Building your player profile

              I am doing a podcast with my friends about games (check out The Adventure Mechanics here) and I decided that I need to try for accountability on actually releasing a game. To that end, I'm going to go through the development process to release a game. Here is the transcript from the twenty-fifth episode on building the player profile for your game: 

 Welcome to The Adventure Mechanics and I'm Chandler. Today I want to talk about player profiles. I've seen a number of early game devs try to sell their games to other game developers. And I want to address that.

It seems to be a common thing that happens with new developers. They have their copy of a game they really like, and then they shop it to other game developers. This isn't exactly a good way to get your player base started. Sure, other developers will be able to give you feedback, and often it's very useful feedback, but there's not going to be enough developers in the world to support your game unless you're building it in a week. If you're not building for other developers, who should you be building your game for? This is where the idea of a player profile comes in.

A player profile is who you expect to be interested in your game, specifically. There's a number of different ways to make a profile, but the one I like the most is the player motivation model made by Quantic Foundry. I'll link to their model in the show notes, but the short version of it is that players are motivated by twelve factors, clumped into three main groups: The action-social, the mastery-achievement, and the immersion-creativity motivation clusters. Each cluster represents broad motivations players have, be it immediate gratification, deep interaction with mechanics or broad interaction with narratives. I'd highly recommend that you take their gamer motivation profile to see where you're at as a player and get a feel for how their model works. I'm not sponsored by them in any way, I just think that their model works well to create a player profile for your game. Let's play with this model a bit.

If you're building a real time strategy game, your target audience better be strategy focused players. You don't want to make a RTS for the cozy farming sim crowd. Or maybe you do. If you're making it for yourself, the player profile is you. Assuming you want to make a commercial game, however, you're going to need a larger audience. Similar to advertising your game only to other developers, having too small a pool of potential players will fundamentally limit the potential success of your game. On the other hand, the wider net you cast for your target audience, the harder it's going to be to actually attract them. If your game is made for everyone, it's going to have to be everything for everyone. And like in relationships, that's just not feasible. You'll exhaust yourself before getting anywhere close to achieving that goal. You need to find that sweet spot if you want to have a hope of success for your game.

So, how are you going to build your player profile? Look at comparable games, and take a look at the people that are interested in them. For the RTS example, your game is going to attract an older audience that maybe grew up on RTS's from the late '90s. Or it's going to attract people who played multiplayer online battle arenas like DOTA. Either way, you have a very specific audience in mind in this case.

With the former audience, twitch reactions and a frenetic pace aren't necessarily going to be attractors for that type of audience, at least not anymore. In all reality, many of those people are going to have a slower reaction time, more disposable income and a desire for deeper tech trees. Having a good base game with a varied tech tree and a slower game pace, but missing some mechanics that could be saved for a DLC is probably a sound strategy.

With the latter audience, you're looking at people who really thrive on the competitive aspect of RTS, yet still want strong characters and a more personal feel with the units they command. You'll want to emphasize the smaller scale strategy layer and stronger character design. More ways to customize each character in the army and really pushing the character aspect and what makes each unique would be a better approach for that audience. Not all player profiles are going to be this easy, though.

Let's say you are actually making that RTS for the cozy farming sim crowd. That's going to be a hard audience to find. At first blush, I would think this crowd wouldn't be interested in that sort of thing, as a cozy game doesn't lend itself to mechanics mastery and competing with other players, like Stardew valley or similar titles. Let's say that's your dream project and you want to fuse the cozy with the real-time strategy, though. Who are you targeting with this game? If it's the farming simulator crowd, you are looking at people who like to take things slowly and build relationships with other characters in the game. You will likely want to emphasize an overarching story and minimize the competitive aspects of typical RTS games. Knowing this, you may change the direction you want to take your game.

If you want to make a "cozy" RTS, on the other hand, you're likely looking at people who want to have a similarly slower pace, but will still want to have the challenge and push from other players, either real or AI, to keep it from a managerial sim. In this case, you may be looking at games like Majesty or Offworld Trading Company and their audiences. The challenge is still there, but it's changed to either be more espionage, in the case of Offworld Trading Company, or character driven, as in Majesty. Or it could be something akin to Factorio, where automation is the key. Each of these games garners a different audience and knowing what they are and are not interested in will be key to your game's success.

If you have a comparable game, look through their forum posts, discord channels or whatever other thing the community has formed around and see what they are like. Instead of looking for what they like and dislike about the game, look at who the people are. Build your player profile from an aggregation of the community. That's now who you're building your game for. That means every decision you make in your game will have something to test against. The joy of manual labor in a farming sim isn't going to really appeal to an automation player, whereas having a list of recipes they can use to get to their goal definitely will. As you build and market your game, you will then have a much better idea of who you need to reach out to and get interested in your game. And that means you'll be one step closer to actually reaching the audience your game needs to succeed.

I'll stop here, but this is just a start to the player profile topic. It's a much deeper topic, one you could build an entire career around if you're interested enough. As always, if you have any questions or comments, leave them below or find me on various social media as jcsirron. I'm still Chandler and this is the end of this Adventure Mechanics Side Quest. I'll talk to you next time.