#but aaa it's not all fun. reading the community posts on that channel is a. concerning experience.

[softservesoymilk]

Also speaking of my son Dism scrolling through windows help forums is so fun because yay :) that's my son :)

[castercasino948]

How to optimize your amd apu for gaming

Top 22 Esports Blogs To Read Inked Gaming

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[the-confused-student]

It’s about time I’ve done this… Studyblr Introduction Post!

So I’ve made this blog like a week ago and I’ve kinda already did an introduction post here but I’ve decided to use that actual layout persons seem to use in this community 😂 Ho-kay leggo~

About me:

I’m female

I’m Barbadian

I’m 16 years old turning 17 on January 14th (still feel like 12)

I’m attending sixth form (it’s my first year)

Used to play volleyball and hockey but school took over

I’m very pessimistic due to the fact I always look at things “realistically”

I get frustrated easily when I don’t understand what I’m supposed to be doing but I usually combat this by taking a break sleepy w.e and go and try again or just leave it till the next day

I have high hopes and dreams but my “realistic” thinking usually gets in the way of it.

Why did I make a studyblr:

I wanted a place where I could vent about school

I wanted a place so I could talk about my successes without Any one being jealous or say I’m being cocky or braggy

I wanted a place where I could be motivated by others successes and learn from their mistakes

I wanted a place where I can meet new people who have the same interests as me and hopefully develop strong bonds

I saw how the studyblr community helped improved others and helped them become vetter students and I hope you guys influence me in that same positive way

THE AESTHETICS lmao like come on the notes here are so pretty and concise and ughh I wished I had notes like that I eould never stop studying

Basically I made it to become better and make friends (plz if you want to be friends don’t hesitate on messaging me)

My interests:

I don’t have much so please excuse me. I’m so boring.

Grey’s anatomy- making me cry on a night it’s all worth it. This is going to be so cringey but this is what got me into medicine as before I wanted to be a wildlife doctor now my career path has changed.. probably will again I just wish i could do both

Eldarya/My candy love- otome games made by chinomiko. They’re really fun you guys should try them out some time! Or if you already play message me ;)

Biomedical Research- I’m fascinated by the changing world of medicine and love to read the latest develops and break throughs

Subjects I’m taking:

Biology

Chemistry

Environmental Science

Communication Studies

If you posts any of these (mostly bio and chem because I highly doubt other people would be doing the other two) please reblog this post so I can follow you.

My goals:

To become an extraordinary student

To get Grade 1s in all of my CAPE subjects (equivalent to A Grade 9/8 Or A*/A depending on the lettering e.g. in Chemistry at GCSE I got a Grade 1 and my letter profile was AAA Which would be the equivalent to A*/9)

To get in medical school in the United Kingdom. I have already started looking at some and looked at BMAT/UKCAT papers and I know I have to put in an extreme amount of work to do good in my national exams and in my entrance exam but work it out some how. What ever will be will be.

Once I get into university I want to form a group of 3 persons where we motivate and guide each other, help each other out exercise and stay healthy and may be start a YouTube channel where we talk about our life and so on

I want to write a biology book that will be great for students to use for studying

(This is crazy so prepare) I have this like gut feeling that im destined for greatness in the medical field. I get it each time I think about it and I feel as though I have some contribution to modern medicine so my goal is to stick to that path and power through no matter how much i may want to stop because I know I’m destined to do something great (cue eyerolling and judgements it’s okay if I were you I would to XD)

Lastly. TO GET MY SHIT TOGETHER. LMAO sometimes I’m a mess and get so frustrated quickly and my teachers don’t help with it.

Persons who inspired me to make a studyblr:

@studyquill ofc because I follow her on youtube. Studytee, RevisionwithEve, Unjaded Jade @sootudying and basically everyone else in this community because I used to lurk the tags before I made a Blog XD I’m sorry for making this so terribly long and boring but please reblog this post if you’re a studyblr especially bioblrs medblrs and chemblrs! Would love to follow you all

[suzanneshannon]

Programming Sass to Create Accessible Color Combinations

We’re all looking for low-hanging fruit to make our sites and apps more accessible. One of the easier things we can do is make sure the colors we use are easy on the eyes. High color contrast is something that benefits everyone. It not only reduces eye strain in general, but is crucial for folks who deal with reduced vision.

