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Increasing Our Reach: Designing To Grab and Retain Players
The indie games movement should be the wellspring of daring and innovative ideas, but we need a sizable and devoted audience to help us realize that potential. How do we reach more players? Is there something we're doing wrong? Some games are instantly appealing, but players are done with them in ten minutes. Others have great concepts, but players never find out because they give up after fiddling around without adequate results. In the world of small indie games, it can be hard to land a strike without falling into one or the other of those gutters. This presentation proposes a theory of design to solve both cases, called Immediacy with Depth. The concept was developed for SPIDER: THE SECRET OF BRYCE MANOR, an iPhone game released in 2009. The idea is explained, and a number of other indie and iPhone games are analyzed with it to see how well it holds up.
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