Submissions

If you desire to submit a game design to Core Talent Games Ltd, please go through the following checklist:

Our Basic Checklist

To submit a design, please follow this process:

1.) Send us a query email

First send us an email with a brief, one paragraph description of your game design. Describe as much as you can without revealing what you consider to be confidential information. Describe the state of the design (is it a design document, prototype, first playable, et cetera?).

Email this to: submissions@coretalentgames.com

2.) We will respond, if interested

If we are interested in pursuing your design, we will respond with an email asking you to sign our mutual NDA, which we will email to you as an attachment.

3.) Sign and send us our submission NDA

Review our NDA. If it is to your liking, please fill it in, sign it, and either snail-mail it to us or scan it (in high resolution) and email it as an attachment. After we receive it, we will send it back, signed.

Submission Email:

submissions@coretalentgames.com

Snail Mail:

Core Talent Games Ltd

1255 Havendale Blvd

Burlington, ON, Canada

L7P 3S2

We can also take it faxed, but email us if that's what you wish to do.

4.) Have you read our Designer FAQ?

Please read our designer faq prior to submitting design documents or prototypes. This will answer many key questions.

5.) Do you have an actual design to show us?

Please understand that we prefer to initiate a project by optioning a design. That is, we want to see an actual design rather than a pitch document. This may be an early-draft design—which will almost certainly change once we exercise the option (purchase it) and bring it into prototyping and production—but it needs to be substantial. Why? Because it is the property we are bartering for. It has to exist; it has to have substance for us to option it.

If you come to us with a pitch document, we can still do a deal, but this would likely make our option transaction more tenuous. An option gives us the right to buy something—if there's little or nothing to that something, if it's just an idea, there's less protection for us, and in essence we're not talking about a game project, rather we're just talking about hiring you to be a designer based on a good intention you have for a game. (You know what they say about good intentions...) We aren't interested in that. We want to know that you have a design for a game that you are dying to get made!

Yes, we know it's hard to write an actual design—but if you're an architect you have to write a blueprint so the production crew has some idea what they're going to build. Outsourcing suppliers will tell you this up front.

Yes, we know that no design survives first contact with actual gameplay—but the purpose of a design is not to be a game, it's just to be a roadmap to it.

But frankly, if you don't have the self-discipline to actually write a game design on your own time—if you just want to talk with a bunch of friends about a game idea and code it ad hoc as you go—how much of a revolutionary game do you really think you can create?, how much do you want to design this new game?, how talented a game designer are you?

At Core Talent Games, we are a facilitation company. You have to be the one to shape the design of the game you are proposing. Again, in old school game development: you are an employee or merely a minor stakeholder of the design; under CTG's free agency way: you are a shaper and a leader of the game design. You have to lead it. Take the initiative. Write it down.

See this FAQ for what we want to see in a design.

See also our links page for resources on writing game designs.

6.) Is your design well-written?

Your design is a selling document as much as a gameplay and production blueprint.

Many game designers write designs for their own purposes—just to note ideas, procedures and so forth—without intending it to be read by external parties. Often to others such documents are confusing or simply not interesting.

But be aware that the design you share with us we are going to take around and sell. Therefore, make it well written.

We don't want to see disorganized files with hundreds of pages of ideas loosely compiled. We want something tightly written and well thought out.

And sell us on it. Your design should be interesting to read, and exciting at parts. If it isn't, what makes you think you're a good game designer? (And how do you expect us to sell it?)

Strip it down. Edit. Provide only sample levels, sample asset lists, et cetera. Cover only the core elements—leave room for the others who will come onto the project later to add to it, creatively. Follow our design FAQ.

You may also wish to review resources out there on general design, via our links page.

7.) Send the design.

Once everything above has been addressed in the affirmative, you'll send us the design. At that point you'll have an email address where we want it sent.