It’s Time To Change The Way You Interact With Customers!
As everyone knows, video games are often viewed as a tool of entertainment and distraction, allowing players and viewers to forget about the world around them for hours at a time. However productive or useful you believe this outcome to be, it is an excellent way to grab and hold people’s attention and this is something you should be engaging with. It is a new way to interact and communicate with your audience and the most efficient way to educate and get your company’s story and vision out there.
But before I go into any more detail about how you can use this to your advantage, I think it is important to define what the purpose and strengths of games are and what you should be achieving when deciding to engage with your target audience.
Firstly the purpose of a video game is to:
- Entertain and keep an individual’s engagement and attention for a long period of time
- Use to education and share information
This brings with it a few strengths:
- It is easier for users to engage with your story and content
- Can reach a wider audience – including both children, adults and those who speak a different language
Purpose of interacting with your audience is to:
- Increases sales
- Increases trust with existing and new customers
- Broadens your potential reach
- Keeps existing customers engaged with your company and products/services
I know this seems like an intimidating task and it certainly can be, but how exactly will video games help to boost your audience reach and engagement?
First you have to determine how long you want your audience to be engaging with a video game; for example mobile products aim to keep their player’s attention for a minimum of 6 minutes, whilst many console and PC games aim for a minimum of 30 minutes to 1 hour.
By determining why you’re engaging with your audience you can figure this out. We have had previous clients who have been using a short video game that takes a maximum of 10 minutes to teach and engage with their audience at expos and fairs. Waste Wranglers is a perfect example of how a council can interact with their audience and how to create a positive change in their community. Enabling many people to engage with them whilst also teaching their audience what they wanted, to learn which waste goes in which bin.
Watch a quick playthrough of Waste Wranglers Here!
If you are aiming to take a video game to help with engagement and interest at expos, fairs or events aiming for each player to have approximately 10 minutes is a good middle ground to keep people entertained and not have them “hogging” the game at busy public events. If you’re looking for a more personal and intimate experience with your audience then a longer game with a more indepth story and gameplay would be more beneficial, this would enable those to relate to your company and story instead of being engaged with just the purpose of your interaction with them.
Solution
Lucky for you, we provide interactive entertainment and educational content, or in a more succinct way; edutainment video games.
We have an easy and simple 4-step process in place to ensure that the product you receive is what you need to increase engagement with your target audience.
We start off with the discovery phase where we will work alongside you to determine what interactive experience will benefit you and your goals. Throughout this process we will create 4 detailed documents going over the method to build your product along with how and who will engage with it once it’s been completed.
- Game Design Document
How the experience will play out and how users will interact with it
- Technical Design Document
How all the behind the scenes coding and technicalities will work
- Art Bible
Determines the visual aesthetic and how it will appeal to your core audience
- Production Plan
Details the budget, costs, development timelines and any funding options and opportunities available
When you’re all happy with the documents and development process we will move onto the development phase; where your product will be created using our in place processes and production pipeline. During this phase we have milestones where we will ensure that you are happy with how the development is going and to voice any queries or concerns you may have. Progress will ensure we hit the following milestones within the determined timelines from the Production Plan document:
- An MVP or Minimum Viable Product
Simple version of the final mechanics and some basic art
- Mechanically Complete Alpha
Basic art, with main art assets having been created with the full and complete version of the mechanics
- Content Complete Beta
First pass on all the art assets and mechanics – enables you to visualise how the end product will be
- Quality Assurance Testing
Improve how the game feels, remove bugs and finalise art assets
- Polish
Ensuring the game is as perfect as possible before handing it over to you
Upon the completion of the game we go into the Publication phase, where we help you to distribute the game on to their platforms and monitor that it continues to work as intended.
We also ensure that the marketing pages for your product are optimal and will catch your audience’s eye.
Of course if your game is not going to be publicly available we will not release it on these platforms but we will ensure it works on all devices that it is needed on.
Once your game is accessible by you and your audience we will then move into the Support phase. Mini Mammoth Games provides on-going support for your product for the following 6 months after completion. This ensures a smooth release, distribution and user experience for you and your audience.
The on-going support allows us to:
- Fix and remove bugs
- Amend product breaking corner cases
- Meet the ever changing needs of the launch and distribution platforms
- Continue to improve customer engagement with the product
To simplify it all, we create yet another tool to help engage with your audience; in this ever digital and online world it is important to update your methods and be on the cutting edge of interacting and engaging with your customers, clients and audience.If you want a more indepth read into our process and what each phase means, catch up to speed here: https://minimammothgames.com/ensuring-our-clients-get-what-they-need/
Just remember this world changes everyday and so does the way we are expected to engage and interact with our audience. One of the best ways to have an easy and self-promoting product is through the use of video games; creating something people will want to share and enjoy with others but will still educate your audience on your company’s vision and story. This is a strong visual medium that can be used to create any experience that you want, use this to your advantage and book a meeting with us to see exactly what you can get out of video games.
Contact us through our contact form or email us via contact@minimammothgames.com
Talk soon!