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长文:开发者谈游戏品牌建设、规划及做好社区运营

发布时间:2019-07-22 09:12:29 Tags:,

长文:开发者谈游戏品牌建设、沟通、内容计划及做好社区运营

原作者:Justin French 译者:Vivian Xue

今天我将来谈谈社区;为什么你应该在游戏发行前建立玩家社区,如何整合你的品牌、沟通和内容战略从而在游戏发行前建立玩家社区,如何组建社区以及最重要的,如何让社区成为你们团队的延伸。

我还会解释这将如何促进你的创作、营销以及销售,帮助你获得额外投资,并降低发行的风险。

我不是社区管理专家,也不是营销大师,并且你们可能已经开始建立社区和筹备营销计划了,无论你有没有经验,我都希望这篇文章能对你有所帮助。

我是谁?

在开始之前,我想我应该介绍一下自己——我是Justin French,Dream Harvest工作室的创始人兼CEO。

在我创立Dream Harvest前,我在3A以及独立工作室担任过设计师、音效师、项目经理以及顾问。我曾经以行业专家的身份受聘于当地的大学,教授游戏设计及开发,在那里我改写了ICT Level 2 BTEC课程,使用Visual Basic替换了应用软件开发的核心,并用Unity和C语言开发游戏,从而帮助这些16-19岁的青少年们了解行业实操。我还为一家招聘机构工作,负责招聘游戏和技术人员。在进入游戏行业之前,我是一名音乐行业的自由职业者,为全国各大工作室做音频的录音和混响,同时还是一名音乐方面的商业顾问。

如今,我们的工作室正在开发NeuroSlicers,一款赛博朋克风的即时战略游戏,融合了丰富的剧情,游戏拥有单人、合作以及PVP模式。

gameloft-total-conquest-3-architect(from pocketgamer)

gameloft-total-conquest-3-architect(from pocketgamer)

社区建设一直是我们商业战略的核心,我们在游戏尚未成型前就开始这项工作,它对于我们进行真正的核心机制创新,以及扩大即时战略游戏的传统硬核/竞技玩家群体来说至关重要。

为什么你应该在游戏发行前建立社区?

我们在开发游戏时,很容易以自我为中心,希望创造一个令我们愉快的体验,但事实上,我们的目标受众是:

成百上千万的玩家。我想说的是,游戏是一门生意,要想把生意做下去,我们得把我们的游戏推销出去。

游戏行业的风险性特别高——我们无数次看到发行失败的游戏,失败的原因各种各样,比如:

1. 发行前没有做好营销和社区建设,发行后无人问津。
2. 选错发行时间,因此玩家无暇关注你的游戏。
3. 游戏本身质量不佳
4. (由于缺乏市场调研)游戏视觉效果/机制/剧情不合大众胃口
5. 游戏定价收费不合理
6. 发行时遇到技术问题
7. 发行前过度炒作引发消极反馈
8. 开发商对玩家意见置若罔闻,或未能有效处理负面评价,从而失去玩家信任

原因大概还有很多,但重要的是,我们能通过尽早建立玩家社区有效减轻这些问题。

无论是在游戏发行前还是发行后,玩家社区就像一个决策班子。作为开发者,你可以通过它征求玩家认同,从设计、实用性和商业的角度分析你的决策,同时让玩家了解游戏开发的内部流程,使他们了解游戏开发是一个艰难、成本高昂的过程!

最重要的,建设玩家社区将有助于你推销游戏,与玩家建立互信,并最大程度地降低社区的“毒性”。

著名营销大师Seth Godin说过:“你的最小可行性受众(Minimum Viable Audience)要求你对其负责。他们迫使你集中注意力,使你无处可躲。”(“Your smallest viable audience holds you to account. It forces a focus and gives you nowhere to hide.”)

去年,我们在3A游戏领域见证了忽视玩家意见带来的后果,例如:

《辐射76》:砍掉了玩家们喜爱的部分,留下了一个《辐射》空壳和最糟糕的部分。
《暗黑血统3》:不仅没有继续《暗黑2》的创新,反而倒退了,用一个线性的故事和劣质的战斗打发玩家,最终让粉丝们很是失望。
《合金装备:生存》:Konami的这款游戏除了名称外与合金系列毫不沾边,没有小岛秀夫的《合金装备》只想疯狂圈钱。

我想这样的例子还有很多很多。

那些只把玩家当摇钱树,从不听取玩家意见和需求进行决策的工作室最终只会迷失自我,被社区遗忘。

我们的工作室必须建立在与玩家的信任和开放沟通的基础上。我们应该让玩家参与到开发过程中,对我们自己的决策负责。

与那些已经发行了游戏系列,建立起游戏社区的工作室相比,我们处于一个特殊的位置,也许我们的背景相对空白,但这使我们能更有效地向社区传递我们的声音。我们能够影响并塑造玩家社区——但这也意味着我们必须小心谨慎地播下种子,这样,当社区发展壮大时,我们才不会失去对它的控制。

到目前为止,我希望我成功地说服你在发行前建立玩家社区,但究竟要怎么创建呢?

当我们刚开始开发NeuroSlicers时,我们并没有这样做,我们通过一系列实验和试错建立起社区,摸着石头过河,一路上也犯了很多错误——我们在Kickstarter上为游戏众筹时,当时游戏的名字竟然叫“失败(Failure)“!

我希望自己在3年前就懂得这些道理,但我也很高兴我们能够通过艰难的学习获得,这些经历造就了今日的我们。

如今,但愿我们能够分享如何更好地完成这些事。

品牌、沟通及内容战略

首先,你必须制定优秀的品牌和沟通战略,它是整个团队吸引玩家并和社区进行有效沟通的指导原则。品牌建设涵盖的内容很广泛(比如品牌Logo),这些我们另作介绍,此处我只针对一些沟通方面的核心元素,而非视觉方面。

一、品牌战略

品牌战略中共应包含:

1. 游戏推介

这是你的整个团队都应该记住的内容;它总结了游戏的所有令人兴奋的特色。

以我们的游戏NeuroSlicers为例,它可能有点长,这三年来我一直使用这段内容推销我的游戏,所以我已经烂熟于胸了:

NeuroSlicers是一款战术性极强的赛博朋克风即时战略游戏,每场战役仅8-12分钟,致力于打造突破传统的快速、宏观和信息化的RTS战斗体验,史诗级目标和暗黑的赛博朋克叙事风格与刺激的PVP、单人和组队战斗模式完美融合,为玩家带来极致的游戏体验。

玩家可以控制AI智能单位,使用强大的黑客技术操控等级,培育先进的武器和建筑,以每次一个数据节点来操控网络。

2. 游戏的核心特质

(1)游戏愿景

也就是你对游戏的定位,游戏的长期目标:

极具玩法深度、剧情丰富度和高度战略性的体验,能够获得硬核战略游戏玩家的喜爱,并吸引更广泛的玩家群体。非平行的战略玩法,让玩家置身于剧情中,能掌控自己的命运。

(2)游戏短期目标

这一项一般放在愿景之前,用于定义公司当前的目标。但就游戏而言,我更愿意将它放在愿景之后,它是你实现愿景的方式和步骤。

致力于打造高战略性的玩法,尽可能缩短战斗时长,提升战斗激烈程度和刺激性,将它与丰富的剧情、单人、合作和PVP模式相融合,让该类型呈现不同的样貌,从而吸引更多玩家,同时为该类型爱好者提供一种全新的体验和挑战。

(3)价值观

价值观即共同目标,它定义了你的游戏体验。你最好把它精简到5个以内,否则团队成员很难记住:

-深度策略玩法
-玩家友好型学习曲线
-精彩丰富的剧情
-高度沉浸感

(4)品牌定位

品牌定位即你的品牌与市场上同类品牌相比的特色。也许你们的特色有很多,你只需要选择一个你们最与众不同的地方,比如“你的游戏是市面上唯一的……”

NeuroSlicer是唯一一款拥有PVE、团战和PVP模式的剧情向策略游戏。

(5)价值主张

这部分关于你的游戏吸引玩家的原因。玩家们付出了时间能从游戏中获得什么价值?他们花钱究竟是为了买游戏中的什么?

