Making a game without the game

     Everyone knows and appreciates the hard work that goes into delivering a functioning and fun game. You can realize after trying a few games out that some are better designed than others and it has that special something. That special spark that makes it so much more enjoyable than its counterparts. These are fantastic traits to have but they are not the only factors that make a game great. Consider the parts of the game that aren't the development or the artwork.

    Consider the audience the game is marketed towards and consider the niche it fills in the current environment.

    To the first question, consider the audience, this asks to whom is the game supposed to attract? What type of people do the designers imagine playing this game? It is overambitious not to mention unreasonable to expect that your game appeals to absolutely everyone. Peoples' tastes and desires range so differently from each other that one game that fits everyone probably just fits nobody instead. The first step is to narrow the age group. Is this game supposed to be for kids? Is it an R rated shooter with tons of blood and gore? Perhaps it is a trivia board game that would be tough for kids to grasp. In any case, clearly defining your age group is a step in the right direction when considering the theme and objective of a good game. A second step hearkens back to my previous post of competitiveness, is the game designed for a casual crowd or do you want a dedicated fan base that loves to pour many hours of their lives mastering its intricacies? There are no wrong answers here, the only failure is refusing to answer the question. Many games have been lost in development when they could not answer the question of their target audience.

    Towards finding a niche, we must first know what a niche is. A niche is any category of players connected by a common interest. A useful niche in this context is a common interest that is not covered by the current market of games. This doesn't mean that only completely original games are allowed a niche and it doesn't mean that a game is sharing the same niche if it has a lot of similar qualities to something else. A standard template for describing a game is that it is like game X but with a twist of game Y. This makes the game immediately relatable to anyone who has played X or Y before. They get the general idea and are probably more interested in learning more about it. It accomplishes two tasks, first to attract people from a similar niche, and second, start to create a new niche for the upcoming game.

 

    Another way to think of this process is to describe a growing tree. Every niche is a branch that already exists on the great tree of games. When a new niche is created, a new branch grows from the similar branches around it. As more and more niches are created, more branches are created until there is an extremely specific branch for any type of player. An example hierarchy might be the niche of puzzle games. Puzzles are a very thick, well known branch and similar to it is puzzle based board games like the classic Clue. A niche from this branch could lean into the hidden information aspect of the puzzle and lead into games like Werewolf or Secret Hitler which also lean into the more social aspect of puzzles. Further down this branch could be a more cooperative experience that relies on visual puzzles and teamwork such as a game like Mysterium. This game has a "ghost" player that has visions of the person, place, or thing that led to their death. Other player must match the clue cards to the specific objects in order to win the game. 

    Using our formula of a game like X but with Y twist, you could say this game is like Clue but with a twist of social dialogue like Werewolf.

    Creating games require a ton of work to function correctly and be fun to play on top of that. The design of the game and how it looks are humongous parts of a game and it absolutely can not function without those elements. It's also important to remember that those parts are not the only factors of making a successful game. Marketing and audience can be important as well and can even make or break a game when it comes to mainstream success. At the end of the day, every single element must come together to make a product that performs as intended by its team of developers.