Intended audience

The intended audience is like a personality profile. It defines, in short, who you're making the game for. Using some stereotyping, it specifies who is supposed to play your game: casual gamers, action gamers, or hardcore gamers; children or adults; English speakers or non-English speakers; or someone else. This decision is important especially for establishing the suitability of the game content and characters and difficulty of gameplay. Suitability is not just a matter of hiding nudity, violence, and profanity from younger gamers. It's about engaging your audience with relevant content--issues and stories, ideas that are resonant with them--and encouraging them to keep playing. Similarly, the difficulty is not simply about making games easier for younger gamers. It's about balancing rewards and punishments and timings to match audience expectations, whatever their age.

As with target platform, you should have a target audience in mind when designing your game. This matters especially for keeping focused when including new ideas in your game. Coming up with fun ideas is great, but will they actually work for your audience in this case? If your target audience lacks sufficient focus, then some problems, such as the following, will emerge:

• Your game will feel conceptually messy (a jumble of disconnected ideas)
• You'll struggle to answer how your game is fun or interesting
• You'll keep making big and important changes to the design during its development

For these reasons, and more, narrow your target audience as precisely as possible, as early as possible.

For Dead Keys, the target audience will be over 15 years of age and Shoot 'Em Up fans who also enjoy quirky gameplay that deviates from the mainstream. A secondary audience may include casual gamers who enjoy time-critical word games.