Nailing your Audience

Loc released on the iPad last week and has been available for some time for the PC/Mac platforms. And it is only now, after reading some very honest and well constructed reviews, that I have come to realize that we created a game for a niche audience.

This entire time we had believed that Loc was a casual puzzle game experience, that it would appeal to any player, regardless of the age, simply because the control scheme was user friendly and the concept was dumb simple. Make a line, connecting these points. It’s like a grown up version of a connect the dots experience.

We even went as far as to make a really shallow difficulty curve, so that casual players would not get too frustrated too quickly. However, that design decision is coming back to bite us.

Why? Because what I have discovered is that Loc is a game constructed for serious puzzle players. The people who do 3000 piece jigsaw puzzles, crossword puzzle, or enjoy playing with a rubix’s cube (where our design evolved from) and etc. These people are masters of logic and the slow progression of our difficulty curve could bore them.

And the reward, the moment when the player overcomes their puzzle, of bringing shape from the chaos of the pieces, is not enough of a payoff.

Maybe it’s too short, a few moments of watching the cube solve itself is a small thing compared to how long it takes to put the pieces into play. The action of moving and rotating tiles can easily be compared to the tedium of putting together a traditional jigsaw puzzle. The review we just got from indiegamemag, which was terrifically honest, nailed that, and I thank them for it.

So the question becomes, how do we reach this “hard core” puzzle audience? I don’t know if I have the answer to this. This crowd is not going to be the ones perusing sites like Kotaku, Joystiq, or even indiegamemag.

Stuff to think over, maybe next week we can put together some kind of plan to address this problem.