Project Proposal / Pitch

Overview

For the game project that you will be making for this class, prepare a simple proposal and milestone schedule.

Be ready to present your proposal in the next class. Milestone schedule should be available for review.

You have 3 weeks until the first project deliverable! Each one there after is 2 weeks!

As if you were explaining to someone else how to make the game you're planning

Provide a high concept of the gameplay.
Concept art is helpful. Screenshots from similar games are okay.
A competetive analysis of other similar games (especially HTML5 ones) is very helpful.
A section on the risks or concerns you have making this project.
Be ready to answer questions!

Get a sense of what it will take to build your project and how long.

Look over the goals for each milestone, and based on your game's design decide what needs to be done each week.
Create a list of tasks needed to accomplish those goals, and estimate how long each task will take.
Breakdown bigger tasks into sub-tasks.
Be as specific as you can for the first milestone. Create only general/broad tasks for the later milestones.
After each milestone you'll update the schedule for the next milestone.

Advice for choosing your projects

Try not to schedule over 10 hours of work a week. Things always take longer than you think, plus there will be surprises.
Know your limitations, and build off them when choosing a game to make
Keep is Simple. Copying from another game is great. Don't go overboard.
Design around having very little art content! Programmer art is just fine! Check out free assets on the internet.
Online multiplayer is extremely challenging, especially real-time, so it's best to stick with simple online features like leaderboards, achievements, etc.
Physics driven games require a lot of tuning to nail the fun, but that exploration can be fun itself (and frustrating)
User-generated content? Tools are the more important part of an engine just for devs, much more so for consumers. Level editor, object editor, particle editor, etc.. Know what you are getting into.