NeuroSlicers能让玩家在推进游戏剧情的同时选择自己想玩的内容,我们试图在保持核心玩家所期待的深度,同时让游戏容易上手。最后,我们将PVE、团战、PVP模式和剧情以及升级玩法结合起来,从而为该类型游戏带来了新鲜感。

(6)宣传语

宣传语是一句话,能成功“勾起”玩家的注意力,它涵盖了你游戏的一切。我们仍然在思考NeuroSlicers的宣传语,目前我们暂时使用的是:

“决定你的现实”

这涵盖了我们的剧情——关于两种现实的斗争,真实世界以及游戏背景,虚拟的AR世界,并且它体现了玩家选择以及用户自定义在游戏中的核心位置,每位玩家都扮演一名“Slicer”,一位揭开虚拟世界的面纱,通过一系列选择决定他们的现实以及人类未来的现实的人。

二、内容框架

内容框架是内容战略的核心,没有它,你的内容就没有支撑。

正如内容营销机构所说:

没有框架的内容就像没有地基的房子。

想要构建内容框架,你可以考虑在团队内部采取Workshop工作法(一种以头脑风暴为特征的创新研修方式)。制作75张以上(越多越好)写着描述性词语的提示卡,然后团队一同将这些卡片分为三类。

1. 游戏是什么样子的
2. 我们想让游戏变成什么样
3. 游戏不是什么样的

你还必须确保它们按照你和你的团队所认为的重要顺序排列。

一旦你完成了这一步,可能有些团队成员会对某些卡片的摆放有不同意见——这时你们需要集体讨论这些卡片应该放在什么位置。完成了这一步后,从“游戏是什么样子”和“我们想让游戏变成什么样子”卡片中选择最重要的3-5张,然后讨论卡片上的形容词对于游戏究竟意味着什么。

以我们的游戏NeuroSlicers为例:

NeuroSlicers是

创新性的:

1. 我们要打破这个类型的界限以及人们对它的成见
2. 我们不满足于该类型的传统游戏
3. 我们仔细观察同类型的其它游戏的缺陷,尝试改良它们,避免掉进同样的陷阱里

而我们希望NeuroSlicers变成

沉浸式的:

1. 我们促使玩家站在游戏角色的立场上
2. 通过“打破第4面墙”方法使玩家身临其境
3. 我们在剧情中加入了玩家决策和结果

易上手的:

1. 我们谨慎地设计玩家入门教程
2. 我们允许玩家玩他们最感兴趣的部分
3. 打造一个互相支持的玩家社区
4. 观察所有类型游戏中最佳的用户体验设计,使用或尝试改进它们

明确定义这些后,你们团队就更清楚了你们想要做的内容,以及想向社区传达的信息。但是你们究竟要如何传达这些信息呢?

三、品牌声音

按照传统,品牌声音要求你们保持一致的、不变的对外沟通方式。它通常基于公司的个性,并受到所传达的内容的影响。

换句话说,假如你们的品牌是一个人,Ta会如何说话?

我个人在这方面遇到的问题是,第一,如果你们还在开发首款产品,你们很可能仍在思考品牌愿景、短期目标和核心价值,或者你们重点关注产品而不是公司层面上的事,并且你们暂时还没有消费者……我是说,你们可能已经有了一批潜在的消费者,但他们还不能买你们的游戏。第二,统一的品牌声音可能会掩盖团队成员的个性,使玩家无法真正了解游戏制作者。

游戏集合了来自所有人的伟大创意、或者说是梦想(游戏邦注除非你是solo开发者)——每一个为此付出努力、贡献过创意的团队成员都应得到玩家的认可与表扬,我想除了让玩家认识你们公司外,还应该让他们真正了解你的团队成员。

然而,团队确实要规定哪些问题属于讨论范围之外,形成共同的理念和对外沟通的口径确实是有必要的。

我建议你在品牌建设和沟通计划之外,单独编制一份文件,列出以下几点:

1. 每个功能特点的具体描述
2. 每个功能的描述关键词
3. 每个功能的描述禁词
4. 用图表区分可讨论的内容、暂不可讨论的内容和永不可讨论的内容
5. 任何有帮助的提示
6. 一条存有功能相关资源的本地共享目录链接

有了这份文件以及其它品牌建设文件,你的团队成员应该能够有效和玩家沟通,同时展示自己的个性了。但他们能通过什么方式与玩家交流,又应该交流些什么内容呢?

四、沟通战略计划

很多工作室都没有专门的社媒经理,社区管理者或营销人员,因此组建社区需要所有团队成员共同努力,如果你的团队成员中有人会说两门甚至更多语言,能将你们的社媒内容和社区贴子翻译成别的语言,那就更有帮助了。

然而,有一点需要高度关注——你应该在一个平台上与玩家保持深度、有意义的交流。很多社区经理以及营销人员告诉我,同时管理多个平台的社交账号会变得非常困难,如Steam论坛、你们自己的论坛和Discord。选择其中一个,与那里的玩家保持积极互动,至少等到你们团队有专门的社区管理者为止。

此外,使用Crowfire或Hootsuite对社交媒体进行自动化分析,这能大大降低管理难度,意味着你能够节省出更多时间开发游戏内容。

无论如何,以下几个平台是你与玩家建立沟通的渠道。

1. Discord

这是你建立玩家社区中心的绝佳场所,你能够每日和粉丝们互动,定时推送独家内容,然后再转发或通过电子邮件发给玩家;最终你会希望人们从各个渠道聚集到这里。最近Discord商店进行了更新,推出了新鲜的功能,我后面会谈到怎么使用它们。

2. Twitter

你应该每天都发推特,最好带上图片,奖励和视频。记住一定要加上话题,不过两三个就够了,一个是你们游戏的专属话题,比如我们每次都会在推特后面加上#NeroSlicers#。

另一个话题要么是#gamedev#、#indiedev#或者每周三下午六点半的#indiedevhour#,每周五的(如果你们使用Unity开发)#madewithunity#, 每周六的#Screenshotsaturday#。为不同主题的推特寻找最佳的话题很重要。比如我们好几次用到#赛博朋克#这个话题。

记得在每条推特后附上你们Discord主页链接或电子邮件订阅链接,吸引玩家进入你们的中心社区。在推特分析页面查看互动率,分析某些推特成为热门的原因(可以从时间、视觉效果、内容、使用的话题等方面)。同时,确保其它团队成员或者用你的其它账号转推,带上额外的2个话题,每隔3-4小时转推一次,覆盖所有时间点。加上图片是个不错的选择。如果有奖励和视频就更完美了,这能提高互动效果。

3. Instagram

我们发现,和其他社交平台相比,Instagram上的玩家互动率是最高的。这是你分享工作室、成员照片以及每日趣闻的绝佳场所,有助于展示团队成员的个性。Instagram平台唯一的弊端是付费才能添加链接。这几周,我们试图每天在Instagram上更一张照片,粉丝量和互动量在逐步增长。

使用Instagram时,一定要尽可能添加更多的话题(最多30个)从而获得更多曝光——搜寻与你的游戏类型相关的热门话题,把它们全部带上——不过你得小心,Instagram有字符限制(2200个),但不会明确提示,因此你可能在发送成功后发现文字被删掉了。

4. 博客

如果你的博客内容是文字和图片,你可以直接发在公司网站或者汤不热(Tumblr)上,然而,我们最近开始制作vlog,它制作起来更快,并且能直观地展示游戏开发过程,我想人们更喜欢这种形式。

博客必须每月或每两周更新一次。把这些文章转发到IndieDB、Facebook、Medium等你觉得有意义的网站上,同时用推特转发。

试着在博客中对某个话题进行详细讨论,并公布大致的开发进度。再次强调,一定要在博客后附上Discord主页链接,加上一些类似“如果你对文章话题感兴趣,请来我们的XXX分享你的见解”之类的话,把博客读者引导到你们的中心社区。

5. Newsletter(电子邮件推广)

保持每两周/每月更新。它是当月营销内容的总结,应保持精简,一个吸睛的邮件主题,一两段有趣的内容,底下附上你的博客、YouTube、 Twitch等更丰富内容的链接。再次强调,把人们集中到Discord上。

MailChimp能帮你更好地完成这项工作,它将为你提供优质的分析:追踪打开邮件的用户,他们所在的地点,包括对邮件标头进行A/B测试,将已发送的邮件按内容分类,查看相关回复,等等。

6. YouTube

在YouTube频道上发布开发过程的vlog、游戏试玩片段、游戏预告片、团队成员采访,游戏直播录像、游戏功能解析等任何你所能想到的内容。

对这些视频进行分类,这样人们就更容易找到自己感兴趣的内容。不要确定发布时间,并且先在中心社区Discord上发布,让社区玩家先看到,再将它转发到别的平台上。记得强调一句Discord粉丝能第一时间看到这些内容。

7. Twitch

试着1-2个月直播一次,超过一次当然更好。你可以组织特殊直播比赛,在期间赠送游戏(这时候Humble Monthly促销包就格外有用了,你可以廉价购买很多游戏激活码作为奖品)。

你还可以直播程序员写代码、美术师设计、展示新功能、团队内部的比赛,真的什么都可以。试着在一周的不同时间段内直播,确保全球玩家都有机会观看直播。每场直播结束后,到YouTube上传直播过程视频,这样看不了直播的观众也能看回放。