So let’s not only use better color combinations in our designs but find a way to make it easier for us to implement high contrasts. There’s one specific strategy we use over at Oomph that lets a Sass function do all the heavy lifting for us. I’ll walk you through how we put that together.

Want to jump right to the code because you already understand everything there is to know about color accessibility? Here you go.

What we mean by “accessible color combinations”

Color contrast is also one of those things we may think we have handled. But there’s more to high color contrasts than eyeballing a design. There are different levels of acceptable criteria that the WCAG has defined as being accessible. It’s actually humbling to crack open the WebAIM Contrast Checker and run a site’s color combinations through it.

My team adheres to WCAG’s Level AA guidelines by default. This means that: 

Text that is 24px and larger, or 19px and larger if bold, should have a Color Contrast Ratio (CCR) of 3.0:1.

Text that is smaller than 24px should have a CCR of 4.5:1.

If a site needs to adhere to the enhanced guidelines for Level AAA, the requirements are a little higher:

Text that is 24px and larger, or 19px and larger if bold, should have a CCR of 4.5:1.

Text that is smaller than 24px should have a CCR of 7:1.

Ratios? Huh? Yeah, there’s some math involved here. But the good news is that we don’t need to do it ourselves or even have the same thorough understanding about how they’re calculated the way Stacie Arellano recently shared (which is a must read if you’re into the science of color accessibility).

That’s where Sass comes in. We can leverage it to run difficult mathematical computations that would otherwise fly over many of our heads. But first, I think it’s worth dealing with accessible colors at the design level.

Accessible color palettes start with the designs

That’s correct. The core of the work of creating an accessible color palette starts with the designs. Ideally, any web design ought to consult a tool to verify that any color combinations in use pass the established guidelines — and then tweak the colors that don’t. When our design team does this, they use a tool that we developed internally. It works on a list of colors, testing them over a dark and a light color, as well as providing a way to test other combinations. 

ColorCube provides an overview of an entire color palette, showing how each color performs when paired with white, black, and even each other. It even displays results for WCAG Levels AA and AAA next to each result. The tool was designed to throw a lot of information at the user all at once when evaluating a list of colors.

This is the first thing our team does. I’d venture to guess that many brand colors aren’t chosen with accessibility at the forefront. I often find that those colors need to change when they get translated to a web design. Through education, conversation, and visual samples, we get the client to sign off on the new color palette. I’ll admit: that part can be harder than the actual work of implementing accessible colors combinations.

The Color Contrast Audit: A typical design delivery when working with an existing brand’s color palette. Here, we suggest to stop using the brand color Emerald with white, but use an “Alt” version that is slightly darker instead. 

The problem that I wanted to solve with automation are the edge cases. You can’t fault a designer for missing some instance where two colors combine in an unintended way — it just happens. And those edge cases will come up, whether it is during the build or even a year later when new colors are added to the system.

Developing for accessibility while keeping true to the intent of a color system

The trick when changing colors to meet accessibility requirements is not changing them so much that they don’t look like the same color anymore. A brand that loves its emerald green color is going to want to maintain the intent of that color — it’s “emerald-ness.” To make it pass for accessibility when it is used as text over a white background, we might have to darken the green and increase its saturation. But we still want the color to “read” the same as the original color.

To achieve this, we use the Hue Saturation Lightness (HSL) color model. HSL gives us the ability to keep the hue as it is but adjust the saturation (i.e. increase or decrease color) and lightness (i.e. add more black or more white). The hue is what makes a green that green, or a blue that blue. It is the “soul” of the color, to get a little mystical about it. 

Hue is represented as a color wheel with a value between 0° and 360° — yellow at 60°, green at 120°, cyan at 180°, etc. Saturation is a percentage ranging from 0% (no saturation) to 100% (full saturation). Lightness is also a value that goes from 0% to 100%, where no lightness is at 0%, no black and no white is at 50%, and 100% is all lightness, or very light.

A quick visual of what tweaking a color looks like in our tool:

With HSL, changing the low-contrast green to a higher contrast meant changing the saturation from 63 to 95 and the lightness from 45 to 26 on the left. That's when the color gets a green check mark in the middle when used with white. The new green still feels like it is in the same family, though, because the Hue remained at 136, which is like the color’s “soul.”

To learn more, play around with the fun HSL visualizer mothereffinghsl.com. But for a more in-depth description of color blindness, WCAG color contrast levels, and the HSL color space, we wrote an in-depth blog post about it.

