Gaming Horror – it's a Game Dev's Life

This week we had a 4 hour long Presentation marathon at work. 16 ten minute presentations were held by team members in front of almost the whole team … at least 40-50 people. Obviously i can’t talk about the content and purpose of these presentations.

But i’m more interested to talk about how the speakers presented their ideas anyway. As you might be aware, what’s often said about presentations is that 90% of them suck. I think we were definetely above the mean but there were clearly bad presentations as well.

What helped me in my presentation was the book “Made to Stick” which arrived just the day before we held the presentations. There wasn’t much time to make any major adjustments but just by reading the book’s Introduction i could make some changes to steer my presentation in the right direction.

Of course this book doesn’t help you come up with a fresh idea in the first place, nor does it teach you how to speak in front of an audience. But it will be helpful if you have to present your idea as the thirteenth presentation when the audience is already tired and due to information overflow harder to impress. It could give your idea and the presentation of it the “kick” it requires to stick. To have people talk about it afterwards.

It will also make you more confident in your idea and how you present it – in that regard maybe it actually can help you get by all the nervosity? As for me, i was definetely nervous, i was a complete wreck. The whole day up to the presentation i felt going-on-a-first-date times ten kind of nervous. When it was my turn to present, suddenly it all went away because i knew what i had to say, i had confidence in my idea and its presentation. That was a complete turnaround emotionally, and that feeling stuck. If not the idea, then the confidence i have in it and that’s what you need to get it across.

Getting to the other presentations, the ones i felt failed to impress the most were those that were created to be the “obvious candidate” as much as possible. My opinion is that you can’t sell an idea by making it as attractive as possible to those who decide about it. You have to have a vision and present that as a fresh idea – you should be prepared for questions about feasibility but don’t present anything just because it’s “possible to do”.