Had not even considered this issue before.
I think it gets tricky to be more specific about the type without sounding annoyingly verbose, but maybe thats just me being self conscious?
Does puzzle/platformer mean anything to you anymore?
Author
Had not even considered this issue before.
I think it gets tricky to be more specific about the type without sounding annoyingly verbose, but maybe thats just me being self conscious?
I don't think this is just you. The big battle for me is that I have about a sentence or two of automatic attention from someone when promoting my game.
In that space I have to use language that's engaging and attractive, give and actual impression of what my game is about, and not turn them off with coming off too overcomposed.
It's definitely an uphill battle. Reducing any game that has a hope of being original to the space of two 15 word sentences is very tough.
If there'e anyone in here with experience marketing games that are completely off the wall mechanically, I'd love to know how you did it.
If there is a part of game design that is lacking sorely as far as innovation across all types of games, its in genre naming conventions. Because designers are using old foundations to structure their game design on top of they feel they can use the old description with not a lot of care for what they've done to the original genre. Game design should take from the music industry, in creating a much wider array of genre descriptions. Honestly how many types of Metal are there? I think this should apply to shooters the same way.
So much of an indie game's success depends on it's elevator pitch, and a genre is a very smart thing to include in that pitch.
**So plain and simple, what's your gut reaction when you read puzzle/platformer in a description?**
Does it entice you to learn more? Repel you because the market is so flooded with them? Has it lost all meaning entirely?
How does it make you feel? There are no wrong answers.
me personally, i don't like puzzle platformers. so that in the description would be a deal breaker for me right there. OTOH, for someone who IS part of your target demographic, "puzzle platformer" should have the exact opposite effect, and cause them to read on.
back in the day, you used to get something like 100 characters to describe your downloadable file. excellent practice in word smithing to get that killer file description.
the indie mobile market today is sort of like the indie PC market ~30 years ago, "all just a little bit of history repeating" - (propellerheads - decksanddrumsandrockandroll).
that 4 sentence description will be some of the most important copy you write for the project.
i credit much of my initial success (top 10 DL on AOL , 10,000+ copies the first week) to the file description used, which highlighted the ground breaking aspects of the game. The game in question was SIMTrek/SIMSpace - the world's first Star Trek flight simulator.
Considering I'm working on a puzzle/platformer, I would have to say "yes". But I'm also a fan of the genre, so that helps. But I tend to not discount any game based upon genre alone. I don't really like strategy games, but I love Civilization V and Advance Wars. On the other hand, I love platformers, but I didn't really get into FEZ. I didn't dislike it, I actually thought it was a very clever concept; it just didn't really grab me for some reason.
Puzzle/platformer is just a part of the content description, as well as the art-style description. I would consider it more a category tag then a pitch statement.
The pitch statement should reflect the qualitative emotions which you get from playing the game ("awsome", "betterest", "feature-rich" and "cool" does not count). Try "dark", "fearless", "gloomy", "peachy" (I'm not very good at this) or something else that has a more distinct emotion bound to it. Asking players how they feel about the game when they play it could be a way to go.
If you want something to read, try looking for the web-buzzword SEO (search engine optimization) and how it works with meta-tags. They are picked very carefully to make the site unique and pop up high in search ranks.
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