Building Alliances pt6

 Target Audience Crowd Feedback

What are the different types of research?

There are a few different types of research that all serve their own functions and benefits. these can all be helpful in the production of our brief. These include:

Primary Research: Research that has been conducted and gathered by yourself that you can guarantee is accurate and reliable.

Secondary Research: Research that has been gathered and collected by somebody else and published publicly for other people to view or refer too. This is also helpful but poses the problem of credibility. 

To ensure our project is as tailored as possible and we are working on all the right things in all the best directions, as the Research lead I decided to create a Microsoft form and distribute it to places where I knew people interested in the genre of game I aim to create would be in to make sure the feedback I was gathering was coming for people involved in the genre! I left the link in a few various discord servers that are involved in fan bases of a few of our benchmark games such as discord servers for fans of streamers that are popular for these particular games.

What are Our Benchmarks?

Resident Evil

Silent Hill

Horizon Forbidden West

Dying Light

Left 4 Dead/ Back 4 Blood

Tomb Raider

The Last Of Us

World War Z

Fatal Frame

Using the benchmarks and the different creative choices that make up the brand identity of each franchise, I constructed a form that would allow us to decipher what elements of different design phases people liked and what parts they didn't like to help us distribute our time more effectively and keep ourselves on the right track. Nobody wants to play a boring game so this is important to ensure your design choices appeal to your target audience!

Primary Research 

Target Audience Feedback

To make sure our game appeals to the right audience, I created a form and gathered some primary research to help us make decisions within the designing process. These first two questions tell us what age range we should be aiming our game content and marketing towards. It also lets us know our target audience mostly plays video games frequently, so we need to ensure our game is fleshed out enough that players will want to come back to our game. This may be done through features such as a collectables list and challenges so players will revisit and replay our game to complete it.

Gameplay and Aesthetic research

The purpose of these next graphs were to help us understand what gameplay mechanics as well as visual styles and aesthetics within our benchmarks players prefer and found most enjoyable for gameplay. This graph tells us that for gameplay mechanics we should focus on the Resident evil, Last of us and back for blood route to make our game hit its target audience best. These games all share similar features that we can implement within our own game construction. The second graph focused on the visuals which lets us know what design path to focus our game on. Eerie apocalyptic style games seemed to be the most popular within our target audience.

Atmosphere and Colour 

To keep our game consistent and to make sure everything fits together in the same universe, we wanted to see what colours and atmosphere were deemed the most desirable and appealing to players. I provided our target audience with a few potential colour pallets to see which ones were the most eye catching for our game. The darker, rustier apocalyptic colours were the most appealing to our target audience which strengthens the general apocalyptic aesthetic for our game to take. These colours would work really well in addition to the other ideas and concepts we have gathered for our game to include strengthening the general identity of the universe we aim to create.

Gameplay mechanics

In regard to the main mechanics, functions and details our game may contain, we wanted to ensure our efforts were being directed the right way to keep our game as interesting and engaging for the player base as possible. We asked our target audience what features they like to see most within the games they already play. The large majority enjoy features that revolve around their playable character the most. These include the ability to customise their look, as well as main story and lore about the characters within the game including how the characters interact with each other to push the story further. 

Main character and their Environment

To make sure the characters first person playable options were tailored to the audience as well as possible, we group, surviving dynamic and their environment. As for the surviving dynamic, it ended on group, split with a solo survivor being the general consensus. To accommodate this, we may design our surviving party as a group but lay out the gameplay similarly to one of our benchmarks ( Resident Evil ) where the survivors work in a group, but a large majority of the gameplay function is a solo character from that team. As for their environment, we gathered that the run down, withered, apocalyptic environments were heavily preferred against the more natural jungle type ones. 

Enemies and violence

To figure out a starting point for designing the mutations and creatures the player would need to face off against throughout the duration of our game, we provided a few options for potential creatures they may face to see which ones the players seemed most interested in. The results for this came back very varied with different animals piquing interest from a lot of different people. This means we can have more creative freedom with our designs and the enemies we decide to create. We can see however that the concept of a bear, gorilla and a centipede did peak the most interest which gives us a good start point for design work. In terms of violence within our project, the majority voted for us to include as much gore and combat violence as possible. This would make our combat style within our game similar to some of our benchmarks ( Back 4 Blood + Dying light. ) This would also be appropriate for our target audience as the majority are 19-22 as provided from our previous data.

Using this data I have collected through this form, I can pass on creative influence to the rest of my group to help shape the creative choices they make throughout the duration of the project. This will tell us the preferences and dislikes of our potential client base down to the details of preference in colour palettes. This will be huge for marketing the game and generating interest. A game is more likely to succeed when it has a client base already excited for it. This also helps us tailor to age rating guidelines and keep everything consecutive  and on theme. It will ensure nothing in our game gives the wrong idea about its content or genre.