After the research report on our "serious topics," we created a game pitch centred around the topics and concepts we delved into. As mentioned in the previous devlog I chose cybersecurity with a focus on cyberwarfare. While doing the research, I had already begun forming ideas for how to turn it into a game, after all, hacking is a common topic in games and the idea I had was based on concepts that I drew from a bunch of other games. My pitch was a game called Zero-Day it was a puzzle/Simulation game akin to Papers Please but focused on playing as a hacker taking on jobs. I really wanted to focus on the topic I did research on and I drafted a lot of different narrative ideas for how to create a story around the topic and how to blend it into gameplay that's both engaging & fitting to the topic of hacking/cybersecurity.

The feedback that I got on my pitch was really helpful and pointed out a lot of flaws that I hadn't noticed initially when working on the pitch. By focusing on emphasizing the importance of narrative to the game the actual gameplay loop was rather simple and most likely wouldn't be able to create a satisfying game experience without a lot more work done to it to add more complexity/more depth to the existing systems I had designed. Another key point of feedback I got was that relying on narrative details isn't ideal for a pitch. While this pitch was fairly different from a real pitch, this point is very true as a real investor wouldn't focus on details like a rich story in your game if the rest of the game doesn't look substantial enough to pursue funding/development. Overall, I definitely know what needs to be done to improve the pitch and game concept as a whole and while I'd love to do that,  it's just not feasible to do so. Right now, I'd rather put my time and effort into working on the pitch my team chose, it's more suitable for the team we have and I'm really glad that I get to work on a fresh idea rather than using my own, to be honest.