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As part of our market research, we created a SurveyMonkey page which we then used to collect information about the potential player’s opinion of Badger Commando. While composing the survey, we made the decision to include a wide variety of questions in order to make sure that no aspect of our project went unnoticed by the candidate – this way, we could correct any weak point or errors in the engine, fiction, or social media early on, rather than in later stages in development. The survey consisted of 10 questions; 9 which were multiple choice and 1 being a written answer (we added this so that we could get some more direct and specific feedback, which may have gone unnoticed if we had done otherwise) and ranged from more general topics to game-specific ones, such as “does the title appeal to you?” Here are the results from the question ‘How many hours do you spend playing video games?’ As you can see, most of our audience played games on average for about 1-6 hours - this shows us that the audience we selected were primarily casual gamers. From these results we decided that making a action packed game that could be saved at regular intervals with separate missions would be best suited for our audience of casual gamers.
RPG and MMO were clearly the favorites among the options presented in this question, meaning that we were forced to consider these genres for our product. Though we wanted to create something new and original, after much debate we made the decision to make a 2D – 3D side scrolling platformer (This was because it was the best received genre on indiegogo and kickstarter) As a result, the prospect of Badger Commando came into view, as we looked through the other results we saw that as a plausible choice.
When it came to deciding on a platform, we noticed a trend in the results, pointing in the direction of both consoles and home PC. We decided that it would be best to create a game on PC as we were just starting out, however we could look at porting it to consoles at a later date. The Oculus Rift was even an option at one point, but we realized that it would be difficult and generally unsuited to the genre of a side scroller.
We decided to ask our audience what would be the highest they are willing to pay for a indie game and as you see the most popular was choice was around £2 -£3, however, we decided to make our game free so we can raise awareness of our existence. Any other games we make in the future we could consider charging for, however, we thought it was wise to make this game just to get Zealot Games out there.
From these results you can see that most of our audience wanted realistic graphics within the game, there wasn’t really any deviation with what people wanted the art style to look like. We made the decision to use cartoony graphics after our client presented us with alternate research, we found that realistic graphics was the favourite however, Deepak discovered that cartoony graphics worked better with our style of gameplay and that in the current situation of game choice-making, people had apparently been enjoying and buying cartoony side scrolling games.
Conclusion/How This Changed Our Game Through our research, we discovered that our target audience preferred games with a realistic visual style and that their favourite genres were a mix of RPG’s and MMO’s. From this, we took some inspiration by having weapons and collectibles within the game similar to that of these genres – we also had the idea for the character to be able to level up, gaining further strength and abilities. We also used the research for the pricing of our game, making it a free to play first-time release for PC and other desktop devices, we thought this was the best course of action as we have never developed a game to this magnitude before and we didn’t really know how it would end up. However, we could in the future think of creating a improved version of the game or develop a completely new idea and sell that for a reasonable price concluded from our research that being about £2 - £3. We found that our audience didn’t spend quite as much time on games as we did, meaning that we had to reconsider the length of the game’s levels and the overall difficulty for non-gamers. We decided that having a short, action packed series of levels (with regular save points) and a gradual scaling difficulty increasing over progression. We kept it short in order to keep the player’s attention over those shorter periods, however we kept aspect of addiction and action well within the player’s grasp, regardless of ability, increasing its overall appeal for potential players.
Evaluation We decided to create an online questionnaire to make it readily available for both people otherwise located and general distribution, which ended up being a good choice, as we received over 30 varied responses, covering various fields, genders and attitudes. We found this effective and helpful to start with, while carrying out extensive research for ourselves we found many useful and intriguing views on what an audience want from a game in the modern day. As we began looking into it further, we uncovered that these trends were becoming an ever-growing partition of the indie market, and we decided to target this with Badger Commando. However, our client was also collecting research of his own. We compared a collection of our results and discussed them as a conglomerate, eventually concluding that we were going to target a smaller, more niche market. Personally we felt that our own research was best suited to the audience that we were going for, but we went along with the client as he was in charge.
