Social media, SEO, marketing and writing10 Key Elements to Include In An Interactive Design Proposal
So you have a wonderful idea for a new interactive game. How do you transform that raw idea into a fully finished product? Writers, designers, programmers, content experts, and project managers usually start by creating a written document that describes the project in detail–as a way to sell the concept to investors, producers, and distributors.
This document can take the form of a proposal, an elaborate treatment, a complete design document, or even a screenplay. Design proposals, in particular, allow each member of the financial, development, creative, and marketing teams to review the idea, its characters, its settings, its game play and its potential marketability prior to investing hundreds of thousands of dollars and several years to produce. A written document may also serve to demonstrate your ability to produce a concept.
Here are the basic elements that make up an interactive design proposal:
- Story summary
- Character descriptions
- Interactive design structure
- Viewing matrix
- Sample screenplay pages
- Technical specifications
- Creative team bios
- Production timetable
- Marketing plan
- Budget and/or Profitability forecast
Here is a sample story summary for “Subterfuge,” an interactive sci-fi series created by author, Darryl Wimberley.
SUBTERFUGE
The Premise
It is the year 2139, an age of transitional technologies, of rapid advances in cyberspace and near space, in biogenics and nanotechnology. But technology never brings Utopia in its wake and human nature remains the same. The streets of New Las Vegas are as familiar to us as The Strip of today. And JAKE STRYKER, our lead protagonist, is familiar too.
The interactive series will weave Jake’s active story from his alcoholic beginnings in orbit above a suffocating Earth to his salvation beside Saturn’s rings. The Solar System is Stryker’s beat. But even that place, large as it is, is no larger than the human heart.
The Period and Place
The interactive episodic series takes place in the year 2139. The action ranges from a man-made station near Jupiter to the series’ primary location in the red-light district of New Las Vegas. There are no gimmicks here. Jake can’t warp-drive to distant galaxies. He can’t beam himself out of jeopardy. There are no force fields in Jake’s world which can deflect a handy shotgun. It’s not that people have given up on these ideas, of course. In fact, the opening script features a power-hungry man in a global corporation who puts big bucks on the line to make a futuristic technology possible.
But Jake isn’t much impressed. Stryker feels a strong sense of nostalgia for the old vices—Cigarettes. Hamburgers and fries. Whiskey straight from a bottle. And, no thank you, an hour of cybersex just isn’t the same as the real thing.
Story Summary
The opening episode for this interactive series introduces JAKE STRYKER, a one-time rocket jock no become an alcoholic with a dead end job loading cargo and contraband on a space station falling apart at the seams. The brutal murder of Jake’s lover and one-time partner, SANDY AIMES, brings Jake quite literally down to Earth. Sandy’s reputation is sullied in death, her murder being claimed by authorities to have resulted from Sandy’s involvement in a criminal consortium stealing nuclear-fusion technology from TERRA-SOL, Inc., based in New Las Vegas.
Jake doesn’t believe for a moment that his one-time love would steal a dime from anyone. He cannot abide the notion that Sandy’s killers are of no concern to the Cops on Earth sooo….Jake quits his job, grabs his last hundred credits, his antediluvian .45 automatic handgun and drops to Earth. Reaching New Las Vegas, Jake teams up with an illegal android, ROLO DEX, and a shady casino owner, BELISE SHAFFRON, to redeem sandy’s good name. In the process, he unearths a major corporate scandal and a host of bad guys on a home planet which, in the 22nd Century, is reaching a social and ecological crisis. Jake does find Sandy’s killer and in the course of saving her reputation finds redemption himself.