The use case I want to solve

Designers can adjust colors with the tools that we just reviewed, but so far, no Sass that I have found could do it with mathematical magic. There had to be a way. 

These are some similar approaches I have seen in the wild:

An idea by Josh Bader uses CSS variables and colors split into their RGB values to calculate whether white or black is the best accessible color to use in a given situation.

Another idea by Facundo Corradini does something similar with HSL values and a very cool “switch function” in CSS.

I didn't like these approaches. I didn’t want to fallback to white or black. I wanted colors to be maintained but adjusted to be accessible. Additionally, changing colors to their RGB or HSL components and storing them with CSS variables seemed messy and unsustainable for a large codebase.

I wanted to use a preprocessor like Sass to do this: given two colors, automagically adjust one of them so the pair receives a passing WCAG grade. The rules state a few other things to consider as well — size of the text and whether or not the font is bold. The solution had to take this into account. 

In code terms, I wanted to do this:

// Transform this non-passing color pair: .example {   background-color: #444;   color: #0094c2; // a 2.79 contrast ratio when AA requires 4.5   font-size: 1.25rem;   font-weight: normal; } 
 // To this passing color pair: .example {   background-color: #444;   color: #00c0fc; // a 4.61 contrast ratio   font-size: 1.25rem;   font-weight: normal; }

A solution that does this would be able to catch and handle those edge cases we mentioned earlier. Maybe the designer accounted for a brand blue to be used over a light blue, but not a light gray. Maybe the red used in error messages needs to be tweaked for this one form that has a one-off background color. Maybe we want to implement a dark mode feature to the UI without having to retest all the colors again. These are the use cases I had in mind going into this. 

With formulas can come automation

The W3C has provided the community with formulas that help analyze two colors used together. The formula multiplies the RGB channels of both colors by magic numbers (a visual weight based on how humans perceive these color channels) and then divides them to come up with a ratio from 0.0 (no contrast) to 21.0 (all the contrast, only possible with white and black). While imperfect, this is the formula we use right now:

If L1 is the relative luminance of a first color  And L2 is the relative luminance of a second color, then - Color Contrast Ratio = (L1 + 0.05) / (L2 + 0.05) Where - L = 0.2126 * R + 0.7152 * G + 0.0722 * B And - if R sRGB <= 0.03928 then R = R sRGB /12.92 else R = ((R sRGB +0.055)/1.055) ^ 2.4 - if G sRGB <= 0.03928 then G = G sRGB /12.92 else G = ((G sRGB +0.055)/1.055) ^ 2.4 - if B sRGB <= 0.03928 then B = B sRGB /12.92 else B = ((B sRGB +0.055)/1.055) ^ 2.4 And - R sRGB = R 8bit /255 - G sRGB = G 8bit /255 - B sRGB = B 8bit /255

While the formula looks complex, it’s just math right? Well, not so fast. There is a part at the end of a few lines where the value is multiplied by a decimal power — raised to the power of 2.4. Notice that? Turns out that it’s complex math which most programming languages can accomplish — think Javascript’s math.pow() function — but Sass is not powerful enough to do it. 

There’s got to be another way…

Of course there is. It just took some time to find it. 🙂

My first version used a complex series of math calculations that did the work of decimal powers within the limited confines of what Sass can accomplish. Lots of Googling found folks much smarter than me supplying the functions. Unfortunately, calculating only a handful of color contrast combinations increased Sass build times exponentially. So, that means Sass can do it, but that does not mean it should. In production, build times for a large codebase could increase to several minutes. That’s not acceptable. 

After more Googling, I came across a post from someone who was trying to do a similar thing. They also ran into the lack of exponent support in Sass. They wanted to explore “the possibility of using Newtonian approximation for the fractional parts of the exponent.” I totally understand the impulse (not). Instead, they decided to use a “lookup table.” It’s a genius solution. Rather than doing the math from scratch every time, a lookup table provides all the possible answers pre-calculated. The Sass function retrieves the answer from the list and it’s done.

In their words:

The only part [of the Sass that] involves exponentiation is the per-channel color space conversions done as part of the luminance calculation. [T]here are only 256 possible values for each channel. This means that we can easily create a lookup table.

Now we’re cooking. I had found a more performant direction. 

Usage example

Using the function should be easy and flexible. Given a set of two colors, adjust the first color so it passes the correct contrast value for the given WCAG level when used with the second color. Optional parameters will also take the font size or boldness into account.

