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This week, we start off by answering two questions from the player perspective. They are:
What do you look for when choosing a game to buy or play? I tend to look for enjoyment factor, and I measure this by looking at what the game offers in terms of my interests. Horror, Action, Adventure, Sci-fi. Any of these genres will grab my attention and make me look into the game before purchasing it. I am not to bothered by graphics and length of a game as I find those to be very subjective. I tend to focus more on the fun factor. I am more willing to buy a game that only last 3-4 hours but is entertaining all the way through as opposed to a game that is 8-12 hours in length and has slow paced filler sections and wonky thrown in additional mechanics to warrant it's price.
What keeps you engaged with your favourite games over a long period? Replayability, epic moments that make me go wow! Online features that I can play with my friends. For example, Hunt Showdown is one of my all-time favourite games (600 hours) and my friends and I will play it daily almost. It has an energy about it and some really cool gameplay mechanics like, different ammo types for additional damage, events each quarter which keeps the player base alive, 3vs3vs3vs game modes, trials so you can practice your skills, and a boss hunt mode where you and your team all posse up and take down the boss, grab the bounty and fight other players and try to escape. You can then upgrade your player to make them better in combat and it also has a prestige function which lets you tell other people you are a badass and they should stay away. I do like story games or games with a strong narrative like Heavy Rain, but the problem with those is once you have seen the twist ending, it loses all of its magic and intrigue.
Further to this weeks discussion on the questions above, I also watched two videos in which Iain Lobb discusses factors that increase market appeal, along with design factors that influence a games success. To that end, I carried on and watched all of the videos this week to further broaden my knowledge and experience within this topic. I have broken down my thoughts and responses to each below in regards to the game hooks and pre and post play hooks, along with kickers and a breakdown on why I felt that certain design choices were bad ideas.
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Game Hooks:
A hook is a concept or mechanic that makes your game stand out from the crowd. Like shooting in slow motion from Max Payne, moving to the beat of the music in BPM: Bullets per minute where you have to time your shots as well to the music. These are things that stand out in people's minds and make them remember your game. A hook is comprised of two components. Desirable and Surprising. Some examples of this would be, if you wanted to start a restaurant and decided to make it have a secret entrance that only people are allowed in if you had the password. It's desirable because people want to be in the know and feel special, and its surprising because you don't see it very often and that makes it memorable.
POST PLAY & PRE PLAY HOOKS:
Post Play Hooks are something that happens after people play your game. It's something that makes a long lasting impression on you that makes you want to talk about it. Post play Hooks are not as valuable to you as pre play because they can't really be measured until the game is out. In some instances you can but it is a lot harder to do.
Pre Play Hooks are something that happens before the game launches. YouTube trailers, artwork, testable demo's and these are very valuable to you and can help reduce risk. This is because you know before the game releases if it's going to be successful or not. You can compare these statistics to your competitor, from here, you can then decide to cancel the game or scale it back if it's not looking so good. You can even use your data to show a publisher and show that fans are really interested in your game.
How to use a Hook:
Genre viability plays a huge part of the success you can attain by simply knowing your market. For example, a hook in the adventure market where there is a smaller chance of you succeeding because you will have more competitors that you have to out-hook so to speak. Not all games need hooks to succeed but having a hook in a smaller market will raise your chances of success.
Lightening can strike and a decent idea can strike you. This is rare and can lead to not making any money. A mashup of genres can help with your hook implementation. A great way of doing this is by taking a existing genre and looking at the weaknesses within that genre and look to fix it with other genres. Looking at Crypt of the Necromancer is a great example of this. A roguelike dungeon explorer where you move to the beat of the music. Again, looking back at what we spoke about above, this is both desirable because rogue like games are desirable, and it is also surprising because it flips the formula on its head and people need to experience it.
The final method is genre shifting. This is where you take a genre like a shooter and add a specific control method for it like Max Payne and it's time control method.
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Marketing with Zero Budget: I am really interested in this topic because I feel like most of us will be in the position where we will have $0 to spend on marketing. I have looked into Instagram and Facebook marketing to see if that would be a viable method. Now that I have read and understood about hooks, I feel I am better equipped to create a better advert to better hook in potential customers. The cost on Facebook and Instagram advertising starts from $5 so for me that is next to nothing, and I feel compared to other companies this is essentially zero. In the 2018 GDC video, Mike Rose discusses how he spent around $1000 on marketing using mail chimp that emails out to email addresses focused on your area of interest such as gamers. However, the main focus of the speech was centred around the areas where it cost zero money. Discord turned out to be the best form of marketing for the game where they would hook people in with things to do (objectives) and where people also got to beta test the game. They used Discord to generate hype and as a thank you they released the game 20 minutes early as a thank you to all of the community for the love and support. The issue with this was that the 10% discount didn't kick in until it's official launch, but to Mike's amazement, people didn't care and they sold over 1000 copies in 20 minutes because people wanted it now.
