I’ve loved Double Fine my whole life. Not only for games like Psychonauts, but for their personal touch and their approach to community engagement. When I saw the chance to pitch to them with illustrator Conley Smith, I didn’t have a problem coming up with a solid idea: a community run Choose Your Own Adventure to help promote their upcoming fantasy tactics game Massive Chalice. We quickly realized we had a concept that was easier show than to tell, so I began writing the script for a 13 page demo with 3 narrative branches.
The event would last for only a few months. Every week, a new comic page would be posted. At the bottom of each page the fans could vote on which decisions the characters in the story would make. And just like in Massive Chalice, your choices could lead to deadly consequences for the characters in the story. Watching Conley pencil and ink the pages for the prototype inspired me to polish everything until it sang. I built the demo site in Bootstrap, designed a mockup of what the website could look like, and created a pitch packet for Double Fine to review.
The project was smart, but in order to get that across I needed to show my work. Inside the pitch packet I outlined the timeline for the project, the budget, character descriptions, and included several other potential storylines. To make sure everything worked the way we wanted it to I hired freelance editor Katie Moody to help smooth out the wrinkles and provide additional guidance. With her help and our hard effort, we had a blast pitching to Double Fine!