Evaluation Question 3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

All pictures can be found below the presentation

For this task I had to analyse the feedback I got when developing my game and then the end result along with my magazine and box art. I did this by conducting several audience feedback tasks throughout the development process and then 2 at the end. I tried to use different forms of audience feedback throughout starting with a play session of my game after all of my core gameplay mechanics where added and then moving onto quizzes on survey monkey.

Before we even started developing the game we conducted some research into what age rating and features people liked in this type of game, we used survey monkey to conduct a quiz and spread it among our peers for audience feedback. We got quite a lot of feedback to base our information on.

As you can see we conducted this test around 6/30/2014 before development, to get a better idea of the kind of audience we were trying to reach. We started with age because this would determine how mature our content had to be and to make sure we aimed it at the correct audience.

From this we determined that our target audience would be age 12-18 which we suspected. We finally decided that a age 15 rating would be suitable because it allowed us to also cater for the higher ages players without running into any legal problems.

After we determined our age range and that we would have a majority mail audience we moved on to other tests such as what was the most popular style of game and then incorporated it into our game. We added adventure aspects and combat into our game to better suit our target audience

After my research into what type of game we should build we then conducted research on the actual game to get some feedback from our audience. My initial feedback was from a small play session of my game, this was in the early stages and I have no documentation of it. After the testing we were told that our game doesn’t cater for the newer player, we had let our personal gaming experience influence the way we developed our game which was something we had to change. We started by adding several new features around the game and because this is the first level we used it as sort of a tutorial section rather than a full blown level. We started with adding billboards around the map above levers and such to let the player know it is important.

These are two examples of what we used to display our tips, this computer Is found in the opening room and to make the tips not so intrusive we included it on a computer screen which once clicked displays the right message. We did this because we wanted to cater to players who were not new to, not just design our game for one specific kind of gamer.

As well as this feedback we also contacted another survey monkey after our game had been complete, this was to see if we targeted our audience correctly. We asked several questions on this survey monkey which were all directly at people who had previously played the game. We started by asking what age bracket our players fell into to see if we had correctly identified our audience in out pre-research.

We attempted to swing the age bracket to the higher avenge player in the 13-18 bracket which we succeeded to do and we even entered the 18-24 bracket. We had successful hit our target audience and even enhanced it which would allow us to carry on the same design with our next game

We then asked our audience what was the most appealing aspect of our game and we got a even review on all aspects, this tells us that our game did not have any obvious features which let it down and that

Overall from our feedback we determined that we were successful in meeting our target audience and that is was enjoyable to play. To finalise this we asked one more question.

After the game feedback we moved on to our magazine / box art feedback. Considering this was our first game we had to make sure it was appealing, an interesting feed and successfully targeted our audience. Below is my box art:

We then asked our audience what was the most appealing aspect of our game and we got a even review on all aspects, this tells us that our game did not have any obvious features which let it down and that

We then conducted the same test as above but for specific game features, and again we detected a nice mix of reviews which told us we did a successful job at appealing to our target audience. Popups which were mostly for the tutorial had the lowest review which is what we expected since they only catered to the newer player.

To gather feedback about my box art rather than preforming a public survey I asked several of my class mates to rate the cover and then tell me what they liked / disliked about it. I got a total of 8 different responses and managed to alter my case accordingly. The feedback can be down below

After my feedback I was told that my case was way to clustered, I had several ratings on the front of the case along with some other text scattered around. I considerably dialled back the case and went with a simplistic look rather then trying to put to much information on. The front just shows a boss and our title which indicates several things such as combat and good vs evil and my back shows game features and a short blurb which tells the user what the game is about, I was told this was a much more beneficial design to my audience as I was targeting young gamers so they might be reluctant to read it all and it would deter some users.

After this I conducted feedback on my magazine article, I decided not to conduct research on my magazine cover because PC gamer is such a big magazine the front cover will not make much of a difference because of it being a subscription magazine, I tried however to go for a same design as my case been simplistic, here is the front cover:

My double page magazine article was mainly aimed at people who already knew about the game from passing but didn’t have any major information, I was sold that my magazine article features all the correct information which was needed but my design was rather crude and I should go for a more user friendly design which was a lot more pleasant to look at rather than jam packed full of information.

To gather feedback about my box art rather than preforming a public survey I asked several of my class mates to rate the cover and then tell me what they liked / disliked about it. I got a total of 8 different responses and managed to alter my case accordingly. The feedback can be down below

This is my final magazine cover, i was told that the information was relevant and an interesting reach but the design was not appealing on just a black background so I decided to add a space feel because of the game being SCI-FI and I was told that this brightened the article up and made it much more pleasant to look at.