在视频和直播中创造一些能吸引人眼球的东西。

记得在直播中宣传你们的Discord账号。

8. IndieDB

我个人不太爱用IndieDB,我觉得它的用户体验界面需要全面修改,太过时了,但转发你的文章并让它登上IndieDB主页仍然是不错的决定。

在该网站发表文章必须遵守他们的规则(好像需要至少5张图片或一个视频)否则文章就只能被收录到你的游戏主页上。

9. Facebook

Facebook上有很多开发者小组和玩家小组,尽可能加入更多小组,然后轰炸式地发贴子营销,这样你可以获得一些热度——尽管Facebook这几年修改了算法,导致营销效果不太理想。

那些已经有大批粉丝的工作室在这方面没什么担忧,但在Facebook上建立玩家社区很困难,现在Facebook的算法导致你的贴子一开始只能被你的一小部分关注者看到,然后再根据互动情况决定它能否被更多人阅读。

10. VK Communities

VK是一个类似Facebook的社区,主要用户来自俄罗斯和东欧。我们在Alpha前期开始使用它,收获了很多关注。把你的Facebook主页和贴子翻译一下发布在这里是一个不错的选择。

11. Steam商店主页

你应该在发行前6-8个月筹备好商店主页,但前提是你有了优质的游戏宣传视频和截图。我建议你在商店界面添上“即将上线”之类的标签,以便玩家把它加入愿望清单。这种方式比为了刺激首日销量开放预购要好得多。除此之外,活跃商店界面将帮助你开放Steam社区,在那里你可以发布贴子,将玩家引导到你的Discord账号上。

五、内容计划

了解了内容发布渠道,接下来你需要整合出一份具体计划。另拟一份文件,用表格列出:

1. 各开发阶段的目标

你可以把开发过程分成三个阶段

阶段1:Alpha前期/Alpha/开发阶段
阶段2:Beta测试
阶段3:发行

列出每个开发阶段的主要交流内容。例如:

阶段1:
1. 分享开发过程——展示游戏的迭代
2. 团队的亮点、特色和背景
3. 剧情介绍/趣事
4. 社区交流——开始建立社区

阶段2:
1. 游戏机制——确定玩法机制
2. 游戏剧情——专注于特色
3. 发行前的筹备情况
4. 调动社区的兴奋感——直到发行。确定游戏功能

阶段3:
1. 确定产品、功能和内容——游戏定价、版本
2. 公布剧情
3. 介绍主要角色
4. 社区概况——认可并奖励早期玩家

这张表格将帮助你发布内容,引发玩家的讨论,这个过程应持续整个开发过程,从而为游戏发行后的沟通计划提供支持。

接下来,你应该制作内容发布计划表,即什么内容应该在什么平台发布、何时发布、核心信息/内容是什么,以及各个平台的负责人。

基于这张表,你可以开始建立内容营销计划时间表,保证它与你的开发计划、各开发阶段的目标相一致。确保团队成员人手一份时间表,并且每周留出一些时间与团队一起准备内容。

Discord——你的中心社区

过去几年内,Discord已经成为了社区建设的核心平台,持续受到欢迎。

它取代了传统论坛,使开发者和玩家进行更直接的互动,Discord的力量似乎在不断增强。

该平台的主要功能包括:

1. 不同话题的频道
2. 频道分组
3. 多样的频道类型(文字频道、语音频道、资讯频道、商店)
4. 强大的用户管理功能
5. 用户自定义表情
6. 与游戏深度结合的功能(游戏内覆盖、游戏内聊天系统、直接观战、直接加入、管理机器人)
7. 通过DM共享屏幕
8. 能够绑定Twitch等其它平台账号
9. 还有很多……

那么,你如何利用Discord建立你的中心社区呢?

你需要设置好一系列东西……

1. 欢迎页面

欢迎页面是社区建设的起点。它应该包含新成员需了解的社区相关事宜。它应当包含以下几个部分,我后面将作详细解释:

-欢迎词
-社区规则
-团队成员介绍

(1)欢迎词

这是用户看到的第一样事物,使用Discord机器人向新用户发送欢迎词。保持欢迎词的简短、温暖,同时能引导用户进入讨论频道。

(2)社区规则

对新社区来说,设立规章制度是很重要的。引导新人了解规则,比如把它列在欢迎页面上。

另外,让社区成员理解并认同这些规则是个好主意——向他们详细解释每条规则,解释为什么你认为这些规则有助于营造更积极的社区氛围。

(3)团队成员介绍

你应该向社区介绍团队成员及他们的职责。这有助于创建社区和团队的联系,使社区成员能够找到解答他们特殊问题的人。

除此之外,你可以为社区提供一些模组(我们采取的方式是选用一些社区测试员)。在这篇指南的最后一节中,我将详细讨论此内容。最后,确保你的团队和模组成员使用格式一致的Discord昵称,为他们设定正确的身份和昵称颜色,确保社区成员能轻松找到他们。

2. 频道话题

为不同话题建立不同频道是个好主意。但一开始不要建太多。随着社区壮大,你自然会增加新的频道,一开始你可以建立以下几个:

-新人频道
-综合讨论
-闲聊灌水
-游戏资讯

3. 用户角色(Role)

设置用户角色是管理社区和频道进入权的好方法。你需要花一点时间设置好服务器和权限……在这一点上,注意权限的覆盖范围。你可以设置很多用户角色,根据经验一开始先设置这几个:

-开发团队
-模组
-内容创造者
-用户

最好把内容创作者和一般社区成员区分开来,甚至为他们创建单独的频道,你可以在那里分享独家内容,以供他们创作视频。

与社区互动的话题/方式

人们进入了你的Discord频道,但你不知道如何有效地与他们互动?以下是一些你可以做的事情:

1. 举办游戏概念设计、或者同人作品设计比赛。
2. 在欢迎页面上列出社区规则,并询问社区成员对规则的看法,只有让他们认可这些规则才能减少未来的冲突。
3. 分享游戏中某一元素的设计草图,让社区成员们为喜欢的版本投票。
4. 谈论你作为一个开发者面临的问题/挑战,使他们了解内部情况。
5. 分享你们的开发计划,并和社区成员讨论优先事项,甚至可以让他们就下一个功能进行投票。
6. 谈论你的团队成员和他们的项目职责。
7. 通过直播或者视频分享早期游戏片段。
8. 分享你们在开发过程中遇到的bug和其它有意思的事情。
9. 对游戏中的某个功能做一个深度介绍,并征求社区的意见。
10. 选择一些最具影响力的社区成员作为游戏测试员,设定严格的选拔标准,从而鼓励社区成员竞争,让这些测试员直播你的游戏。
11. 制作一个有意思的Discord机器人,为达到一定等级的玩家创建私人频道,在里面分享特殊的内容。
12. 最重要的是,真诚地与社区沟通,不要像一个公关/营销人士一样。

Discord额外使用技巧

1. 在资讯频道和欢迎频道实行禁言,从而确保人们看到重要信息。
2. 使用标记(PIN)功能收藏有趣的话题,引导新成员讨论这些话题,获取他们的见解。
3. 试着加入其它Discord频道——特别是与你的游戏类型相关的频道,这是你获取新成员的绝佳方式。也试着加入其它类型频道……你永远无法料到哪里能找到新玩家。
4. 通过CNAME(别名解析)替换难记的Discord邀请链接,这样一来你就能获得一个更酷的邀请网址,比如(http://discord.你的游戏名.com),把它印在名片或者海报传单上美观多了。

哪些人是你的受众?

那么你现在有了品牌计划、沟通计划和内容计划,你已经开始着手建立一个类似Discord的社区,但你究竟想吸引什么人加入社区呢?

我想你很可能已经确定了核心玩家,但我觉得我们有必要再次思考一下这个问题,因为它关系到如何充分利用所建立的社区。

在品牌建设中,构建用户画像(Persona)是了解潜在客户的关键过程。它要求我们根据不同类型用户的习惯、性格特征、生活方式、年龄等信息制定具有针对性的营销计划。

然而,收集这些信息并不简单。你要上哪找这些人,又要如何与他们交谈以确定你的品牌的用户画像?

第一步——观察类似产品的玩家社区。这些游戏的开发商在哪里建立社区的?

