Vitaly Romanov, CEO of Nevosoft, has formulated six rules that must be followed when creating a concept if you want to interest a publisher in your project or just develop a successful mobile game.
Any game starts with an idea, with the sacramental phrase “let’s do it.” This is usually followed by a burning description of the project and a frantic search for a publisher who would give a budget for this idea. As a rule, most of these stories end sadly. The publisher shrugs his shoulders, says that he is not interested and goes about his business. The developers shake their fists in response and shout something offensive to the publisher.
In general, it turns out that the publisher remains without a team of enthusiasts, and the developers are at a broken trough. Moreover, what is especially offensive, their mutual misunderstanding at the level of the idea of the game could be easily resolved. It was enough for the developers to be a little more critical of their idea, to be able to present it seriously.
“Serious” does not mean a description of mechanics in the smallest details, interrupted by exclamations, “three-dimensional graphics with particles” or “real Newtonian physics” or something similar. Not at all, at least not for the publisher, whose task, first of all, is to sell the game, and not to abstract Vasya Pupkin, but to a specific audience. Therefore, any idea, any concept should start with the audience, with those to whom the game will be intended.
This is what Vitaly started from, formulating the rules.
Rule one
Even at the idea level, choose the target audience of the project. However, there may be difficulties.
On the one hand, the audience should not be too general (there are no games for everyone). On the other hand, it should be wide enough – niche products often cannot even pay for their development, therefore they are of little interest.
As an approximate description of the target audience, you can cite a product already existing on the market. But here it should be remembered that in the future you will still need to explore the selected audience.
Rule two
Love and understand your audience.When the boom of social games began, many developers of “hardcore” projects came to the new market only to earn money.
They despised their audience, they did not share their needs. Despite the fact that they managed to hit their jackpot on the general wave, a year later it turned out that their projects were not able to compete with either Western analogues or domestic games, whose developers approached the matter with love.
So, if the audience is initially disgusting or incomprehensible to you, do not undertake to develop a game for it.
Rule three
When forming the concept, think about the distribution model of the game and how you will monetize it.With the death of gaming retail, which we are seeing at the moment, and the actualization of micropayments, the developer bears part of the responsibility for how the project earns.
Now, from the very beginning, he is obliged to think about what the player will pay for in the game, what he will want to pay for. If the developer has no idea about this, the game should not even start.
Rule Four
Don’t make clones of popular games. Before developing, always conduct market research for the presence of similar games in mechanics.
If there are a lot of competitive products, and the game being conceived is no different from them, then you should hardly take up development.
If you decide to make such a game anyway, then it should be an order of magnitude better. Only the project that compares favorably with others can hit the jackpot on someone else’s popularity. And to everyone – the best graphics, the best controls, music, history, attention to detail.
Rule five
Formulate the main “chips” (distinctive features) of your game.When positioning the project, they will need to be promoted, it will be necessary to focus the attention of the target audience on them.
And here again the audience comes out on top.
The “hero drinks the blood of his enemies” feature will clearly be out of place if your audience is housewives. But “a handsome man plants carrots, thereby increasing the growth of rabbits” is quite another matter.
Rule Six
Play games for your audience.This is the key to understanding what she needs.
However, there is one small, but very important point: you should be interested in playing, you should at least impersonate yourself a little with the target audience. If this does not happen, it is better not to start working on the project: the key to the heart of a player you do not understand is not to pick up by chance.