Darkness Swells

For our marketing class we have been tasked with picking a preexisting game from our degree and use marketing strategies to find its target audience and craft an experience specifically for said audience. After pitching our game ideas Nick, Victor, Penguin and myself formed a team around Penguins Studio 2 personal experience game “Darkness Dwells”. This was a small interactive experience about being a child scared of things in your room. As the player would look around in first person, scary faces would appear in the characters peripherals and disappear again when looked at directly. After witnessing two successful horror style games come out of our cohort I initially thought that we had a bit of work alleviated knowing that we had a market for the game. As weeks have gone by and we have learned truly how to find target audience through extensive target market research, I can foresee some problems this project is going to face.

The main problem I can currently see and which the team is trying to address is the brief calls for a pre established game to tweak towards a market whereas what we are doing on Darkness Dwells is making a sequel. The reason behind this is that the core mechanics of the first game after looking at games that would be Darkness Dwells primary competition don’t fit the genre very well. The two main competitors and inspirations being Slender and Five Nights at Freddy's. Although both mechanically simple they used their premise and scary creatures to invoke fear in players whereas Darkness Dwells core concept is that when looking at a monster directly you can’t even see it. This means the game needs a complete redesign and I worry that with the amount of time left on the project scope creep is going to because incredibly problematic.

However what has alleviated most of my fears has been the breakdown of our target audience and really creating clear plans for the game on how we are going to capitalise on the previously mentioned successes while making a distinct experience. We spoke at length about how Late Night Wanderer struggled to turn views into downloads but the core concept we took away from it was that we can accomplish what Late Night Wanderer didn’t by finding out exactly what our target audience wanted, for example a experience they couldn’t watch just on YouTube and not accomplish something different in the game themselves.

Since Late Night Wanderer became #1 on Itch.io its a clear example of something Darkness Dwells should lean on and since the initial thoughts were that streamers and online personalities were the ones that spread the content, we thought targeting them would be the most beneficial. After spending a huge chunk on time breaking down why they were the target audience and then having constructive breakdowns of each aspect it became clear that it wasn’t the actual streamers themselves but the people who watch them were our target demographic. Constructing and clarifying what these people wanted from the game and what we could actually provide has managed to give the team a strong direction and shut down a lot of loose ends. I still think scope is going to be an issue moving forward but now with a clear and distinct group to shape the game around I believe we can accomplish a small polished experience for said market.