嗯,大概是以下几个地方:

-开发商的Discord
-发行商的Discord
-该游戏或该类型的玩家Discord
-论坛
-Reddit
-Facebook小组
-Twitter(也许没那么多……至少比较困难)
-IRL聚会/活动

让自己融入这些社区,试着了解人们在讨论什么、他们喜欢游戏的哪些地方,不喜欢哪些地方、大致了解这个类型。观察那些最有影响力的成员、他们如何与其它成员互动,以及最重要的,观察开发者/发行商是如何管理社区、与社区互动的,人们的反应如何。

像这样尽可能地观察更多同类的游戏。同时关注游戏本身如何反过来影响论坛、Discord、Newsletter等平台——即开发商/发行商如何将玩家群体到他们的中心社区。

在进行下一步工作前,和社区玩家以及开发者交流一些日子将对你很有帮助,这将使你获得一点技巧——坦白地告诉他们你的目的,更有可能得到有意义的回应。

用户调查

这项调查的目的有这么几个:

1. 更好地了解潜在用户的群体特征。
2. 帮助你找出关键的信息,该类型的游戏玩家喜欢什么、不喜欢什么,根据这些信息打造游戏卖点。
3. 使你了解潜在玩家的游戏习惯、游戏文化。
4. 可通过在问卷调查底部加入链接,吸引玩家进入你的中心社区、其它社交媒体账号、订阅你的Newsletter。

如果你仅发布一份问卷调查然后期盼人们填写它,反应肯定很平淡。这就是为什么我建议你先在每个游戏社区上花上1-2周和那里的玩家交流。此外,记住你在别人的地盘上,因此在发布问卷调查前一定要征求开发商/发行商的同意。

那么,你想问什么样的问题?下面是我们的用户画像调查内容,分为几个关键部分:

个人信息:

这组问题有助于你了解潜在玩家的人口特征和背景

1. 出生日期
2. 性别
3. 所在国家地区
4. 工作职位/学习专业
5. 游戏以外的爱好/兴趣

系统配置信息:

这组问题有助于你了解玩家的系统、配置,从而确定你游戏的最低配置要求。

1. 操作系统
2. CPU规格
2. 显卡
3. Ram
5. 拥有的显示器数量
6. 主显示器最大分辨率
7. 宽带网速

游戏习惯:

这部分问题很有趣,它们能帮助你进行有针对性的营销,了解玩家是哪种类型的人、他们一般上哪儿获取游戏资讯,以及更多商业化的东西,比如你的潜在玩家是否在游戏中消费,花销大概多少。

总之,以下是我们提出的问题:

1. 每周花在游戏上的时间
2. 打游戏的地点
3. 一周内哪几天、几点打游戏
4. 每个月在游戏上花多少钱
5. 通过什么渠道购买游戏
6. 是否购买游戏道具
7. 游戏道具的类型是
8. 游戏商品消费额
9. 拥有的游戏设备
10. 不同游戏平台所花时间比
11. 玩过的游戏类型
12. 最喜欢的三种类型
13. 使用的社交媒体平台
14. 获取游戏资讯的来源
15. 最喜欢的YouTube/Twitter频道
16. 对传统游戏媒体/新闻业的看法

游戏类型方面的具体问题:

接着,问一些针对你的游戏类型的具体问题。

这些问题涵盖了与你的游戏相似的产品中的机制和功能,询问玩家这些机制和功能令他们喜欢和不喜欢的地方、他们最喜爱的游戏模式是什么,以及他们分别花多长时间打在线和离线模式。

这一部分问题一定要尽可能全面,但这可能会导致你的问卷调查过长,玩家不太可能完成它。未来你有很多机会做进一步调查,因此你可以先列出那些对你的开发计划至关重要的问题。

此外,至关重要的一点是,为所有问题提供选项,否则人们可能会不知如何回答某个问题然后放弃它。

尽可能延长调查周期,你希望获得来自广泛玩家群体的数据,填写问卷的人越多,数据就越准确。

让社区成为团队的延伸

哇哦,已经接近尾声了。你已经制定了品牌、沟通和内容计划,开始在Discord上建立玩家社区,获得了大量的调查数据,但愿它们能帮助你确定目标玩家。但是,你究竟要如何充分利用你的社区,比方说,让他们成为你的团队的延伸?

好吧,建立早期社区的好处是,你会发现社区成员在很多方面能为你提供帮助:

1. 我们前面讨论过的沟通和内容计划,是由一位社区成员为我们制定的,他是英国一家顶级手机公司的传媒经理,并且拒绝了我们提供的报酬,他只是想帮助我们。
2. 另一名正在学习数学和数据分析的社区成员协助我们分析、理解了上述问卷调查中收集的数据。
3. 我们很喜欢Discord机器人,它的作用是如此之大……一些社区成员有这方面经验,并帮助我们创建了满足我们需求的机器人。如今我们有一个可玩性测试机器人,还有一个超酷的机器人,它与我们的后端系统相连,帮助我们在Discord上发布战斗、排行榜数据。
4. 社区成员来自世界各地意味着,你大概拥有说着不同语言的玩家——你可以把游戏内的文本对话整理成一个电子表格,把翻译工作外包给你的社区成员……也许你想等游戏成熟后找专业人士完成这项工作,但提早进行它能帮助你测试一些游戏内容,并确保用户界面和字体支持其他语言。

但社区发挥作用最大的地方是在反馈和测试方面。

在开发早期,定期与核心团队之外的人员合作进行测试是非常有帮助的。它不仅能让你尽早发现bug,而且还为你提供游戏上手性、可玩性和趣味性等方面的反馈,从而帮助你制作出更好的游戏。

哨兵计划(The Sentry Program)

我们工作室开展了一个“哨兵计划”。

“哨兵计划”的目的是帮助我们不断地从不同类型的玩家那里获得反馈。

我们从社区成员中选出了10名玩家,他们来自不同国家,代表着从硬核竞技型玩家到更休闲的玩家类型,这使我们获得了更全面的反馈,确保我们朝着实现游戏的品牌计划目标努力。

但“哨兵们”不仅仅是测试员。在我们发布宣传内容或公告前,我们会先获取他们的反馈,在我们制定盈利战略、发行计划和做设计决策时,我们都会首先寻求他们的意见……我们对彼此保持百分百的坦诚。他们代表了我们的玩家群体,使我们了解玩家的真实情况。

那么,你如何建立自己的“哨兵”团队呢?

1. 制定一份申请表,确保其中的问题能帮助你招募到合适的人。在我们的申请表中,我们重点关注申请人是否能以建设性的方式表达他们的深思熟虑的观点。我们还希望了解申请人是什么类型的玩家、年龄和游戏习惯。然而,我们的问题没有所谓正确答案,很多问题甚至有点傻,比如“2145年,整个世界支离破碎,但电子游戏依然存在,它们对社会的影响是什么?”我们得到了一些很有趣的答案。
2. 为这些测试人员制定一些特殊规定。他们将深入了解开发过程,并看到游戏早期形态。因此,应限制他们与广大的社区交流分享的内容。与他们详细讨论这一点,并确保他们接受和遵守这些规则。
3. 发起招募活动前的2-3个星期,通过其它媒体平台推广这项活动,这样你就能吸引更多的人到你的Discord社区。
4. 允许这些测试员直播早期游戏内容。
5. 基于提交的申请表,从中选择一群具有广泛代表性的玩家加入你的团队。
6. 将这些测试员视为你的社区版主,允许他们与其他社区成员讨论有关游戏的话题。
7. 邀请这些测试员参加公司活动,请他们帮助演示游戏(用小吃饮料犒劳他们)
8. 为他们建立Discord私人频道,讨论不适合向社区开放的话题。

Alpha/Beta测试 & 分析的力量

在我看来,制作多个测试版本比冒险进行Early Access发行更有价值——特别是在你寻求发行商或额外资金时。原因如下:

1. 大多数情况下,Early Access发行后你只能获得一小部分收入,因为用户会对你的游戏保持怀疑/或想等待完整版。
2. 游戏进入Early Access后,你必须制定相当可靠的内容计划,确保源源不断的内容更新和bug修复,一旦失误很可能会丧失玩家信任。
3. 发行商不太可能和已经进行Early Access发行的工作室合作——发行游戏的好机会只有一次。
4. 媒体不太愿意报道Early Access游戏,并且一旦他们报道了,游戏最好能引起轰动,否则他们不太可能在游戏正式推出后再次报道它
5. 一旦你进行Early Access发行,你就要开始面对所有正面和负面的评价。

这就是为什么我建议你制作一些只向游戏社区开放的封闭测试版本。

随着Discord更新,如今有了一些更酷的功能。首先,你现在可以使用特殊的频道——商店。Discord的商店超酷的地方在于你可以设置多个页面,并且根据用户角色控制他们访问该页面——这意味着你可以通过变更用户角色控制他们的访问权限。社区成员拥有多个角色,一旦删除某个社区成员的角色,他们即便已经安装好了游戏也无法进入。

考虑到这一点,下面是一些关于进行封闭测试,甚至是社区内部更小范围测试的建议:

1. 在各个内容渠道提前宣布测试阶段。
2. 首先向社区内最具影响力的成员开放测试,甚至举行内测资格竞争,从而制造话题。
3. 建立反馈和错误报告渠道,或直接在游戏中使用相关工具。
4. 测试期不要过长……我们进行了8周,从周五晚上到周一早上,每周都尝试推出新功能,几乎要了我们的命。最好进行一周时间。
5. 让测试员们进行直播,询问他们是否能向观众宣传你们的Discord频道。此外,尽可能多观看这些直播,并和主播们互动,这是与他们建立融洽关系的好机会……特别是和那些粉丝很多的主播建立这些关系,这样在游戏发行后他们更有可能帮你宣传。
6. 最重要的是,确保在进行测试前建立起分析团队——尽可能多地收集数据。良好的数据指标,加上不断扩大的社区规模,将帮助你获得投资……这一点帮助了我们。

总之,就是这些。

本文由游戏邦编译,转载请注明来源,或咨询微信zhengjintiao

Hi Everyone,

So today I’m going to be talking about Communities; Why you should be building one pre-launch, how to put together your brand, communication and content strategy in order to help build one, setting up your community hub and most importantly how to turn your community into an extension of your team.