// @function a11y-color( //   $color-to-adjust, //   $color-that-will-stay-the-same, //   $wcag-level: 'AA', //   $font-size: 16, //   $bold: false // ); 
 // Sass sample usage declaring only what is required .example {   background-color: #444;   color: a11y-color(#0094c2, #444); // a 2.79 contrast ratio when AA requires 4.5 for small text that is not bold } 
 // Compiled CSS results: .example {   background-color: #444;   color: #00c0fc; // which is a 4.61 contrast ratio }

I used a function instead of a mixin because I preferred the output of a single value independent from a CSS rule. With a function, the author can determine which color should change. 

An example with more parameters in place looks like this:

// Sass .example-2 {   background-color: a11y-color(#0094c2, #f0f0f0, 'AAA', 1.25rem, true); // a 3.06 contrast ratio when AAA requires 4.5 for text 19px or larger that is also bold   color: #f0f0f0; font-size: 1.25rem;   font-weight: bold; } 
 // Compiled CSS results: .example-2 {   background-color: #087597; // a 4.6 contrast ratio   color: #f0f0f0; font-size: 1.25rem;   font-weight: bold; }

A deeper dive into the heart of the Sass function

To explain the approach, let’s walk through what the final function is doing, line by line. There are lots of helper functions along the way, but the comments and logic in the core function explain the approach:

// Expected: // $fg as a color that will change // $bg as a color that will be static and not change // Optional: // $level, default 'AA'. 'AAA' also accepted // $size, default 16. PX expected, EM and REM allowed // $bold, boolean, default false. Whether or not the font is currently bold // @function a11y-color($fg, $bg, $level: 'AA', $size: 16, $bold: false) {   // Helper: make sure the font size value is acceptable   $font-size: validate-font-size($size);   // Helper: With the level, font size, and bold boolean, return the proper target ratio. 3.0, 4.5, or 7.0 results expected   $ratio: get-ratio($level, $font-size, $bold);   // Calculate the first contrast ratio of the given pair   $original-contrast: color-contrast($fg, $bg);      @if $original-contrast >= $ratio {     // If we pass the ratio already, return the original color     @return $fg;   } @else {     // Doesn't pass. Time to get to work     // Should the color be lightened or darkened?     // Helper: Single color input, 'light' or 'dark' as output     $fg-lod: light-or-dark($fg);     $bg-lod: light-or-dark($bg); 
     // Set a "step" value to lighten or darken a color     // Note: Higher percentage steps means faster compile time, but we might overstep the required threshold too far with something higher than 5%     $step: 2%;          // Run through some cases where we want to darken, or use a negative step value     @if $fg-lod == 'light' and $bg-lod == 'light' {       // Both are light colors, darken the fg (make the step value negative)       $step: - $step;     } @else if $fg-lod == 'dark' and $bg-lod == 'light' {       // bg is light, fg is dark but does not pass, darken more       $step: - $step;     }     // Keeping the rest of the logic here, but our default values do not change, so this logic is not needed     //@else if $fg-lod == 'light' and $bg-lod == 'dark' {     //  // bg is dark, fg is light but does not pass, lighten further     //  $step: $step;     //} @else if $fg-lod == 'dark' and $bg-lod == 'dark' {     //  // Both are dark, so lighten the fg     //  $step: $step;     //}          // The magic happens here     // Loop through with a @while statement until the color combination passes our required ratio. Scale the color by our step value until the expression is false     // This might loop 100 times or more depending on the colors     @while color-contrast($fg, $bg) < $ratio {       // Moving the lightness is most effective, but also moving the saturation by a little bit is nice and helps maintain the "power" of the color       $fg: scale-color($fg, $lightness: $step, $saturation: $step/2);     }     @return $fg;   } }

The final Sass file

Here’s the entire set of functions! Open this in CodePen to edit the color variables at the top of the file and see the adjustments that the Sass makes:

CodePen Embed Fallback

All helper functions are there as well as the 256-line lookup table. Lots of comments should help folks understand what is going on. 

When an edge case has been encountered, a version in SassMeister with debug output was helpful while I was developing it to see what might be happening. (I changed the main function to a mixin so I can debug the output.) Feel free to poke around at this as well.

Play with this gist on SassMeister.

And finally, the functions have been stripped out of CodePen and put into a GitHub repo. Drop issues into the queue if you run into problems. 

Cool code! But can I use this in production?

Maybe. 

