Unit 72 - Computer Game Design: LO2

My Game Ideas:

Final Idea - My Game Idea is set around a Middle Age kingdom with a strong Ye Olde England aesthetic design. The game concept sketches will cover designing characters such as Knights and noblemen. I will also produce sketches of the buildings, with a strong adherence to the architectural design of the buildings during era's such as the third crusade in England.

Narrative Concept - The game is set during the middles ages in England where rebellious lords are hoping to take the crown for themselves. Upon taking the crown, they plan to use the crowns resources to take over all of the known world, and establish a central world government with them as the leaders of this new world order. It starts out with a group of 4 of England's most powerful lords gathering together to create a plan to take the crown. They hope to pool their resources into one large army of which they hope will be able to defeat the royal army and take the crown for themselves. Upon amassing large amounts of supplies and armament's, the rebellious lords summon their Vassals, and begin their march on London. Upon hearing of their treachery, the king calls all his Vassals near London who amass to combat the approaching army. Since they are not enough, the king sends out messengers to signal the rest of the royal vassals further up the country, but they are intercepted and killed by the rebellious lords. Without help and a small army, the king braces for the coming fight. After many weeks, the rebel army finally reach London, having killed any opposition and recruiting further fighters which has led to the rebel host becoming 20,000 men strong. Having only 8000 men, the king sends his men to battle anyway in order to try and take back his country.

Target Audience/Market Research and Target Platform:

I aim to have a target audience of males aged 18 to 35. This is for numerous reasons. Firstly I aim to have a more mature mindset to my games content so content such as heavy violence, strong language and usage of drugs, so anyone younger than 18 would be unable to witness this, via the ratings systems. I also want to cater my game to this age rating, because I feel that games such as mine would appeal to men aged around that age range. I think that this is the case because men stereo-typically into violence and more mature content and I feel this would be the case even now. In order to cater to this audience, I will arrange my game content to adhere to their preferences.

My target platform for my game will be PC. This is because PC is a broad enough platform to appeal to gamers of many tastes and preferences. This would appeal to many people and would give me a large audience that can access my game. Also, the majority of people these days have a computer of some sort, whether it's a OEM Dell or a custom PC with 4 GTX 1080's in SLI. Most people have access to a PC of some-sort which gives my game as much exposure as possible. I will also make my game to a level that it can work on budget systems so I will provide multiple graphics options for my game.

For my market research, I decided to look into a game that is similar to mine in setting, called For Honour. I felt that this game would attract a similar audience to mine so I felt this was the best option to research. Upon looking into the combat systems for my chosen research target, I saw that it had heavy violence so I felt that my game should feature that since I am aiming for a similar target audience. I also noticed that people liked using the knight classes, which gave me the idea to base my game around the middle ages in England.

I also used Google trends to find out where For Honor is being searched the most. I found out that North America is where For Honor seems most popular. Due to this, I would focus the majority of my games marketing on persuading the US to play my game. I would achieve this by running online adverts on american gaming websites.