Oct 9, 2025
I did it! I just finished pitching my game at the DNID Capstone Pitch event and it went great! Had this been a year ago and had I not been so passionate about this project, I probably would have just passed the opportunity up, but I decided to push myself to try to improve and learn. I'm glad I did. A major concern for me was firstly getting my game across concisely, but also presenting in a natural way and not reading from slides. I prepared by being very familiar with the info on the slides, which was rather easy, writing speaker notes, and then practicing it by performing it for my roommates. These are all commonplace in public speaking learning, but I had never actually done this. My first iteration of speaker notes I tried to write as similar to how I would naturally say the info on the slides. I quickly found that this just led me to reading from them, which I wanted to avoid. I revised them by distilling them as much as possible.
Now, the main tangible outcome from this was feedback from both fellow students, but also professors and two industry professionals who attended. The main feedback I got included my project being potentially useful in the actual distributed systems industry to train workers on the systems, as well as my project having a massive scope and something that a fully fledged team would take years to make. The first thing I hadn't considered, and while it's not really the direction I want to go, it was interesting to hear and sparked some further ideas. My considerations of balancing mechanics taking a long time were affirmed, not that I was doubting that. However, generally people really found it interesting, and I got lots of people coming up to say that my idea was interesting! Another bit of feedback I got was that using Godot to make my game would mean that my project would matter little to potential jobs that I'm interested in. While I do recognize this is a possibility, I feel that the two aren't really different enough for the transfer of skill gained in Godot to Unity to not be considered by future employers. Also, I love open source software, so... fuck it.