What’s my budget? What are my resources? What’s the timeline? What’s the product? What’s my primary audience? What’s the longer-term plan for the company?
This stuff doesn’t work in a vacuum. It’s part of a comprehensive strategy, and it is tailored to the specifics of the situation.
At the most obvious level, I’d start talking about my gameplay plans here. Get a dialog going. Tune the discussion. Learn what gets people thinking in the right vein about the product and what misses the goal. Keep it in the privileged inner circle of whatever pledge tier we’re on. Development preview? That’s one community to work with. Small and devoted.
Then Alpha comes along and the discussion broadens to the Alpha backers. It’s a chance to check the presentation for effectiveness. After all, the development backers have been listening to the message for a while, so they’re already indoctrinated; it’s time to try some people new to the idea to see how the evolved message registers with them. Tune the message again.
Along comes the Beta backers and it’s another cycle of the same. By the time the product is released, the team has gone through three iterations of hopefully frank and open discussions with their prospective customers to find out whether they’re building something worth playing. When they release, their ducks are in a row and they know that they’re hitting some kind of market segment, and only time will tell how broad that segment is.
When discussing this with the various tiers of backers, words will suffice for most of it. Concept art, artistic stills and such are just fluff and are largely a waste of time - except to get kids excited. If they’re serious about leveraging the player base, they need to ignore the fluff and get down to the meat of the game. People might buy the game in the first week out of a desire to participate in a graphical orgy of space scenes, but the game’s real success lies in its ability to provide sustained entertainment. And that first week’s orgy is going to be muted by the fact that the game is not being launched into the vacuum of five years ago.
That said, artwork still counts. Pictures are worth a thousand words, and if a picture can be presented to communicate something more succinctly than words, go with a picture. “Here’s the kind of resource placement we’re planning.” “Here’s the sort of team coordination interface we’re planning.” Where a video works, use a video. “This is an example of harvesting a resource.” The point here is to educate the development tier backers. Then the alpha tier backers. Then the beta tier backers. By the time they’re done doing all that, they’ll have tuned their presentation because they understand how people react to their presentation. And, of course, to their product, in its various stages of development.
Note that these discussions aren’t supposed to be a public way of designing the gameplay. It’s a way of getting feedback. If everyone who replies thinks that having spaceships in a space game is a bad idea, then some wire got crossed somewhere and the message definitely needs tuning. If there’s no replies at all to anything that they present, then either nobody understands it or nobody cares about it.
Keep the presentations short and to the point. Pictures to convey concepts really help. Consider the warp system prototype videos that I did. They existed to educate, not titillate. The same can be said of Flavien’s networking video. How many people were hugely reassured by that, beginning to understand how hundreds of players would be blasting away at each other with the game retaining some semblance of performance? How many people extrapolated to realize what a scrum such a battle would be? How am I going to survive in that environment? Those are the impressions that people talk about and think about. This is not just another Star Citizen with two or three guys shooting at each other. On the flip side, is it going to be another shot spam game like Planetside 2? The dialog would help INS understand that people see these things as challenges, and that they need to consider the consequences.
Anyway, that’s yet another dump of commentary on how I’d tackle it. I have no idea if it’s anywhere near what you’re after.
But that’s what a dialog is for.
I should have prepared some pictures…
