Hey guys. I'm not sure if this might be the right place for this post, but I can't find any other place to put it . A moderator might be able to help me here.

I’m happy to be finally developing my first commercial game. I want to start with the right foot, so I decided to do a small survey to understand my players a little bit better. Here is what I came up with:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1sr6RbOmbTEXZ2lEZPAZxfhoO7CwdMx-mYjXvLrK9x4k/viewform

Since this is my first time doing this I wonder if there is anything you guys have to say about my survey. Also, if there is any tips on how to run a survey of this type, I would really love to hear them since I’m trying to figure this out as I go along.

I'm not particularly asking you to answer the survey right now (you can do it if you want to of course), but mainly I would like to know if you have any ideas on how my survey could be improved and some tips about how to run it on the internet I would really appreciate that!

My main objectives with my survey are

• Better identify my target player as well as his/her likes and dislikes

• Test the appeal of my setting and general artwork style.

• Gather some very raw ideas about how the combat system I’m thinking will be perceived by users.

I’m thinking about asking people to fill the survey on facebook groups, reddit, and other random internet forums and communities. I might ask some pages to run the survey for me hoping I get some administrators to agree.

Any suggestions comments or ideas?

I'm not sure if this might be the right place for this post, but I can't find any other place to put it . A moderator might be able to help me here.

I second Tom -- finding out who your audience is is a marketing thing, not a design thing.

I don't have much experience with that -- I take on projects mostly because they seem interesting to me, and I don't give a ton of thought to market other than considering whether there's an over-saturation of competition and on what platform I think it might fit best. Aside from that, I try have some unique hook.

But I think something interesting about interactive entertainment is that, done right, you don't have to guess at what your players are doing, you can know exactly, subject to their privacy preferences and perhaps privacy laws. Freemium games are incredibly good at this sort of thing, although the only measure they care about is revenue-per-user. But the priciples are the same -- measure how long it takes players to complete levels and you can gain insight into what levels might be too hard or too easy -- record where players die to see if there are any hotspots that reveal an unbalanced or broken map -- you can gather all kinds of information.

You can even take it a step further by supporting A-B testing, where a representative sample of your players have a different 'prototype' experience, and then you compare your satisfaction metrics to those playing the 'normal' version to see which one people like better. Freemium games do this too, where they might find that moving the "buy credits" button to the top-right corner from the bottom-left, and making it orange instead of blue has increased revenue by 3%. If revenue isn't your main concern, you can adopt other satisfaction metrics. It takes work to enable this, but it allows you to tailor your game to your audience using hard data, rather than guesswork alone.

This is strictly reactionary of course, but the insights gained can be payed forward to your next project.

@Ravyne Thanks I'm definitely going to implement some kind of A-B testing on this game :).

My main reason behind doing this was that I read basically everywhere that a good indie should know how to market his/her game. I decided to buy a few "traditional" marketing books and I quickly ran into the whole "Know your audience" concept. I'm still new at this, but I'm trying to experiment with what will work best for me :). Thanks again!