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Hot tips from Pitch Your Game Idea judge!

If you haven't already heard it, David Perry and Jamil Moledina recent spoke about the upcoming "Pitch Your Game Idea" event coming to E for All. It's where aspiring game designers will get a chance to get pitch their own unique idea for a video game to a panel of judges. I wanted to find out a little bit more, so I talked with Perry myself -- it sounds like this is going to be a lot of fun.

The "Pitch Your Game Idea" session will gather aspiring game designers -- pre-registered Game Career Seminar passholders -- "American Idol" style on stage, where everyone will get a short time to describe their game idea, according to Perry. Perry will judge the ideas, along with Ru Weerasuriya, co-founder and VP, Creative Development at Ready at Dawn Studios, and Dave Kosak, executive editor at Gamespy.

What makes Perry an expert? Besides being the CEO and founder of GameConsultants.com, he's directed some monster game hits, like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Disney's Aladdin and The Matrix. He's also an accomplished game programmer and designer with two decades of experience under his belt.

Five finalists will be chosen to battle it out on the main Gamer Stage in front of the E for All audience, and the winner gets an All-Access Pass to CMP Game Group's Game Developer Conference 2008 -- an invaluable resource for veterans and newbies in the video game business alike.

Perry says to expect lots of surprises.

"I go to a lot of colleges to help kids that want to present game ideas or talents like art skills. There's always someone in the room who blows me away -- someone who just doesn't realize how much talent they have," he explained. “It's important to cultivate that person's idea, and give it a chance to grow.”

Perry offered some practical tips if you're coming to the "Pitch Your Game Idea" seminar and plan to present.

"The problem is you've got a really short amount of time," he said. "You need to practice and practice and practice. You're going to see a lot of people just stand up there and die, because they're only going to have a few seconds or a minute or however much time to get their idea across."

Perry said that contestants shouldn't bother with disclaimers about how finished a game is, and shouldn't bother with long introductions to their team or descriptions of what part of the project your team members are working on. "These are some of the simple mistakes people make," he said.

The idea is to refine the game concept down to an "elevator pitch" -- common parlance for entrepreneurs and other business types. An elevator pitch is a brief overview of your game, distilled down to the time it would take to ride in a high-rise elevator.

"Try it out on a bunch of different people and see what they respond to," said Perry. "Sometimes when you see a headlining comedian play a small club, it's because they're looking to see how each audience member responds to their lines. That's exactly what you need to do."

Don't let the concept scare you, however. Perry says that some of the best ideas he's ever heard come from people with absolutely no experience in the game business.

"I've seen examples where students pitch much better ideas than ten-year industry veterans. You just cannot predict where the next monster hit is going to come from," he said.