-
One of the most important things about signing a game is how I feel about working with the designer. I can design games if I want to, but I really enjoy working with others and making things that I couldn’t create by myself. During the game pitch, I try to make sure that the designer takes feedback well and seems open to ideas. I’ve worked with a designer or two that ended up causing me more stress than if they would have just handed over their design and not talked to me again and I don’t need that to happen again. It’s also definitely a positive if the designer can deal with me as a person because, as you know, I have a specific personality and it doesn’t work for everyone.
From there, I’m really just looking for that ‘twist of weird’, which is usually a classic mechanism done in different way. The game might be close to complete or really far from it, but if I could see where the game could be fantastic in a Weird Giraffe way, I’m open to working on it and molding it to fit my line. For example, I signed Wicked & Wise when it had bidding in it and during the development process it lost the bidding, got turned into a deck building game, then set collection, and probably a few more until it settled where it is now, but the core game loop stayed throughout the process. It was really early on in the development of the game, but Fertessa was amazing, so it was worth signing that early.
