Venture Arctic - Designing Around a Market

There's a big difference in the design process between designing a game and improving upon an existing game. Your average recreational game designer spends most of his time thinking about how to improve upon an existing game. I'm actually finding that process harder than designing a game from scratch.

With Venture Africa, I took the broad idea of an ecosystem simulator, and tried to distill many of the game concepts of tycoon and puzzle games and mold them into a single, simple, fun and interesting experience. It was a very new and fresh game design. I probably got lucky that it worked as well as it did.

With Venture Arctic, the sequel that I'm working on now, I'm trying to improve upon that experience, but in a targeted manner: there are plenty of things that I would like to improve about the gameplay of Venture Africa, but I need to constrain myself to improving just a few major systems, so that I don't end up with an overblown budget and schedule.

I wrote an article about designing with a target market in mind for Gamasutra a little while ago. You can read it here. The rest of this post details some of the thought processes I'm going through in framing the game design of Venture Arctic.

So how do I decide what to change and improve, and what to leave alone? It always comes back to the business goals for the product. I am designing Venture Arctic with the "light-core" market in mind. These people enjoy building games, open-ended games, being rewarded for creative solutions to problems. They want an alternately active and passive experience. These people enjoy "interactive" TV, such as reality television, documentaries, and other shows in which they are learning or putting themselves in the mindset of the show to strategize or fantasize with the characters on the show.

Many of these people play simple portal games, like match-3 games, and so they expect high production values and hand-drawn, colorful art. They also occassionally buy games in the brick and mortar stores.

These gamers are parents and kids and computer-savvy non-gamers, and they are definitively PC gamers, not console gamers.

There are plenty of people outside of this description who I hope will enjoy my game, but this is the market that I am designing the game around. That leaves me free to say that I am NOT designing the game around a typical portal-gamer, a strategy gamer, a console gamer, or an edutainment gamer. The game may appeal very strongly to some of these people, but the person that I have in my mind of who I am making the game for is not them.

Other games that I think fit into the market space I am trying to design around are:

*Tradewinds Legends
*Zoo Tycoon 2
*Prison Tycoon
*Outpost Kaloki

More on this subject later...