I’ll also explain why and how this can benefit your creative, marketing and business processes, help you raise additional funding and help you mitigate risk at launch.

I don’t profess to be an expert in the field of community management or marketing and some of you may already be going through the processes of building your communities and working through your marketing plans, but no matter your level of experience hopefully you’ll get some use out of this.

———————————-
Who Am I?

Before I get started I should probably tell you a bit about myself – I’m Justin French, founder and CEO of Dream Harvest.

Previous to starting Dream Harvest I worked in both AAA and Indie as a sound designer, composer, project manager and consultant. I also used to teach game design and development at a local college as an industry specialist where I re-wrote the ICT Level 2 BTEC course, replacing the focus on app development using Visual Basic with games development using Unity and C#, giving 16 – 19-year-olds a real taste of industry-relevant skills. I also used to work as a game and tech recruiter for a recruitment agency. Previous to the games industry I worked in the music industry as a freelance recording and mix engineer at studios across the country as well as a business adviser to musicians.

——————————————-
Why You Should Be Building A Pre-Launch Community

When we develop games, we often start by focusing on ourselves, trying to create an experience or experiences that we’d want to play and enjoy, but in reality, we’re really building experiences for them:

The millions of players out there in the world. I mean, we are businesses, and we need to sell our games to continue to be businesses.

The games industry is incredibly risky – Time and time again we’re seeing games launch and fail due to a wide variety of reasons such as:

As a studio, we’re developing NeuroSlicers, a cyberpunk real-time strategy game that combines solo, co-op and competitive PVP gameplay into a seamless narrative-driven experience.

Our community is central to our business strategy, we started building ours before we even had a playable and is especially important due to our attempts to really innovate the genre’s core mechanics and expand the potential audience beyond the traditional hardcore / competitive gamer player types associated with RTS games.

1. No pre-launch marketing and community building so no one knows about the game
2. Launching at the wrong time so everyone is pre-occupied with something else
3. The game doesn’t look/feel polished enough
4. The game is something no one wants to play due to visuals/mechanics/narrative not hitting a chord / resonate with anyone (Lack of market research)
5. The Pricing strategy is wrong
6. The game is riddled with technical issues on launch
7. The game is overhyped pre-launch leading to high level of overly critical/negative reception
8. Developers are un-responsive to their player base or respond to negative criticism in an ineffective way causing a loss of trust.

The list could probably go on, but the important thing to note is that most, if not all of these points can be mitigated by effectively building and communicating with your community as early as possible.

A community is a sounding board, both pre and post-release. It’s a place where you as developers can seek player validation, sanity check your decisions from a design, usability and business standpoint while also giving players a chance to see the inner-workings of the games development process, where you can show them the reality that games dev is hard and expensive!

Most importantly, this can and will lead to “player buy-in” and build faith between developers and their audience and also helps minimise the likelihood of toxicity within a growing community.

Seth Godin – Famous Marketing Guru
“Your smallest viable audience holds you to account. It forces a focus and gives you nowhere to hide.”

We’ve seen the effects of not listening to your audience over the past year within the AAA space with games such as:

-Fallout 76 – Stripped out all the content that people loved about Fallout and left just a hollow shell of the worst parts.
-Darksiders 3 – Rather than improving upon the innovation that DS2 made over DS1 it went back to basics, creating a linear slog with terrible combat which ultimately disappointing fans of the franchise.
-Metal Gear Survive – Konami building a MGS game in name only, no one wanted this game, especially with Hideo Kojima out of the picture. A Cash grab.

There is a multitude of other examples that I’m sure all of you could list.

Studios that treat their audience as cash cows rather than listening to and making informed decisions based on what their audience wants will eventually be lost and forgotten, shunned by their community for not listening.

It’s essential that we build our studios on a foundation of player trust and open communication. Making the players part of the development process, making us accountable for our decisions.

Many of us are in a unique position compared to studios working on established franchises with established communities with pre-conceived expectations and this means we can start with a relatively clean slate that allows us to control the message we want to give to our players. We hold all the cards and can influence and shape our community before it has a chance to grow to a point where it’s autonomous – but this also means that its essential that the right kind of seeds are sown so that when the community does grow, it flourishes, growing into something wonderful instead of something out of our control.

So, hopefully, I’ve convinced you of the importance of creating a pre-launch community, but how exactly do you go about building it.

When we first started working on NeuroSlicers, we didn’t do this, we started building our community through a lot of trial and error, feeling our way through the process and we made a lot of mistakes along the way – I mean, try running a Kickstarter campaign with a game called Failure…..what NeuroSlicers used to be called!

I wish I’d known this stuff 3 years ago, but I’m also glad we learnt the hard way and built upon our experience which has helped us define who we are now.

We can now, hopefully, share a better way to go about doing things.

———————————–
Brand, Communication And Content Strategy

Well, the first step is to make sure you have a good brand and communication strategy in place that can be used by your whole team and which defines how you’ll attract and talk with your community, acting as a set of guidelines that will give the team direction and motivation. There is a multitude of other benefits and elements that make up the process of branding (ie, the Logo) that could be a whole another talk in itself, but here I’m just going to cover the key elements you’ll want in the documents specific to the communication side of things, rather than visual identity:

I. The Brand Strategy

You’ll want to put together a document with the following:

1. The Game Elevator Pitch

You want the whole team to be able to memorise this; its a summary of everything that is your game and should be enough to get people excited

Our one, for NeuroSlicers, is possibly a bit too long, but I’ve been using it for the past 3 years of pitching so it’s kinda stuck:

NeuroSlicers is a highly tactical cyberpunk RTS that turns the genre on its head by focusing on fast, macro and total information gameplay, short 8-12 min matches, epic global objectives and a dark cyberpunk narrative campaign that seamlessly blends competitive PVP, Co-Op and singleplayer into a truly unified gaming experience.

Control clever AI-powered units, use powerful hacking abilities that allow you to manipulate the levels and spawn advanced weaponry and buildings that allow you to take over the network one data node at a time.

II. The Game’s Core Identity

i. Vision

This is all about how you want your game to be perceived, what it is aspiring to be.

A deeply immersive, narrative-rich and highly tactical experience that is loved and enjoyed by both hardcore strategy fans as well as the wider mainstream. An unparalleled strategic gameplay experience that puts the player at the centre of the story and lets them be in control of their own destiny.

ii. Mission

This is usually put before vision and is used to define what your company currently is, but for games, I like to swap Vision and Mission around and use mission as a statement that explains how you will reach your vision.

Focus on higher level tactical play, shorter matches, high intensity battles and exciting memorable “edge of your seat” moments and wrap it in a deep narrative-driven campaign that combines solo, co-op and pvp and which modernises the genre and brings strategy games into the mainstream while offering lovers of the genre a brand new experience and set of challenges.

iii. Values

These are all about common goals, what defines the experience you are creating. You generally should stick to 5 or less otherwise it’s hard for your team to memorise.

Deep Tactical Play
Easy Learning Curve
Exciting and Rich Narrative
Highly Immersive

iv. Brand Positioning
Your brand position is how your game/brand differs from other similar games on the market. There might be several things, but for here, just choose what you feel is the strongest, ie your game is the only game that…….

NeuroSlicers is the only strategy game that combines PVE, co-op and PVP gameplay into a unified narrative-driven experience with the player and their journey at the centre

v. Value Proposition
This section is all about why players will be attracted to your game. What exactly will the game give them in exchange for their time? Why exactly should they purchase and play your game?

NeuroSlicers lets player’s play through the content they want to engage with while progressing the core narrative, we make the experience accessible while retaining the depth that the core audience expects. And finally, we modernise the genre by bonding together PVE, Co-Op, PVP and narrative gameplay and progression into a seamless whole.

vi. Tagline
Your tagline is a phrase, “hook” or call to action that encompasses everything that is your game. For NeuroSlicers, we’re still trying to work out exactly what we want ours to be, but currently use the following:

Determine Your Reality

This encompasses both our narrative – the battle over two realities, the real world and the digital AR layer that hides the real world that everyone in our game is forced to live in, and, how player choice and customization is central to our experience as players embody the role of a “Slicer”, a hacker who is able to see beyond the digital veil and, through their choices, determine their reality and future reality for humanity.

II. Messaging Architecture

Message architecture is a vital component of any content strategy because, without it, you do not have a framework for creating your content.