I’d like to say yes, but I’ve been iterating on this thorny problem for a while now. I feel confident in this code but would love more input. Use it on a small project and kick the tires. Let me know how the build time performs. Let me know if you come across edge cases where passing color values are not being supplied. Submit issues to the GutHub repo. Suggest improvements based on other code you’ve seen in the wild. 

I’d love to say that I have Automated All the A11y Things, but I also know it needs to be road-tested before it can be called Production Ready™. I’m excited to introduce it to the world. Thanks for reading and I hope to hear how you are using it real soon.

The post Programming Sass to Create Accessible Color Combinations appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

Programming Sass to Create Accessible Color Combinations published first on https://deskbysnafu.tumblr.com/

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

Hi, I would like to talk about creating a game that is appealing to content creators – Youtubers or streamers. We, Alda Games, released rogue-lite FPS game called Killing Room last year and our main marketing focus was Youtube. It may seem difficult to impress these young people who can make or ruin your game, but it can be much easier and have much bigger impact than reaching online gaming magazines. You can also watch Youtube video from White Nights Prague 2017 with my speech about this topic.

[embedded content]

First of all, I don’t think that you have to create „silly“ or „AAA“ game to appeal to Youtubers. There is vast space full of opportunities between games targeted only on Youtubers like Goat Simulator and huge and hyped production of top companies. And Killing Room aimed right for this space.

Hard-core rogue-lite FPS is really terrible genre if you want to sell a lot of games as fans of FPS and fans of rogue-lites are only rarely the same people. It is obvious on examples of the best and most famous games of this genre – Tower of Guns or Ziggurat – they sold only 280 000 and 150 000 copies after years on Steam according to Steamspy. It may look like a lot for an indie game but pure rogue-likes like Enter the Gungeon or Binding of Isaac sold many times more.

With technical problems Killing Room have, it is no wonder that it sold „only“ 40 000 copies during first 5 months on Steam but this number could have been much lower if we didn’t target Youtubers and streamers – both during development and while promoting our game before/after release.

[embedded content]Great trailer helps a lot

Why did we choose Youtubers?

Because we knew that they have power, but also because we knew that game doesn’t have to be perfect to impress them, fun is enough. Youtubers are also much closer to regular players than redactors from digital and paper magazines, both in their game preferences and mutual interactions.

We were also quite sure that we will be able to make game interesting and fun but it would be difficult for our inexperienced studio to deliver something that wouldn’t be criticized for bugs and lack of some values important for professional critics. Alda Games has some history of making games but before Killing Room we made only mobile games (and port of our TD game Defend Your Life on Steam) and team working on Killing Room was more or less brand new. 

How did we try to impress them?

There are several requirements to meet if you want to be sure that your game has potential to appeal to Youtubers. I will show you some examples from Killing Room later. Our game had two strong features that helped it become quite famous among streamers and Youtubers – online voting feature and „FPS Binding of Isaac“ catch phrase that actually didn’t come from us directly even if we counted Binding of Isaac as one of our major inspirations. So you can try to be original and bring something new or at least not very known (online voting feature is part of few indie games like Party Hard) and try to create catch phrase that tells people exactly what to expect.

We designed our online voting feature to be completely optional so everyone can completely enjouy the game

But what about actual game? First of all, your features should be visual – yes, some Youtubers will bother and read text if it is important for their audience but if you actually SHOW fun stuff, you are much more likely to impress them. If your game allows it, make it over-the-top in some areas, you may even get some additional inspiration if you try to follow this road.

Each boss fight has unique intro animation, we were inspired by Enter the Gungeon bosses

Killing Room is not only name of our game but also name of reality-show that character participates in – winner will be incredibly rich but losing means death, which is great concept if you are creating rogue-lite game with permadeath and it also tells you that you should be very creative and visual with ways in which you repeatedly kill players.

Huge traps

Huge traps, voluntary risk-taking (suicide machine, wheel of fortune with spaces that can kill you or for example give you some money or useful item) and perks that really show its effects on screen (rentgen glasses, one-eyed, lunacy, …). All these examples are very specific but once you decide that your game should be interesting for streamers and Youtubers, you will probably think about ways to do so, just don’t be afraid to make some sacrifices, it is completely undestandable that you want your game to have success and making game appealing to content creators can be important part of development.

So lets summarize it:

Make your game with Youtubers in mind – they want to show fun/scary/over-the-top/original things to their viewers.

