The annual conference SEA Game Developers Conference LEVEL UP KL 2022 is back physically and we had the opportunity to attend a talk by Sarah Johana titled – The Hook Analysis: Finding Your Game’s Design Pillars and Maximising Your Game’s Strongest Selling Point.

Sarah Johana is the Head of Marketing for Toge Productions, an Indonesia based Indie Game Development and Publishing company who worked on titles such as Coffee Talk, When Past was Around, etc.

During her talk, Sarah mentions some of the common problems that developers would normally face when creating games. Some of the issues stem from obstacles such as losing direction during development, not knowing how to improve the game’s prototype or even not knowing what people would want.

Sarah also mentions that when it comes to making commercial games, what developers need to do is conducting market researches and market validations, essentially doing research on what do players want since it’s a hook that would help on grabbing player’s attention.

Hook Factors

Sarah also talks about Hook Factors, which are the parts where developers can focus on to pull player’s interests. Factors like the game’s title, music, emotional impact that the game tells, the visuals, all play a part to make your games stand out.

For games that have yet to be released, developers can give out forms asking for feedback to the players who played the demo. One of the key feedback they would ask players about would be the expectation price. All of the feedback will then be made into a score board, to which an analysis would be made on which parts of the demo have the highest or lowest scores.

Design Pillar

The Design Pillar can guide developers and lets them know what directions that should go for by narrowing down the focus points of the process of making games, like knowing what kind of playstyle a game should be, or what elements that you’d want. The main takeaway is to find a middle ground for both what the developers and the players want.

Once the statistics are collected, the developers will need to maximise their game’s strongest selling points. For instance, if the players like the pixel artstyle from the game, when making ads, they’ll focus on showing off the pixel visuals. But there are times where the developers would need to change some of the elements in the game to make it more suitable for the market.

Sarah mentions that the analysis aren’t just for the games but also for the marketing strategy or for the competitors. From this, you may know what the market already have or don’t have, so that you can focus on your game’s selling points. For most of the time, developers would give out the prototype of the game to people who are in the industry first, polishing it to make a solid game before they show it off to the public.

Hopefully these important factors from the talk by Sarah Johana at LEVEL UP KL will help out future game developers who wish to put out their games to the public.