The game also featured a hook, which was down hill mountain biking which was also freeride (the hook) and was all set in a procedurally generated world (the kicker). Coupling these two things together this provided a net revenue of $250000 early on. This is a good case study for why the methods we are discussing this module work. The bottom line and step 5 of 6 in Mike's video explains that you should really be knocking on people's doors and asking what you can do together. Get on Nintendo, get on Xbox, stream your game. Get a developer account on Mixer that Microsoft offers. I had no idea this existed and I will now be proactively be streaming on Mixer once my account is up and running. All of these methods you can use to help advertise you, your brand and your game. Talk to other people and find out what makes your game interesting.
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Design & Marketing Mistakes: In the final video for this weeks module, I watched Hugh Monahan discuss what went wrong with his design and marketing on his first game Brigador. Hugh gets right into the context of what went wrong and listed these points as the main reasons behind the failure of Brigador, or at least the first iteration of the game.
Of the 4 developers only one of them (Hugh's brother) had worked on a commercial game as a contractor and the rest were all new to working on a game of this scale. Between 2011 and 2016, there were only 4 on and off again full time developers, so work on the game was always patchy and there were areas where the game wasn't being worked on. This created a shift in the landscape of gaming and what was working at the time.
The team used their own money and they funded the game themselves as they were completely unknown and no one would invest in them. The engine was built from scratch because at the time, Unity and Unreal Engine had fees in place where you would have to pay to use their engine if you were using it in a professional capacity. This is vastly different from nowadays.
Design choices were also not favourable with their game being described as a "tank western" which doesn't do it any favours. The developer himself even went on to say that the game took inspirations from games that were already 20-25 years old. Because of this, not many people could relate to the game and ultimately scored badly for being confusing and also having awkward controls. Hugh mentions that "had I taken more notice of this earlier on in the development cycle, I could have done more to address those issues and end up with a much better game financially". When the development team started out they had a series of goals they wanted to achieve. 1) To create a game with a high skill ceiling 2) Create enough money to do it again 3) Keep the team together 4) Establish themselves as a high quality developer. Out of the 4 goals, they only achieved 1, which was the first goal. The rest of the goals failed because they were too reliant on goal 2. Unfortunately keeping a team together requires money and as they didn't make any money they had to separate and look for work, which goes hand in hand in being able to do it again. In regards to establishing themselves as a high quality developer, Hugh mentions that he feels this is a hard question to answer after developing just 1 game and gets easier the more games you develop.
All of these aspects brings me to believe that the goals that they had set for themselves were not SMART goals and should have been more focused around the development of their game and market. As their first trailer showed, the game had a different name "Matador" which needed to be changed due to the issues with impressions and clicks and people thinking it was something else. Their second trailer which contained the name change, also showed the game as something else entirely. A fast paced action shooter set in an apocalyptic world, again, this didn't show the true nature of the game and was very misleading.
In summery of the talk, it looks like the developers didn't know their market and didn't know the genre of the game they were making. They had no hook and no kicker to make the game viable after launch. They did not pre play testing either which after listening to the other GDC talks, is a great way of looking into what is going to work for you prior to launch. As Hugh mentions at the end of the talk, "All that matters is that players buy, and enjoy your game. Sales determine longevity."
Image Source - Falmouth Online University - Canvas Challenge Activity - Game Design Outline: This weeks challenge sees us writing out our game design outline. A game design outline is a proof of concept you plan to create. I have taken the template provided by the team and answered all of the questions changing my writing language on stuff I have already implemented vs what I have yet to create.
I believe I have a good idea on my hands as I have taken a few genres and mixed them together creating a good hook and kicker which players will enjoy playing and also talk about after the experience.
Image Source - Falmouth Online University Canvas Reflection: I have found this week a lot more reassuring in terms of wanting to be a game developer. Weather that turns out working for a company or on my own. This week has given me a lot more insight on the types of games I should look at making if I want to earn money and be self sufficient. Compared to last week's talks which were depressing and hard to listen to, this week has been fun also. I started prototyping early last week with some shader creation and design choices. I thought a lot about the genres I wanted to explore and mix together and I am glad that this topic was discussed this week in the videos as it shows I am on the right track on essentially "reducing my risk" in failing on the goals I am setting for myself via the business plan. I believe I also have a couple of good hooks that when shown at our latest conference, was well received. This means my pre play hooks are good and that people are responding well, with one student even saying "I'd buy that!" The work has been ok so far and I have started looking into my business plan research and market research to help with the creation of the game and the business plan. This is all detailed in a separate blog post to keep University reflection and normal development logs separate from the assignments. My favourite part this week was watching the video regarding marketing with a zero budget as that I believe is more likely the case for a lot of us in this course if we go down the self publishing route.
References Used: https://youtu.be/qUsuusNLxik https://youtu.be/gyDOrNbvFN8 https://youtu.be/DTvBgmNL-p0 https://youtu.be/l3QnovWYvwo https://youtu.be/NOb-PdYwkwk https://youtu.be/F-8N0DuHwJo https://youtu.be/Gn6QWyRnNNA
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