Marketing & Promo Material

Target audience

I think my main target audience would be PEGI 12+ or 12-25. Players from titles like It Takes Two, Fall Guys, Splatoon 3, Hi-fi Rush and The Sims 4 will also enjoy this game. The main attraction from this audience would be the funky nostalgic graphics, exploration and exciting battles/encounters. I think the younger target audience will be drawn to the exploration and battles, while the older audience will be drawn to the lore, music and story progression. I’ve been taking tips from the abovementioned games such as It Takes Two, Fall Guys, and Splatoon 3. For the former, the multiplayer and story progression draw in players. With the latter, Fall Guys and Splatoon 3, customisation is a key part of their appeal, and the exciting gameplay is what keeps players engaging with the gameplay.

PC offers increased customisation like modding, which I’d have to consider the way that community would work alongside base game content. Games such as Stardew Valley (SMAPI) and Balder’s Gate 3 have strong mod support with communities either hosted on a site or have a built-in mod player, which has increased ties with their PC player base. Therefore, I’d consider having a mod hoster built-in or on a site like Nexus.

Console audiences don’t have access to these mods, so I think I could try and regularly update my game with new exciting content like characters and extra levels which console players would enjoy this feature. If I have some console-exclusive characters/quests, there may be an incentive to play on a different platform and offer an exciting alternative experience to PC.

Game Cost & Justification of Price

As I mentioned in my overview, the Price would be £15.99 taking into account that the amount of content it would have would not be as much as an AAA game. However, the typical small-scale indie game can cost from £0 – £1,000+. I would want to aim around the £100-300 range at most.

Early into the game development, I’d upload a demo version on Itch.io, then when the game is finished, it would be available on Steam (Where I’d have to pay the upload fee of £79.99 fee), so I’d need to take that cost into account.

This is the break down of what I need to take into consideration:

Design (Mindmapping Sites like Miro, Figma etc. paying for membership so I can have more features?)
Programming (Paying for unity?)
Art (New brushes cost around £1-15, sculpting brushes can cost up to ~£15)
Animation (Animation rigger tools up to ~£50)
Production/Scheduling (Time is money. Realistically, I’d spend 6-8 hours a day working on a game, so in a year. 56 (hrs per week) x (52 weeks (in a year) – 18 Vacation weeks (every 3rd week is a week off)) = 1904 hours spent working on the game in a year.

To justify the price, I think 15.99 is a good price to start at because I want my game to be easy to access but I also want players to find my price point valuable to them. What can they get out of 15.99? Replay value, mods (for PC), and general enjoyment is a big concern for consumers. As stated in a Reddit post, a gamer states that their metric for games is “$1 per hour” If they paid $20 for the game and played at least 20 hours of the game, then they feel they “got their money worth”.

While a subjective take on game value, I think it’s a good basis to work on. The full game will be 15-20 hours of story, but around 40 hours for a complete playthrough with all collectables. From studying how players engage with game content and what they expect to have, I feel that the price tag is even more justified. From my research, it seems players want the price to be worth it, but also want that “WOW!” factor that keeps them coming back and engaging with the content.