Designer Frequent Questions

• Who may submit a game design to Core Talent Games, and how is a submission made?

• What is "core talent"?

• What is Core Talent Games' basic process?

• What is a "design"?

• Will you sign a non-disclosure agreement?

• What are your basic deal-terms?

• Where does pre-production and full production take place?

Who may submit a game design to Core Talent Games, and how is a submission made?

Anyone may submit.

If you are a veteran game industry professional, feel free to submit to us any time. However, please first send us a query letter with a one-sentence description of your game design.

If you are not a veteran professional game industry designer, we are planning to have an annual open submission window in the spring of each year. Please do not submit prior to that.

We expect to receive design submissions from core talent.

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What is "core talent"?

"Core talent" includes all developers at the heart of a game's design—the people who thought up the idea and did the early work on it. Typically it will be one to five people in size. These people may be artists, programmers and/or designers.

Core talent can also be a single game designer.

We prefer our submitters to be a very small group of individuals or a single person.

A core talent team could be a self-contained game company. However, unless this company is very small with almost no overhead, we discourage this. If you are a company with considerable overhead and administrative burden to deal with, that adds more "moving parts" to the works, complicating things, distracting you from focusing on doing your game design work on this project with us. We are interested in funding new and original designs, and it takes a long time and a lot of focus to take a highly original design through the pre-production process. We want you to give total focus to developing this new design, not worrying about keeping your company's overhead paid for.

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What is Core Talent Games' basic process?

You send a query email that you have a game design or prototype. If we are interested we will contact you to do an NDA. After the NDA is executed, you submit a design or prototype to us. If we like it, we'll begin negotiating to bring it forward. We will either negotiate a co-production or a design acquisition.

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What is a "design"?

What a "design" is, varies.

But whatever it is, your design should be fresh. It should be motivated by new gameplay design and/or narrative design, and should point to a game that is executable using existing technology we can license.

Design as Prototype

Obviously a design can be a prototype—demonstrating gameplay, look-and-feel, narrative design, et cetera.

Also, tabletop prototyping is a rapid technique to help find the core of a game's heart. Such a prototype helps as well.

Design as Document

A design can also be a first-draft design document of some type. At a minimum it should be a concept paper—a few pages long, illustrating what the game is going to be about.

A design document lays out core content, core game mechanics, core user interface, and organizes the production of assets.

When you write design documentation, focus on visualizing the gameplay. While many written designs don't work once prototyped, often this is because the designers just rush into building stuff before imagining gameplay.

Introductory Information

Your design documentation should have an author's notice (i.e. telling who wrote/designed it), a copyright notice, the designer's contact information, page numbers and a (preferably hyper-linked) contents page. (You'd be surprised how many people forget these basic things.)

Give a one-sentence summary description of the game near the beginning. For example, "Lords of Fire is a third-person action game for consoles." (If you believe your game is of a new genre, simply state this.)

All designs should have about three unique elements or selling points. List and briefly describe these.

Gameplay Design Documentation

If your game is driven by new gameplay design—a new way to play, new kinds of puzzles, et cetera—your design document should include:

• Written descriptions that describe the spirit of gameplay in general and emotional terms (game dynamics).
• Written descriptions of specific core "rules" on how play works, and specific key actions the player will be doing (game mechanics). Visualize these.
• User interface graphic mock-ups.
• Sample spreadsheets or charts that organize some game element properties in relation to the game mechanics (balance design).
• Top-level descriptions of key characters, items, weapons, units, factions or whatever other key nouns the gameplay uses.
• Top-level descriptions of one or more sample levels or missions (if applicable).
• A summary description of game story (if there is any).
• A working prototype, however crude, is always nice.
• Other important things you can think of.

Narrative Design Documentation

If your game is driven by new narrative design—story elements, characters, setting and plot, interesting level design, unique artistic vision—your design document should also include:

• One-liner—a tagline or single sentence that captures the essence of your game's narrative vision. (The movie Alien, for example, had a particularly salient tagline: "In space, no one can hear you scream.")
• A premise statement—this is a short description of your game written in second-person perspective, the kind you might read on the game's box. It speaks directly to the player. For example, Half Life's premise statement could be: "Escape from Black Mesa, a hidden desert laboratory overrun by hostile aliens, deadly soldiers, and holding a secret darker than any you ever imagined."
• A summary description of gameplay (e.g. what genre the game falls under—first-/third-person perspective, real-time strategy, et cetera).
• A plot overview (about one page).
• A description of the look-and-feel of the game.
• A campaign overview or mission breakdown. Take your plot and break it up into all the discrete missions, levels or quests that will make it up. Then list of all these missions, giving each a very short (one or two sentence) description, including its goal.
• At least one sample mission description. This includes diagrams of the physical maps, all mission event descriptions, descriptions of all dialogue and cinematics (including any mission intro and outro), a list of which characters and key items will be in said mission, and so on.
• Key character descriptions (about a page each).
• Key unit, weapon and/or item descriptions (if applicable; about a paragraph each).
• Key "faction" descriptions (if applicable).
• Descriptions of key environments (for example, if Missions 8 through 12 are set on Planet Zontar, describe the Planet Zontar environment the player encounters).
• You may include sample images, or links to images on the internet, that illustrate the look-and-feel of any of narrative elements. This is particularly relevant in your sample mission description.
• Any thing else you can think of.