Make everything visual as much as you can – you are making game, not book

Don’t be afraid to change your game a bit if your youtuber-friendly approach demands it

You can still create proper indie game, there is no need to make silly pointless game to impress Youtubers

Try to be original – our online voting feature was one of the main reasons for most of streamers and probably even Markiplier tried Killing Room

Pretty girls are easy way to attract players, but at least use this exploit of human nature in some interesting way (these are door to Boss room and they are part of funny boss intro animation)

Marketing tips

There are few basic things you should and shouldn’t do:

Don’t panic and only send keys to verified emails, there will be ton of fake Youtubers and redactors who will try to steal your keys and sell them on G2A and similar sites.

Use Keymailer or similar services to easily send keys to verified content creators.

Make your own list of Youtubers and send them emails with Steam key. You want to try the biggest ones and also Youtubers that cover games similar to yours – in our case we made sure to write to those who enjoyed Binding of Isaac, Ziggurat etc.

Be very cautious when asked to pay for Youtube video – there are many companies that represent some bigger Youtubers and they will want a lot of cash. It is extremely expensive and probably not worth it because Youtube is not stable business environment yet and these people know that there are a lot of publishers willing to pay anything to have their games promoted in videos from famous Youtubers. For example we were asked to pay 20 000 Euro for one video and after we told them we are not interested price dropped to 3 000 Euro – we still didn’t accept it but it somehow shows what the problem is…

How did it go?

It was great. First day after release H2ODelirious made video from Killing Room and it soon reached over 1M views. It is difficult to say how many copies was sold because of this video as Steam release generates a lot of sales on its own but it is save to say that it was probably at least 1 000 copies. And it definitely helped us reach Steam top sellers (at least in some regions) and stay in Popular New Releases for much longer – and staying on Steam home page creates that nice snowball effect resulting in game selling much better.

This first video also inspired other smaller Youtubers and streamers to try our game – many probably also found key for Killing Room in their email boxes which helped a lot while deciding to cover it.

After 10 days on Steam, something even bigger happened and it was a moment when we understood that we did something right. It was Markiplier who made video of Killing Room and he even used our Online Voting feature (via twitter – his fans didn’t really know what is happening but they still voted like crazy and made his gameplay and video much more fun). Link to our game in description and praise of our game made big impact on our sales. And we were really happy, more so when he later uploaded second video. Then we had to „wait“ until February to catch another huge channel when jacksepticeeye joined 1M+ views club with his participation in our cruel reality-show. There are many other Youtubers who made video from our game, some quite big, some smaller, some with only few views and after few months after release we can say that our decision to focus on Youtubers was correct.

Direct impact of Markiplier’s video was really big

PS: Not entirely on-topic but one of the funniest creations connected to Killing Room is this animated movie from Freyjinn about Markiplier’s first attempt in our game.

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

Your game’s target audience is the demographics and interests of the majority of it’s players. For example if you’re launching a match-3 puzzle game, your target audience is likely female, 35 years of age, and cares mostly about achievement over all other aspects of the game.

This article was originally posted on Launch Your Indie Game.

But before you’ve launched your game, before you’ve gathered any real player data, you’ll need to make an educated guess about who your players might be, so that you can make and market your game to attract them.

Contrary to popular belief, not all games benefit from the same marketing channels, tactics and strategies.

And investing what little time and money you have on marketing the wrong way can lead to devastating losses, if not failure.

In fact, it’s such an important part of launching games that AAA publishers spend exorbitant amounts of money building in-house teams whose sole responsibility is to gather this research and use it to decide whether or not they should move forward with even making games that are in the conceptual phases of development.

However if you’re a bootstrapping indie game developer, you probably don’t have access to those teams or their tools. But you still need some idea of who your target audience is.

So I’m going to unpack for you why target audience research is so important before you launch, then I’ll illustrate my signature strategy for getting that research, and finally I’ll show you my process to build a tentative target audience profile for zero cost.

In other words, you don’t need to be a AAA publisher to make an educated guess about your game’s target audience.

Why It’s Important to Research Your Game’s Target Audience Before You Launch

Before you launch your game, you’re no doubt going to spend a lot of time and money on marketing. If not in actual dollars, then definitely in sweat equity. Think about all the time you’ve spent just on things like your website or social media. Now add in trailers, a press kit, media outreach, newsletters, conferences, and all those other marketing efforts that everyone else is doing.

Marketing games, even small indie games, is time-consuming.

