the game has turned out like a stripped-down version of PTA.

6) Here is one single sentence which describes 1-2 things about my game idea that other games don't currently offer (to my knowledge).

I totally don't know how to answer this. I don't think there are any other games that aim to create animated sitcoms. Cartoons, yes (Toon, Cartoon Action Hour); sit-coms, no.

7) Here, in no more than three sentences, is what the game is about in general.

Cartoons.
Dysfunctional family.
Worst-case scenarios.
Selfishness.

Obviously that's more than 3 sentences but I'm happy to brainstorm on this one and then winnow it down.

8) Here are one to two vignettes about the game's setting.

Depending on the group, the setting can veer all over the place from realistic to totally surreal. Occasionally I've had playtesters who think this is a problem - but over time I've grown to see this as a feature; each group sets up a particular tone for their game.

On the realistic end of things, one player wanted her character to be a teenage boy who was struggling with whether or not he was gay. He ended up at a party, with the girl he was interested trying to lead him upstairs to a bedroom - while at the same time his best (male) friend from school gatecrashed and declared that he loved him in front of everyone. It was an extremely awkward moment in the story that made all of us cringe in sympathy.

Towards the more surreal, I've seen a grandmother character stoned on peyote, stripping off all of her clothes under a hot sunny day while cycling to her weekly bridge game. And one young kid accidentally invented a time machine when he tried to soup up his bicycle with some spare parts stolen from a local army base.

Bad Family: 100 words a day

The re-writing of Bad Family (*) has been warming up over the last week or so (although it'll have been just over a month, by the time this entry is auto-published).

(*) My game about dysfunctional relationships, family sit-coms, and the struggle to get what you want by the end of the episode before your big sister screws you over.

Really, it feels like the writing is happening at the intersection of seven personal productivity hacks that I've been using for a while:

1. I've set up the home page of my browser so that the Google Docs page where I'm writing Bad Family is right in my face whenever I go online. Using Google Docs also has the advantage of making it easy to work on it anywhere.
   
2. I have started a Seinfeld chain - basically, the idea that if you can see you're making progress every day, you don't want to take a day off (and break the chain). You can see my chain for Bad Family here.
   
3. I'm using an idea from Mark Forster called the Current Initiative, which is that you choose one project that you want to make progress on, and make it the very first thing you do each day. So, when I wake up I write on Bad Family for 10 minutes. I also make it the first thing I do when I get home.
   
4. After reading 'In Praise of Slow', I'm putting less pressure on myself to complete this game RIGHTNOWASSOONASPOSSIBLE. By taking the pressure off, I'm trying to make it more fun.
   
5. I'm writing it with a specific audience in mind. This is a hack suggested by Jonathon Walton - writing it to a particular person gives it a more personal voice. Hopefully it also makes it a more enjoyable read.
   
6. I'm making this my main writing project for the next two months (till the end of July). I'm now alternating a period of serious, focused writing with two weeks of playing around with various projects, finding out what's fun.
   
7. I'm writing 100 words a day. Again it's a suggestion by Jonathon Walton, in this thread on Story Games.

Basically, I'm looking forward to 'finishing' this thing. Not only will it tie off the last Old Thing I've been working on, but it'll also allow me to release Matt, Karen, and Gino's artwork into the internet.

EDITED TO ADD: I've also been 'gameifying' my writing - finding easy levels (sections) to complete and working on them; gradually I'm working my way up to the harder levels.

Learning how to play - Process

I've played an enormous amount of cellphone poker over the last 2 days. It's made me think about some broad phases of skill acquisition when I play games. For me, it breaks into:

• Process (what do I do and when do I do it?)
• Tactics (what are the best options for me?)
• Understanding (the point at which the game becomes fun)

Process is simply getting comfortable with what happens when. When is it your turn? What are your options on your turn? What further decisions do taking those options open up for you?

There are a lot of games that I think I'd enjoy where I'm simply not comfortable with the process: poker, D&D4E, Capes, The Committee for the Exploration of Mysteries.

The thing that makes me comfortable with process is repetition. And that's where having poker on my cellphone comes in handy. Normally I might play three games of Texas Hold 'em a year. In between times, all of those skills simply get lost. Any insights I've made, fade away. In the last 48 hours, I've played at least 3 games a day (probably more), and in the course of doing that I've become way more comfortable with checking, calculating outs and pot odds, and bluffing.

Games where the human element isn't so important (and I think I include D&D4E in that - despite loving the way it plays and its apparent tactical depth), are really amenable to these rapid cycles of practice and learning.

... huh. I just taught myself something. Taking that idea of process (which has also been talked about here, with the idea of how do you introduce someone to a game), I think I'm going to add an 'introductory' round to Bad Family - an opportunity for players to get used to narration and introducing complications, without introducing the rules.

Bad Family - still hammering away

The outline is nearly finished, and I'm about to send off the final requests for artwork. Not sure I'm going to make my self-imposed May 16 deadline, though.

The common wisdom around goal-setting is that you should always include a realistic but challenging deadline to achieve your goal by. I generally don't find deadlines that useful - I find them frustrating and de-motivating if I miss them. My preference is to set an objective and then stubbornly keep at it until it's done.

The one enormous exception to that is when I decided to film hopeless within a year. That got things done.

I'm still trying to reconcile these two things.

Bad Family - Progress Report

Bad Family is the Old Thing #3 that I've been working on. I've nearly finished restructuring the outline. I'm trying to far easier for readers to visualise how to play the game. I've sort of been using Jason Morningstar's process:

the rules have to be crystal clear about procedures, and call out what to do when, and flag points where what you do is a little off kilter. So how to do that?

I’ve been steadily revising a cheat sheet, a “what to do when” document, so I atomized that into a very detailed outline. Like this detailed:

3.2.4.3 Keep any die that resolves a spotlight scene for your character in front of you throughout the game.

It’s four pages long and was a pain in the ass to put together. Then I cut and paste my current text into the outline by paragraph, wherever it referenced the outline. And here’s what I learned - there are big chunks of assumption, places where I don’t talk about what to do, when. There’s redundancy. There’s stuff that is presented subtly out of order. It was a really instructive and eye-opening exercise. It’s going to make the game text much, much clearer. I recommend it!

Jason's comment about stuff that's presented subtly out of order is very true of my project.

No idea if I'll make my May 16 deadline for producing an ashcan of this, but I'm making lots of progress towards getting the thing done and out of my life.