If your game is driven by a combination of new gameplay and new narrative—and many will—you should get all the above elements into your design.

Production Documentation

Eventually your design document will need to include some production documentation, if it is to be made. If you can include samples of this, it will convince us you know how to design for production as well as concept. Therefore you might send us the following:

• A summary of required asset lists;
• Some sample asset lists with asset descriptions.
• Organize the assets using a consistent naming convention.
• A sample use-case structure - which outlines key action-sets the player will do and the game must execute.

This documentation is not critical as it may change, depending on how the prototype turns out. However it, or documentation like it, will be used to actually make the game if it goes into production. So it shows us you are thinking across the full spectrum of game design: from the highly effervescent ideas of new gameplay and story, at the one end, to considerations of how to build the sucker, at the other.

Design Thoroughness

We require no more than a first draft. Answer only the key questions. Focus on making the design simple. Provide only samples. Don't try to answer every question. Once we get into prototyping and development, the actual required gameplay mechanics asset descriptions, mission designs or whatever, will likely change.

Ownership of Design Materials

Also, you must own everything you design—or, if you are using third-party IP, you need to get rights to it or inform us that those rights must be acquired. For us to release a design as a finished game, we need to be able to shore up all the chain of title.

Writing Quality

Your design document should be well written. This means terse, well-edited, organized and readable prose—and writing that conveys the spirit of your game. Make it elegant, easy to understand and compelling.

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Will you sign a non-disclosure agreement?

Upon sending us a query email about your game, if we decide to continue and wish to see your game design, we will send a mutual non-disclosure / non-use agreement for you and us to sign.

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What Are Your Basic Deal Terms?

This depends on what you want, and the needs of the project.

We generally do a co-production deal, a design acquisition deal or a consulting deal.

The Co-Production Deal

If you are a small game company or a team with a fairly advanced project, and you want to retain sizeable ownership of the IP, consider a co-production with us.

In a co-production, we negotiate terms with you to set up a Special-Purpose Vehicle—which is a company that will own the project. You own a piece of that SPV and our company owns a piece of it. We must negotiate over the deliverables we are each providing, and based on this do an ownership split. The split begins at 50-50 (as all deals do), but will tend to move from there depending on how much we each provide. If you have a full game made already, we could take a small amount. If you just have a design document and need a lot of resources added to it, we will need more.

Our deliverables will typically be design consultation, producing, prototyping support, corporate management and securing financing and/or publishing.  Your deliverables will be to create the design and/or develop the prototype. The co-production route is a simple and flexible way to begin a game project.

The Design Acquisition Deal

If you are a lone designer with a ton of designs you want to get out there before you kick the bucket, and you don't want to get bogged down running a game studio or managing an IP, consider a design acquisition.

A design acquisition is similar to a screenplay acquisition in the film industry. We option the design from you (which means we buy the right to buy the design before anyone else); we negotiate every contract term and every way you will be compensated if the design gets made into a game (this can include gross residuals, fees for sequels, television or film spin-offs, etc); we negotiate your participation in the full development of the final game (your Designer Services Engagement); then we strive to get the game greenlit.

The Consulting Deal

In this deal you pay us and we consult for you. We take no ownership. We can provide design consultation, producing, prototyping support, corporate management, project management, acquisition and direction of external development teams, securing financing and/or publishing. In our region (Toronto and Southern Ontario) we have access to major tax and other incentives for game development (40% for digital media labour costs for example) and top quality outsourcing teams.

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Where does pre-production and full production take place?

This depends.

Early cycles of pre-production typically occur in a distributed environment (over the Internet, parties working from their own locations). Later-stage pre-production and all of production proper will usually occur at a specific location—everyone having to be there for its duration. We will set up a temporary office for this, its location varying depending on where the core talent is, where the key outsourcers are, and so on. The core team may have a temporary office at its location, with outsourcing liaisons also at that office, while the bulk of outsourcing staff are located at their own permanent facility.

If we are consulting for you and are setting up and managing prototyping and production, we will do this in the Toronto and Southern Ontario area.

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