Target Audience
When we were planning our game we had to come up with a target audience that we would be marketing this game towards, knowing their age will help us create the game to be age appropriate in terms of content and difficulty. Our target audience’s age range is 12 – 20, this gives us a bit of freedom when it comes to the game’s content and difficulty, as the people playing this game will either be Teenagers or Younger Adults. We selected this age range after doing research on similar games in the genre and looking at what they were rated, however, many of these games were rated U (Universal) which means that anyone can play so this did not help in our research as it did not give us a solid age group to work with, so to try and find a solid age group I looked at the average age of a video game player, and the results vary from 31-37, with 72% being over 18, while only 17% are under 18. we used these numbers to help influence our target audience age, but as we aim to make this game available to all ages we lowered the minimum age rating to 12 only due to difficulty on some of the levels we planned on creating, and as for the maximum age, we put down 20 as even though there is no limit to when it is seen as unacceptable to play the game, we chose it as it seems that this would be near the highest age that someone would be, if they are interested in mobile phone puzzle games.
Quality Assurance
To cover Quality Assurance we would either ask people in a controlled environment to play test our game, or we will play it ourselves to find any issues or improve the quality of fun that the players will have. Any issues that players will have we will make a list out of, and once we have gathered enough problems with our game we shall start to update our game to fix bugs and change the game to make it more accessible to every player.
Alpha and Beta tests.
All games go through testing at some point in their lifetime, whether that would be alpha testing which takes place around the time the game has some working mechanics present in a level or two, or if it Beta testing, which often takes place towards the end of production phase and is very similar to the finished product.
We plan on holding an alpha test with our class being the play testers as they all fit the target audience age-range. in this stage we expect to find bugs in our game both large and small, however some may be game breaking. Once we have fixed the bugs discovered in the alpha test, and improved on the game, we will move onto beta testing, this is where the smaller issues can be found, such as small level bugs, sound/visual errors and glitches caused by specific inputs from the player.
Alpha
yesterday we held the alpha test of our game, those that tested out our game were given access to the first five levels of our game, with each level increasing the difficulty. while watching people play our game, I realized that the majority of players struggled with the last two levels as the difficulty levels spiked drastically, this told us that we will need to either reduce the difficulty overall, or smooth out the curve a bit, allowing players time to adjust to the game a bit more.
During the alpha testing we designed a survey for our play testers to participate in once they had finished playing the game, however as we set this survey up on two PC’s it meant that it only counted two results overall, giving us so few results that our feedback was useless.
Marketing
To cover the marketing side of the Game Jam project we are going to spread the word of our game by creating posters of our game and creating mock-up advertisements, we have the idea of placing the posters around the college and anywhere else we think would attract a lot of payers, and we will share the mock-up advertisements on the Facebook page, which I believe will attract a lot of players as the Facebook page is the Games Design group, the members of the group not only play games but create them, this means they may be more concise and detailed when listing problem that they encounter while playing the game, making it easier for our quality assurance.
Trailer
The trailer for the game will most likely be quite simple, as it would keep in theme of the game’s visual style and game-play. The primary focus of the trailer will be the game play, as this is what players want to see when looking for new games too play, as players are not very likely to download a game if they have no clue what the game-play is about. The final seconds of the trailer could contains links to some social media links/link to download the game, allowing anyone who is interested in our game to find out more information quickly.
Posters
While Posters serve the same purpose, they come with a new set of issues, since you cant have game play on there. For this reason, we will have to change the main feature of the poster from game play to other elements, such as art style or technical details. Since the art style is a major focus, I think that screenshots will work great on the poster. This will give the player an image of what the game looks like, and if the games art style appeals to them. We can also make sure to give the player an idea of how to download the game. This would include what platform the game is on, system requirements, pricing and release date.
Social media links are a good idea for a poster as it allows the viewer to gather further knowledge by looking at any social media pages that we set up for the game, since this can also help the developers gather publicity. That helps with any future games that we develop either as a team, or alone.
Lewis Taylor 