As Content Marketing Institute puts it:
Creating content without a message architecture is like building a house without a floor plan.

To build your messaging architecture it’s suggested that you take a workshop approach with your team. You want to put together cue cards with at least 75 descriptive Adjectives (though more can be useful) and then as a team, filter them into 3 piles consisting of

“What the game is”,
“What we want the game to be”
“What the game is not”.

You also want to make sure they’re ordered by what you and your team feel is the most important ones.

Once you’ve done this, there might be team members that disagree with the placement of certain cards – discuss this among everyone to determine if the placement is correct. Once you’ve done this, choose the top 3-5 from the What the Game is and What we want the game to be piles and discuss what these Adjectives really mean to you and your game.

For us, we had the following:

What NeuroSlicers Is

Innovative

1. We push the boundaries and preconceptions of the genre
2. We aren’t satisfied with the traditions of the genre
3. We carefully review other games in the genre and their failings in order to improve and attempt to avoid the same pitfalls

As NeuroSlicers is still in development, not everything is in game yet, on that note, this is What We’d Like NeuroSlicers To Be:

Immersive

1. We place the player in the shoes of the character
2. We use 4th Wall breaking techniques to get the player to embody this character
3. We use an evolving narrative with real player decisions and consequences

Approachable

1. We carefully craft the onboarding experience for new players
2. We allow players to play the content they’re most interested in
3. We culture a community that’s driven to support each other
4. We look at UX best practices across all genres and use and/or attempt to improve upon them

With these defined it now becomes much easier for the team to know what kind of content and message you want to push with your social media and community outreach. But how exactly do you want to communicate this message?

III. Your Brand Voice

Traditionally Your brand voice requires that you define a consistent and unchanging way of communicating with your audience. It’s usually defined by your company’s personality combined with a tone that dictates an adjustable emotional inflexion applied to your voice depending on the particular message or piece you are sharing

In other words, if your brand was a person, how would it talk?

My personal issue with this is that, firstly, if you are still working on your first product, you will likely still be trying to work out what your vision, mission statement and core values are as a studio or these are likely product based rather than company based and you don’t currently have any customers….I mean, you might have a community who are potential customers, but they’ve not bought your game yet. Secondly, it hides the individual personalities of your team members behind a company / corporate face and doesn’t allow your community to really get to know the people making the game.

Games are made through the harvesting of great ideas, the dreams you could say, of a combination of people (unless your a solo dev) – Its the hard work and creativity of the individuals on your teams that should be praised and celebrated by your community and I think there is ample room for the community to really get to know your team better, not just the company.

However, some lines do need to be drawn regarding what can and can’t be discussed and there does need to be a shared vision and way of describing things.

I suggest you put together, as part of all the other documentation you’re doing for your branding and communication planning, another document that outlines the following:

Communicating Planned Game Features

1. A description that defines key talking points for each feature
2. Key Words to use when describing each feature
3. Key Words to avoid when describing each feature
4. A Label to signify whether it can be talked about now, later or never
5. Any helpful notes.
6. A link to a dropbox folder with assets to share that are associated with this feature.

With this and the other branding documentation in place, your team should be in a good position to be able to talk about the game while still being able to put across their own personalities. But where exactly should they be talking about the game and what kind of content works where?

IV. Communication Strategy Plan

Many of us don’t have dedicated social media managers, community managers or marketing people on the team, so it’s important that the whole team works together to help grow your community. It’s especially helpful if you have team members that speak more than 1 language and can translate your social media and community hub posts.

However, one very very important note – You’ll want to try and keep the place where you have meaningful conversations to a single place. Based on conversations I’ve had with community managers and senior marketing people, It becomes very very hard to manage a community split across multiple locations, ie Steam Forums, your Forums and Discord. Pick one, syphon people there and stick with it, at least until you have a dedicated community person on the team.

Also, get into automating your social media; use tools like Crowdfire or Hootsuite, it makes things much much easier to manage and means you’ll be spending more time building your game and content and less time managing the social media side of things.

Anyway, here are a few sites to get started:

1. Discord
This is a great place to have the main community hub where you interact with your fans on a daily basis and share timed exclusive content before tweeting this content or including it in a newsletter; ultimately you want people to be funneled here from all other places. With the recent changes to the Discord store, there are also some cool new features you can make use of which I’ll talk about a bit later.

2. Twitter
You should be tweeting on a daily basis and preferably with images, gifs and videos. Always make use of hashtags, but never more than 2 or 3 max and one of them should be a custom one for your game, i.e. for us we have #NeuroSlicers.

The other hashtag should be either #gamedev, #indiedev or on Wednesday at 6PM BST #indiedevhour, on Friday’s (if you’re using Unity) #madewithunity and on Saturday’s #screenshotsaturday. It’s important you research the best hashtags to use for your particular genre and theme. We make use of #cyberpunk quite a bit for instance.

Always try to link to your Discord and/or Newsletter within every tweet to push people to your main community hub. Track engagement on the Twitter analytics page and work out why certain tweets maybe work better than others (time, visual content, word content, hashtag use, etc). Also. make sure you get other team members, or your other accounts to retweet using a different set of 2 hashtags and try to retweet your own posts every 3 – 4 hours in order to hit other time zones with your content. Content with images are a good, Gifs and videos are even better and you’ll see much more engagement with these.

3. Instagram
We’ve seen some of the highest engagement over on Instagram compared to other social platforms. Its a great place to share photos of your working environment, the team and your day to day experience as developers and offers a great way to share the personality of your studio and game. The only downside to Instagram is that links don’t work on normal posts, only paid posts. We personally tried posting 1 image a day for a few weeks and saw good growth and engagement over that time.

On Instagram its essential you make use of as many hashtags as possible (Up to 30) to reach as many different topic based feeds – research the most popular hashtags for your genre and use all of them – though do be careful, there is a character limit on Instagram (2200), but they don’t show this on the app…instead you’ll just find that half your text has been cut-off when you post.

4. Blog
This can be hosted directly on your site or somewhere like Tumblr if your doing it in a written form, however, we’ve personally started doing video dev blogs instead as they’re faster to produce and allow you to put a face to the game that I believe people appreciate.

Blogs should be done on a monthly or bi-weekly basis as well as part of your newsletter. Repost these blogs across other sites such as IndieDB, Facebook, Medium or anywhere else where you think might be worthwhile and also be sure to tweet about them.

Try to find a single topic to cover in a blog in detail while also giving a general update on the progress of development. Once again, always remember to include a link to your Discord, funnel readers there by saying something like “If you’d like to discuss any of the topics covered in this month’s blog then head over to blah blah blah……”

5. Newsletter
This should be a bi-weekly/monthly thing where you summarize all the marketing content you’ve created that month and where you link to this content. Keep newsletters short and sweet with interesting headlines and a paragraph or two for each section before linking to the bulk of the content held on your Blog, YouTube, Twitch, etc – once again, push people to your Discord so they can discuss the topics.

MailChimp is a good product for this and has pretty good analytics that allows you to track opens, the location of people opening your newsletter and more including A/B testing Newsletter headers, splitting send outs with different content to check for the responses, etc.

6. YouTube
On your YouTube channel, you should be posting your video dev blogs, gameplay snippets, trailers, interviews with your team where they discuss their role on the project, videos of your time at events, recordings of live streams, game feature deep dives and anything else you can think of.

Make sure you organize your YouTube channel into categories so it’s easy for people to find the content they’re most interested in. Make new video uploads unlisted and share them first via your Discord so your Community gets a first look, then maybe a week later make them public and tweet about them. Make sure you emphasize that your Discord community is getting a first look at everything you create on here.

7. Twitch
Try to live stream at least once or twice a month, ideally more. You can hold special live stream events where you giveaway other games (It’s super handy having a Humble Monthly subscription and also buying some of the Humble Bundles to have a big catalogue of game keys to give away for competitions).

You can live stream your team programming, your artists doing art, new gameplay features, an internal competition, anything really. Try to live stream at a variety of different hours throughout the week and weekend so that you can be sure that people from across the globe can attend at least some of them. Once a stream is over, upload the video to your YouTube Channel for those members of your community that couldn’t attend the live stream.

Be sure to create some good visual assets for your channel and Streaming overlay.

Always be sure to promote your Discord throughout your stream.

8. IndieDB
Personally not a big fan of IndieDB, I think the interface and UX needs a massive overhaul as it’s incredibly archaic, but it’s still a good place to re-post your blogs and get them featured on the IndieDB homepage.

You need to make sure you stick to their rules when posting content on your pages here though (something like at least 5 new images or a video) otherwise they’ll archive the post and it will only be visible on your personal game page.

9. Facebook
There are a lot of game dev and gaming community Facebook groups out there; join as many of them and feel free to spam posts to your other content; you’ll get a few hits this way – though, Facebook has become less business-friendly over the past year or so and less effective for marketing efforts due to changes in their algorithms.

