Final Product
Target Audience
My target audience for my game is someone between the ages of 14-20 and is more likely to be played by people who are gender neutral or masculine as the playable character doesn't have many gendered traits and therefore may not appeal to feminine people. People who enjoy indie platformers with a theme of exploration are most likely going to enjoy this game but it will also appeal to those people who play games on easy mode or are just looking for a calm game where they don't need to worry about dying.
These people will most likely see or consume information via social media such as TikTok, Instagram and Youtube. They're hobbies will most likely be platformer titles such as Hollow Knight, Super Meat boy and Celeste but they may enjoy sandbox games such as Minecraft as they will get to explore my map on their own terms rather than a linear path.
Promotion
As stated before, my target Audience is someone around th ages of 14 - 20 as they would be the most likely to enjoy the soft colours and art style of the character and buildings whilst also appreciating the time and effort it takes to make a game. Therefore, I needed to find a way to reach this demographic. This means that most of promotion needed to be online rather than other methods for example: posters, leaflets and business cards. I needed to think more so in the direction of social media. Thus I created new accounts specifically to promote my game titled "Echo's Journey" for Instagram, TikTok and Twitter called "heyo_its_echo224". I picked these social medias specifically as they are the most likely to reach this demographic according to the statistics recorded as shown underneath.
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I want to make sure I record my analytics for each of the platforms to see which was most effective in getting the word out as these are actually my first public platforms. I've posted to social media before, however I have always kept these accounts private so I want to see how effective public accounts are for promotion. To start this off, I'm starting with Instagram as it is the platform I have the most familiarity with content creation. To start off, I posted the custom profile picture I created for promotion, then the poster-like image and then a basic shot of the Unity Project. Interestingly, the poster did the worst with a mere 3 likes followed by the Unity Project with 9 likes. Which means the first image I posted had the most interaction with 14 likes. Interestingly, Instagram only shows you interactions with your community instead of showing viewership like most other platforms, which we'll see later on. I tried to optimise people's chances of seeing it via adding hashtags to my posts so that if someone follows one or more of these hashtags then the post will be shown on their feed.
TikTok
The next social media platform I used to promote my game was TikTok. As you can probably see, TikTok reached a lot more people that we know of. With the minimum viewership of my profile being two hundred and thirty eight who also saw the other videos. However, if we assume these are all unique views then it is well over 500 viewers but the former is more likely. I posted six posts all together with three of them being duplicates as Tik Tok is no where near optified for Desktop / Mac in which you can't add sounds to your videos which is the biggest promotion tool Tik Tok gives you, so I decided I would repost the videos with the sounds Tik Tok suggested to use. I also use hashtags on these posts as well however, instead of using topics that are like my game e.g. platformer, you would instead use hashtags like: ForYouPage. This is so that it ends up on someone's main feed despite whether they follow the hashtags or not. Now the most interesting piece of statistics for Tik Tok is that the usual viewership is much greater than the amount of interactions with the post for example the video with 238 views only has one like. This is probably because it's a silent video with a long duration in an algorithm which supports short videos. ​
For my next social media, I have Twitter, a social media I have never used before. This was an odd one but twitter is a social media that I have zero clue as to what format goes well, whether hashtags or images are supported more by the platforms algorithm. Thus I posted 1 video and two photos, one with hashtags and one without but both with a link to my game. weirdly it was the video that had the most views with 31 people seeing it where as the image posts didn't do as terribly as I had thought. with over 40 people seeing each post. However, I still believe the video did the best with people stayed around to see where the game was hosted.
Promotion - Itch.io
Technically, Itch.io is not a promotion site as it is what I had hosted my game on. On the contrary to this, Itch.io has an analytics tab which allows me to see how many people have viewed the game, how many have played it and where they have come from in terms of links with the list being above. With a roughly 50/50 split on who viewed the site and who played the game, I quite happy as that ratio is an incredible feet for someone's first experience making a game. I think the most interesting factor to these analytics is where they came from with twitter being the most at 10 people who reached my game. On Instagram only 1 person actively sort out the game and 2 seeing it on the home page of Itch.io. But the strange analytic I wanted to see was how many people searched for the game. Six searched via Itch.io but 8 people searched it on Bing, which means they saw my promotion and then actively looked for it.
The feedback I got mainly came from Itch.io however some came from real life when I asked for feedback and they were all very similar with the Itch.io feedback covering the majority of it. The pros of my game given by "BoiFat" was so incredible as to description as they show their experience with the journey being a magical one. It makes me incredibly happy to read this as it means people actually liked my game and felt something whilst playing, I'm glad that the feeling of uncertainty expressed via the changing backgrounds was felt and that they enjoyed the floaty jumps. The negatives are things that were shared seem to be common amongst online and offline players. The biggest complaint is that it was confusing to navigate as the camera was so zoomed in and there being numerous paths. I completely agree with this point as it is confusing unless you already know the layout and a good game shouldn't force you to memorise the map in order to play it. So next time I decide to program and create a game I will make sure that you see less of the character and more of the environment. I will also make the map more linear so that I understand the basics of what makes a good platformer before experimenting with a complicating, explore driven map so that I can add variables to help the player along the right path. The next critique was that the textures got repetitive quickly. I think this is because in other platformers textures change depending on the players progress instead of the textures being static all the way through. Next time I want to create multiple textures for platforms and environments so that the player has a sense of progress which could also help with the confusing map as well. For example Hollowknight splits its map into different sections with their own textures and enemies. The other big critique is "Is this the end?". As my ending was a very basic walk into the light instead of something congratulating the player, people got confused on whether they made it or whether they were softlocked (stuck). This is very clear that next time I need to not only congratulate the player at the finnish line but I should also give the player a reward e.g. a bonus level, movement upgrade or trophy.
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"mischiefbirdie" was another commenter who I just wanted to include as I found it interesting that they enjoyed the art style so much that they added my game to their collection which was just a nice feeling to know that my game was good enough to be saved.