Engagement design for indie game development

• Autor(a) principal: Silvério, Josué António Oliveira
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/31651
• topic: Game design; Indie game; Development; Engagement; Player taxonomy

Indie games have appeared as a response to the spaces left open by the AAA game industry, filling niches. This means that, more often than not, a lot of indie games get lost in the sea of products listed in today’s online stores. Adding to this problem we have the fact that, when designing a game to fill a niche space, we will have a niche audience, which is, almost always, reduced in size and indie developers are afraid to tweak their games to reach more people because they do not want to give up on their creative vision. This project aims to find what lessons can we learn by using the Engagement Design Model, which shifts the focus from experiences to engagement, when designing and developing an indie game. Thus, speeding the process of defining audiences, giving indie developers more time for other tasks that usually lack in quality, like marketing. With these lessons, we also hope to help indie developers understand that it is possible to tweak their games’ engagement without having to change their creative direction, giving them the possibility to deliver their messages to more people without compromising on their vision.