Studios with existing large communities have fewer issues, but it’s harder now than ever to build a community on Facebook due to how the algorithm only shares your posts to a small segment of your followers initially and then based on engagement it might share it with more people

10. VK Communities
VK is a platform similar to Facebook predominantly used by Russian and Eastern European users. We only began using this during our Closed Pre-Alpha and saw lots of interest. Its probably worthwhile having a translated version of your Facebook page on here and cross-posting stuff you post on Facebook to your official game page here.

11. Steam Store Page
This is something you should have set up around 6 – 8 months before release, but only if you have all your key art and a solid video and screenshots ready. At this point it’s recommended that you make your store page live with the tag “Coming Soon” so people can start Wish Listing your game. This is much better than allowing pre-orders in order to get as many day 1 sales as possible. In addition, making your store page live will open up your steam community pages to the public, here you’ll want to pin a post that tries to push people to your Discord.

V. The Content Plan

Now that you have a list of key places to post your content you’ll want to put your actual plan together. In a new document, put together a couple of tables that outline the following:

Objectives For Each Phase Of Development

Your phases might be

Phase 1: Pre-Alpha / Alpha / Development
Phase 2: Beta Testing
Phase 3: Launch

Under each heading, you’ll want to list the key talking points and content that you want to focus on during that phase. For instance:

Phase 1:
1. Share the Development Journey – Showing the evolution of the game
2. Spotlight Features on the team and their backgrounds
3. Story Introduction/Tease
4. Community Foundations – Start building the community
Phase 2:
1. Mechanics – Locking down gameplay mechanics
2. Building world narrative – Feature focus
3. Background story for the season launch
4. Community excitement – Build up to launch. Game Feature lockdown
Phase 3:
1. Product, features and content lockdown – Price points and versions
2. Story Reveal
3. Key Character Profiles
4. Community profiling – Identifying and rewarding early adopters

Here’s what the table will look like once built:

This is used as a springboard to generate discussion and ideas regarding the content you’ll be sharing with your community and should be continuously expanded upon throughout development and beyond to support your post-launch communication planning.

Next up is a table for laying out your Channel Structure, ie where you’re going to be posting content, when you’re going to be posting it, what the core messages/content types are and who is the key owner responsible for posting on each channel is. Here’s a screenshot of ours:

 

Based on this table you can now start to build a roadmap/calendar of your content marketing plan and align it to your development roadmap and the objectives for each phase of the development plan. Make sure your whole team is subscribed to the calendar/roadmap and set some time aside each week to prepare the content with your team.

——————————————-
DISCORD – THE HUB FOR YOUR COMMUNITY

Discord has quickly become the go-to platform for community building over the last couple of years and continues to grow in popularity.

Replacing the traditional forum as a place to discuss and engage with your audience in a more direct way, Discord is an amazing platform that seems to be going from strength to strength.

Some of the key features include:

1. Channels for different topics
2. Channel grouping
3. Variety Of Channel Types
-Text Channels
-Voice Channels
-News Channel
-Shop Channels
4. Incredibly powerful user/role management
5. Custom Emoji
6. The potential for deep integration with your games:
-Discord overlays
-In game chat systems
-Direct Spectate
-Direct Join
-Custom Bot Support
7. Video and Screen sharing via DM
8. Integration with Twitch and other streaming services
9. Lots more…

So how do you get started using Discord as your community hub?

You’ll want to set up a number of things starting with your…

1. Your Welcome Page
Your Welcome page is the starting point of any good community. It should contain everything a new member should know about your community to get settled in. It should be broken down into the following sections which I’ll go into more detail after:

-Welcome Message
-Rules
-Team

1. Your Welcome Message
This should be the first thing that your users see and it’s a good idea to get this to appear via Mee6 when they join your Discord server. Keep it short and sweet while directing your users to the channels where discussion topics are happening. Here’s ours as an example:

2. Your Community Rules
It’s important that with any new community you start on the right foot and have some robust rules in place for new users. Make sure you direct new users to where your rules are, such as a welcome page when they join. Here are some rules to get you started:

It’s also a good idea to gain “buy in” from your early community members in regards to your rules – discuss this topic with them and go through each rule in detail explaining why you feel this will help create a more positive community space.

3. Your Team Section
You want your community to know who your team members are and what their role on the project is. This will help to connect your community with your team and allow the community to ask specific questions to the right people.

In addition to this, having some mods (in our case our selected community member testers, something we’ll talk about in a bit) that help out with your community is a good idea. I talk more about this in the last section of the guide. Finally, make sure that your team and mods have a strict naming convention in terms of their username on Discord and be sure to assign the correct roles and colours so that your community can easily identify your team

4. Channel Topics
Setting up a variety of Channels for particular topics is a good idea, but start with a small number of them. As your community grows you’ll naturally start to need new ones. Start with the following:

-Welcome
-General
-Offtopic
-News

5. Roles
Roles are a good way to separate out your community and channel access. You’ll want to spend a bit of time sorting out and setting these up correctly with the right types of server and channel permissions…..on that note, Role permissions can be overridden on a per channel basis so be careful with this. You can have as many as you want but a good rule of thumb is to start with the following:

-Dev Team
-Mods
-Content Creators
-Users

Its a good idea to separate out the content creators from the general community members on your server and maybe even give them their own channel where you can share exclusive content for them to use for videos.

-Conversation Topics to Get your Community Chatting-

So you’ve started to get people to sign up to your discord but your struggling to think of how to engage with them in an effective way. Here are a number of things you can start doing:

1. Have a Competition to get community members to design / come up with a new design idea or even some fan art or anything really
2. Set up some rules on your welcome page but ask your community what they should be; get them to buy into the rules in order to mitigate any future toxicity
3. Share concept art or even early sketches for a particular unit/building/whatever design, but have several versions and get the community to vote on which they prefer
4. Talk about problems/challenges your facing as a developer, give them an inside look at the process
5. Share your development roadmap and discuss priorities with the community, maybe even get them to vote for the next feature.
6. Talk about your team members, who they are, what their role on the project is
7. Live stream some early gameplay or create some super raw videos that you share with your community
8. Share funny bugs and other random stuff you come across during development
9. Do a feature deep dive where you talk about a particular element of your game in detail and ask for community feedback
10. Get your most vocal community members involved as testers, make this super exclusive so there’s some real competition around the application process and allow these testers to stream your game.
11. Gamify your community using something like Mee6, create private channels for the people that reach a certain level and share special stuff only in those channels
12. Most importantly, talk like a human being rather than a corporate / PR / Marketing person; allow the community to connect with you as an individual

- Additional Discord Tips & Tricks-

1. Make Your News and Welcome Channels Read Only so Important Messages always stay in view
2. Pin Pin and Pin Some more….seriously, start pinning interesting conversation topics so that you can direct newer members of your community to them and get their instant input on things.
3. Don’t be afraid to join a bazillion other discord groups, especially gaming communities to do with your genre of game – these are great places to find new community members for your own discord. Also join ones not to do with your genre of game….you never know where you might find new players!
4. Replace the hard to remember Discord invite link and setup a CNAME record on your domain that’s linked to a “never expiring” discord invite link – this way you can have a cool url like [http://discord.yourgamename.com](http://discord.yourgamename.com/) which will look so much better on a business card, poster or flyer.

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Who Exactly Is Your Audience?

So you have your brand plan, communication plan and content plan in place and you’ve started to build a community on something like Discord, but who exactly are you trying to attract to your community?

I’m sure most of you have gone through the process of defining who your key audience is but I think it’s important to have a little refresher as part of this process leads into how to make the most from your community once you’ve started building it.

In branding, the process of building Persona’s is a key part of understanding the types of people that are potentially your customers. It allows us to paint a picture regarding the types of habits, character traits, lifestyles, ages and more in order to better target our marketing efforts towards different segmentation’s within our community.

However, gathering this information isn’t always straightforward. Where do you find these people and how exactly do you go about speaking with enough of them to define your brand’s Personas?

The first step – you’ll need to start with looking at comparable products and the communities built around them. Where do the developers of these games engage with their communities?

Well, they’re more than likely spread across a number of the following:

-The Developer’s Discord
-The Publisher’s Discord
-Fan Discord dedicated to that specific game or genre
-Forums
-Reddit
-Facebook Groups
-Twitter (Maybe not so much….well, at least its harder to work with for this exercise)
IRL meetups / events

Embed yourself into these communities, try to understand what people are discussing, what they like and dislike about the game and the genre in general. Take a look at who are the most vocal community members and how they interact with the wider community and most importantly, review how the Developer / Publisher handles the management of the community and how people respond to their interactions.

You’ll want to do this for as many games within the genre you’re working with as possible. Also take note of how the games themselves link back to their support forums, discord, newsletter, etc – how the developers/publisher syphon their player base to their community hub.