Making an educated guess about who your game’s target audience will be helps you increase the efficiency and effectiveness of what you spend to choose your time and money on.

For example, let’s say you’re planning to experiment with some Facebook ads at launch. You could lose a lot of money by failing to hyper-target your ad campaigns based on very specific demographic and interest data. Even the seemingly trivial chasm between shooters and WWII shooters is wide enough to lose all your money in.

Or let’s say you’re spending the weeks leading up to launch promoting your game on various game development forums, but your game’s target audience isn’t actually other game developers.

The colossal waste of time and money is painfully obvious, not to mention the opportunity cost you will miss at launch.

Conducting target audience research before you launch helps you design the right marketing foundation to launch upon. That way, when you begin collecting actual in-game analytics, you can optimize your marketing strategy based on that real player data.

The Lookalike Target Audience Research Method

One of the biggest mistakes that indie game developers make is believing that their target audience is made up of people who are just like them. After all, they typically make the games they want to play. And that’s ok, a lot of great games are made that way, but it doesn’t necessarily mean your target audience is anything like you.

You and your games are far better served with the more data-driven approach of measuring the audiences of games that are similar to yours. It’s called a lookalike audience, as in your-audience-probably-looks-like-their-audience.

Here’s the gist of what you’ll be doing:

The first thing you’ll do is make a list of your game’s 3 biggest competitors

Then you mine their audiences for demographics and interests, documenting the results along the way

And finally you’ll note the overlap to find your game’s tentative target audience

I call this the Lookalike Target Audience Research Method.

Obviously, it’s not rocket science. It’s just common sense, and you’ve probably already been thinking this way.

Unfortunately, there’s no empirical way to prove your game’s target audience before you launch. All assumptions, by you or big AAA publishers, are still assumptions. Building a target audience profile from competitor data is the best way to make a best guess about who your game’s target audience might be.

And that’s really all you need to move forward with.

You don’t really need teams of people, data warehouse subscriptions, and keynote presentation decks being pitched to people in suits. Sure, those help. But they’re nice-to-haves, and not really need-to-haves for where you’re at.

So here’s exactly how I execute this strategy:

1. Create a list of 3 competitors, and prepare a spreadsheet to collect their demographics and interests data

Who are your game’s 3 biggest competitors?

What we’re looking for here is to match your game with other games in the same genre, with the same mechanics, done in the same style or art direction, and that have similar pricing or business models.

You might not be able to find exact matches (unless you’re making a clone), but do the best you can with those requirements.

If you find that your game is unlike literally any other game out there, that you have zero competitors, that’s a big red flag. 9/10 times that means your game is going to flop. Just throwing that out there.

Make a copy of the Google Sheets spreadsheet I use to do target audience research. The pre-populated data is from researching the target audience for a new multiplayer first person shooter.

My Google Sheet spreadsheet for researching game target audiences.

Think of this like making your own personal finance budget, where there are some staples (such as housing costs), but no two budgets are the same, nor should they be. Use your experience and instinct to choose which categories of data to focus on depending on your game.

Now that we’ve got our spreadsheet set up, we need to go out and find your competitor’s demographics, interests and behaviors.

2. Mine and collect the demographics and interests of those 3 games in your spreadsheet

Demographics are the age, gender, and race of players. Interests are, well, categories or things they’re interested in. And behaviors are activities they do either online or offline.

For example again using the match-3 puzzle game illustration, and having already talked about their demographics, their interests would be things such as other games by King, women’s health brands, and the Hallmark Channel. And their behaviors would be things such as dining out, buying pet products, and clicking mobile ads.

So if you’re making a very colorful and cute match-3 puzzle game, I’ve pretty much done your work for you.

But for those of you who aren’t, let’s mine some data!

1. GOOGLE ADWORDS DISPLAY PLANNER

Most official game websites and app traffic comes from organic search. And Google is the king of search. Thankfully, they make the demographic and interest data of certain keywords and websites available to you for free in Google AdWords.

If you don’t already have a free Google account, grab one and head on over to Google Adwords. Log in to your dashboard and navigate to Tools > Display Planner.

Then type a competing game’s official website domain in the “Your landing page” input box.

I’m using Candy Crush Saga for my search:

Don’t forget to consider region. If you’re soft-launching in Spain, filter for Spain otherwise your results will be useless.

As you can see you’re not only getting juicy demographics for over 10 billion impressions, you’re also getting interests and specifically where they’re running display ads, if at all.

