Understanding The Target Player Base Of Your Game | Game Development Tips

Player Base i.e the Audience of your game is one of the most important factor that you have to consider as a Game Developer.

Understanding your player base can give you a lot of insights that will help you in making your game a commercial success.

So in this article, i have listed some questions and reasons for asking these question

that will help you in understanding your Player Base, before you start developing your game with everything you have got.

So, let’s dive directly into it.

This Post is Part of the – Game Development Tips Series, in which i give tips and tricks that will increase your productivity and make your life easier as a game developer whether you are making a 2D Game or A 3D Game.

If you are interested in Game Development Tips then you might be interested in this article on 3 Points To Consider Before Committing To A Game Idea

where i talk about various points that you should think about before starting your game development process

so that after all the hard work that you do on your game,

you can push out a Game that can be Commercially Successful and something that your Player Base will have fun with.

What does my player base expect from a game of my genre?

Players expect certain Game Mechanics and Design Style from particular Genre of Games

and if you veer off too much from those expectation they might not be well received.

This does not mean that you should not add your twists and sprinkles to your game

Instead just try to balance the expectations of stuff they know and expect from the Genre that your game is part of

and new things that you want to do in your games that will blow their minds off.

Is the character design in line with player expectations? If not, then is there a reason that i designed them like this?

When you Design Characters, it is necessary that they fit the Genre of your Game and the Player Expectations regarding that Game Genre

as even if you have the same Game Mechanics,

if you put the Dark Souls Characters in the Harvest Moon Games or vice versa

it will just look wrong.

This does not mean that you can’t try weird combinations of Game Genre and Character Design

what i mean is, be mindful of what you are doing and make these weird combinations because it’s your mindful design choice

and not because your characters just happened to look like that.

This New Game Mechanic seems extremely complex and intricate but will my player base have fun playing with it?

Sometimes when you are in the zone, you start developing really intricate Game Mechanics that are awesome from your perspective

but what your forget is, most of your players are not going to take a huge amount of time to understand these mechanics

as they are playing games to have fun not to learn stuff.

Be extremely mindful when creating Complex Game Mechanics

and if you do make them, then be sure to minimize the time and effort it takes for your player to understand and use them.

Another way of doing this might be to keep the Core Game Mechanics Simple

while Making More Complex Support Mechanics that only those who are willing to put in time and effort can learn and brag about.

This will make sure that everyone can enjoy your base game from start to finish.

Just make sure that the Support Mechanics are not necessary to complete the game.

Where is my player base Located? Is it mostly in English Speaking Countries? If not then should i consider localizing the game content?

Another point to consider is the location of your player base.

When you are developing your games, you will either you will know where you players are from or you will have a market that you are targeting.

Based on either of these you will make a decision of whether localizing your game content makes sense for your particular game.

For example, let’s say you are a German Game Developer and you don’t know where your players are from

Now let’s say that you want to make a game specifically for the German Market

where a huge amount of your player base speaks German as their first language.

In this scenario you might want to localize your content to German so that you can capture a larger part of that market share

and have an edge over you competitors who have not localized their content yet.

What is the age of my player base? Is it kids, teenagers or adults? Or is it a Family Game?

Now, the Age of your Players plays an important role over basically everything in your game.

All your decisions regarding your Game Mechanics, Character Design, etc will be highly influenced by whether you are targeting kids, teenagers or adults.

If you are targeting kids for your game, you should not add really complex mechanics to your games are they won’t be able to understand them.

Nor do you want to add complex story lines and dialogues that an average kid won’t be able to follow.

You character designs will also be a less edgy and controversial when designing for kids, teenagers or if it’s a Family Game.

While it would be completely opposite when making games for adults as they would be more interested in complex plots and mechanics which would challenge them.

So, pay attention to what sort of game you are making and make appropriate design decisions.

Are you collecting Personally Identifiable Information From Your Audience?

Another point to consider will be that, if you are collecting and storing Personally Identifiable Information from your player base,

like IP Address, E-mail Address, Names, etc

you have to make sure that you follow all the Data Protection Laws Worldwide like

• GDPR ( General Data Protection Regulation )
• CCPA ( California Consumer Privacy Act )
• VCDPA ( Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act )
• and others.

Be extremely mindful of these laws as they have become more and more strict in the recent years.

Is any of the content that i made politically controversial to my player base?

If you answer yes to this question then remove that particular content from your game immediately.

It takes a insane amount of time to design and develop a game

and i really don’t want the blood and sweat that you put into your game to come to nothing

because of one controversial image in your game.

So, please, For the love of god! Don’t add anything controversial to your games!

Conclusion

Well folks, that does it for this article.

i hope that this information will be helpful to you.

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