Talking with people and developers in the communities for a few days is generally a good idea before doing the next step as you’ll want to try and build a bit of a repertoire – be honest and open about why you are there and you’ll likely get a better response with…..

- The Survey-

The survey serves a few purposes:

1. It allows you to get a good understanding of the demographics of your potential audience,
2. It allows you to find out key information about what players of the genre like and dislike about the genre and allows you to work out how you can shape your own USP’s to some of those targets.
3. It gives some key insights into the playing and gaming culture habits of your potential audience
4. It gives you a chance to start syphoning players to your community hub and other social media channels and newsletter by including links to all at the bottom of the survey.

Just posting a survey expecting people to fill it out will lead to a tepid response, this is why I suggested you spend a week or two talking and sharing things on each community first. Also, if it’s another developer’s or publisher’s Discord, be sure to ask them if its ok to post the survey first.

So what kind of questions do you want to be asking? Here’s a rundown of the types of things we asked for our Persona building survey, broken into a number of key sections:

Personal Information:

This set of questions helps to build a general idea of your core demographics and the backgrounds of your potential players.

1. Date Of Birth
2. Sex
3. Country of Residence
4. Job Title / Course Studying
5. Hobbies / Interests Outside of Gaming

System Information:

Helpful for getting a good idea of the types of systems your players will be playing your game on and what you should be attempting to target in terms of minimum specs.

1. Operating System
2. CPU Specs
3. Graphics Card
4. Ram
5. Number of Monitors
6. Max Resolution of main Monitor
7. Internet Speed

Gaming Habits:

This is where some of the fun stuff is. Some of these questions can really help with determining where your marketing efforts should be focused, the types of people and places your community go to get their information about games they enjoy playing and also more business orientated things like knowing whether your potential community spends money on gaming merchandise and how much they spend in general on gaming.

Anyway, here are the questions we asked:

1. Time spent gaming per week
2. Where they play games
3.Days of the week when players play and what time
4.How much they spend each month on games
5. Where they buy their games
6. Do they buy gaming merchandise
7. Types of merchandise bought
8. Amount spent on merchandise per month
9. Gaming hardware owned
10. Time split between gaming platforms
11. Genres of games played
12. Top 3 Favorite Genres
13. Social media platforms used
14. The primary source of their gaming news
15. Favourite YouTube / Twitch Channels
16. Opinion on traditional gaming media/journalism

Genre Specific Questions:

You’ll then want to have a section with questions that are specific to your genre.

Questions that cover mechanics and features that are maybe common in games similar to yours, what players like and dislike about each of these, the modes of play they enjoy most and how their time is split between online and offline play in different modes.

Being as thorough as possible in this section is important, but you might end up with a super long list of questions and the longer the survey the less likely people that will complete it. You can always run further surveys down the line, so maybe stick with questions that are key to your development plan.

Also, super important, but make all the questions optional otherwise people might get to a question they don’t know how to answer and give up.

Leave the survey running for as long as possible, you want to collect data from a good cross section of players and the more people that fill it out the more accurate that data will be.

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Turning Your Community Into An Extension Of Your Team

Wow, so we’re almost there. You’ve put together a Brand plan, comms plan, content plan, started building your community on Discord and now have a load of data that hopefully gives you an idea of who your audience is, but how exactly do you now make the most of your community, ie, make them an extension of your team?

well, the great thing about an early stage community is that you’ll potentially start to find that community members are happy to help with all sorts of things…..

1. The Communication and Content plan we talked about, well that was put together for us by a community member that turned out to be a Communication Manager at one of the top UK mobile phone companies, and when we offered to pay him he refused, he just wanted to help us out.
2. All the data gathered from the survey above; well, it turns out that another one of our community members is studying a masters in mathematics and data analysis and offered to help us make sense of it.
3. Discord bots; we love them at Dream Harvest, there’s so much you can do with them….it also helps that several of our community members have built some before and offered to help develop ones for our needs. We have a playtest bot and also a really cool bot that integrates with our backend systems so we can get match and leaderboard data posted to our discord.
4. Having community members from all around the world means you probably have people that speak quite a few different languages – why not put all your in-game text and dialogue into a giant spreadsheet and crowdsource the translations with your community…..you’ll probably want to get things professionally translated down the line, but doing it early means you can test things in game and make sure things like your UI and fonts support other languages.

But where a community becomes massively powerful is feedback and testing.

Early stage, regular testing with people outside of your core team is amazingly helpful. It allows you to not only catch bugs early and often but the feedback regarding usability, playability and fun will help you make better games.

-The Sentry Program-

We run a program at Dream Harvest called The Sentries.

The Sentry program was designed to help us get a constant stream of feedback from as wide a variety of player types within our audience demographic.

For us its made up of 10 members of our community, from all around the world with player types ranging from super hardcore competitive gamers all the way to much more casual players and allows us to get a good breadth of feedback and makes sure we are always working towards what we defined within our branding plan for NeuroSlicers.

But the sentries are so much more than testers. We use them as a test bed when planning our other communication and announcements, they act as our first port of call when discussing things such as monetization strategy, release plans, design decisions……we are brutally honest with them and they are brutally honest with us back. They’re a true cross-section of our players and get a real look through the looking glass.

So how do you go about building your own Sentry team?

1. Put together a survey and make sure you’re asking the right questions in order to determine who would be right for your team. With our survey, we specifically wanted to understand the applicants’ ability to explain and argue their point in a well thought out and constructive way. We also wanted to understand what type of gamers they were, what their age and gaming habits were. The core of our questions, however, had no right or wrong answers and many of them were pretty silly such as “The year is 2145, the world has fallen apart, but video games still exist, what part do they play in society?” We got some pretty interesting answers.
2. Set up some specific rules for these testers. They’re going to be getting an inside look at the development process and early builds before anyone else. There needs to be a bit of control over what they can and can’t share with the wider community in public channels. Discuss this with them in detail before putting the rules into effect, making sure that they’ve all bought into them.
3. Promote the Survey through other social media at least two or three weeks before you launch it so that you can drive new people to your Discord Community.
4. Allow these testers to live stream early content.
5. Based on the submissions, try to select a cross section of your core demographic to bring onboard.
6. Treat these testers as your community moderators, allow them to discuss topics regarding the game with other community members.
7. Invite these testers to events and get them to help demo the game (and buy them Pizza / Drinks for their help)
8. Make sure they have private channels on your discord to discuss topics away from the rest of the community.

- Closed Alphas And Betas & The Power Of Analytics-

I’m of the opinion that doing a number of Alpha and Beta phases is much more worthwhile than risking early access – especially if you’re looking for a publisher or additional funding. There are a few reasons for this:

1. In most cases you’ll only generate a fraction of the revenue you would do during a full release as users are much more sceptical and/or want to wait for the finished game.
2. You’ll need to have an incredibly solid content plan and ensure a constant stream of this content as well as bug fixes and more while in early access otherwise, you’ll quickly lose player trust
3. Publishers are unlikely to work with studios that have already launched into early access – you usually only get 1 good launch.
4. Its harder to get the press to cover early access games and if they do, then the game better be a hit otherwise they’re unlikely to cover the game again during your main launch.
5. Once you’ve launched you’ve launched and all the positive and negative reviews will start to come in

This is why I suggest that you instead have a number of limited time closed alpha/beta phases, only accessible to your community.

With the latest update to Discord, you can now do a couple of super cool things. Firstly, you can now make use of a special channel type, the Store. What’s super cool about store pages on your Discord is you can have multiple and access to them is controlled via your Role preferences – this means you can give and remove access to a build just by giving or removing a role. Community members can have multiple roles. Removing the role that gives a community member access to the game will stop them from being able to play it, even if it’s installed.

With that in mind, here are a few ideas for running a closed Alpha/Beta or even running a smaller test with your community:

1. Announce the testing phase well in advance across your different content channels
2. Reward your most vocal community members first, perhaps even run a competition for access, use it to generate conversation
3. Setup a feedback and bug reporting channel or use a tool directly in the game
4. Don’t run the test for too long….we did ours over 8 weekends, Friday evening to Monday morning and it almost killed us as we tried to get new features in each weekend. Run it over one weekend or maybe 7 days.
5. Let testers live stream and put videos together, but ask people if they can direct their viewers back to your Discord. Also, try to watch as many of these as possible and interact with the Streamers community while they play; its a great way to build a rapport with them….and its especially important if the streamer has a big viewership – building these relationships will lead to the streamers being more likely to help out when you launch.
6. Most importantly, be sure to set up your analytics before tests – you want to be collecting as much data as possible. This data, combined with a growing community can help you raise funding from investors if the numbers are good…..it helped us.

Anyway, that’s about it.

Hopefully, with some of this info, you’ll become Community Ninja’s or at least start to find your own path to solidifying your brand, communication and content planning as well as building the community of your dreams and making the most from it.

Thanks for reading!(source:Gamasutra

 


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