Here’s a fun side note: The Display Planner shows an affinity audienceof “Fast Food Cravers” for Candy Crush Saga. Looks like candy isn’t the only thing they like!

I mean, who doesn’t? McDoubles are crazy cheap. Just saying.

2. FACEBOOK ADVERTISING AUDIENCE INSIGHTS

Almost 17 million people like Clash of Clans on Facebook. What if I told you that Facebook makes all that demographic and interest data available to you for free?

It’s totally true, all through the magic of Facebook Advertising Audience Insights. Grab a Facebook account and head on over to the dashboard for Facebook Advertising.

Go back to your home dashboard and click the new “Ads Manager” menu item on the left-hand side of your screen.

On your Ads Manager dashboard and navigate to Tools > Audience Insights.

Once you arrive on the Audience Insights page, you’ll notice the general demographics and interests for all of Facebook have already been pre-populated.

But we want to narrow that data down by interest. On the left-hand side of the screen you’ll notice a section appropriately named, “Interests”. Start typing “clash of clans” in that input box.

And there you have it, the demographics and interests for all 17 million people who like the official Clash of Clans Facebook page. Boom!

This technique can also be used to display your own Facebook ads to their audience. Yes you read that, you could put your game in front of 17 million Clash of Clans fans if you wanted to run some ads.

3. SIMILARWEB TRAFFIC ANALYTICS & BEHAVIORS

SimilarWeb gives you insight into the Web traffic analytics any domain name or mobile app in the world.

The mobile app analytics are meh. I recommend sticking to domains for the best information.

While there’s no demographic data, it’s fantastic insight into behavior and interest data. Reports show modules such as social network referral numbers, ranking keywords, referring domains, traffic from organic search, display ads, categorical interests and more.

Simply visit SimilarWeb and perform a search for any competing game’s domain name.

Once it finds the domain and creates the report it should look something like this:

Take the social network data alone. It’s a clear picture of where you may want to consider focusing your initial efforts. And equally important, where not to.

Now that you have all this data drop it in a spreadsheet and start comparing and contrasting your results.

But there’s one more thing.

Don’t forget to consider the personality of your game. For example, let’s say your game is about survivalism. It may be a good idea to dig up any available research on the survivalist community as a clue to how you might better market your games or segment your overall research.

3. Analyze the data, identify the overlaps, and draft a target audience profile for your game

Now that the tedious work is done, it’s time to start analyzing your data for overlaps.

Again, it’s not rocket science. You should be able to pretty much eyeball it, especially if you were able to find 3 solid competing games. The overlap should be deafening.

However, if the game you’re making is more obscure game, or unlike much that’s out there, then connecting the dots with your data is probably going to be more difficult. It’s possible that you complete this process, stand back, and are confused by what you’ve found.

In any case, I would put your trust in that data.

There’s only one, big trick I have for finding overlaps when it comes to Interests and Behavior data, and that’s to use a word-analyzing tool such as Spokeforge’s Word Counter & Text Analyzer to identify duplicate terms and phrases. Otherwise you’re going to be squinting at spreadsheet cells trying to find all the overlaps (and missing some).

No one has time for that mess, just use the analyzer.

Profiling Your Game’s Target Audience Is Just the Beginning

Congratulations, you now have a really great idea of who your game’s target audience is going to be.

The next step is to start using your new profile to begin planning your game’s launch marketing strategy, choosing the channels and projects that you’ll be executing for that strategy.

Whatever you do, don’t forget to track the analytics of your game or your game’s marketing. Otherwise, you might as well just have not read this article because you’re not going to have any data to compare it against.

After all, Google Analytics is free.

Also, don’t forget to enable demographics and interest tracking. But note that there is some legal requirements in doing so.

Basically your game’s analytics will tell you who’s really playing your game.

And that data will either validate or disprove your best guess here. It will probably be really close (it would be rare to miss the mark completely), but make sure you use the overlap to optimize your game’s marketing strategy.

Creating a tentative profile of your game’s target audience is just the beginning, but I can tell you first-hand that if you take the time to do that, you’re already lightyears ahead of most other indie game developers.

What did you find most interesting about profiling your game’s target audience? And how have you used that to successfully influence what you’ve done for your game’s marketing?

Justin Carroll writes about indie game marketing at Launch Your Indie Game. Get his free email newsletter for help launching games and growing a business.