Creating Nostalgia and Attracting Newbie Players by Design

Hello! 

   "We are Slingshot Studio. We are a group of 6 awesome people, intending to bring your childhood memories in a stealth game even though you are not even familiar with the stealth genre."   

- Slingshot Studio,2021

    While we are designing  To Save a Toy, our focus is always on 2 questions:

• How can we reach out to newbie players?
• How can we bring nostalgia?

ATTRACTING NEW PLAYERS

    The Stealth genre is mostly preferred by hardcore players due to the complexity of the mechanics and required amount of time. If someone new wants to investigate this genre, they have to spend a significant effort and time on the game even though they don't know whether they like it or not. Therefore, our approach is to break this barrier by decreasing the amount of effort and time to experience. Thus, it will be possible to attract newbie players to the stealth genre. It is possible to make this by:

• Shorter gameplay loops.
• Mechanics that are easy to understand.
• More " window of opportunities" in the level.
• Introducing new sub-mechanics such as puzzles.
• Easier gameplay beats while abiding by the rule of challenge and flow.

    To sum up, this approach will have a balance between a casual game design and a hardcore game design. While we are developing our main approach, you can check what we are doing in other blog posts.

NOSTALGIA

     Nostalgia is a subjective feeling and heavily depends on the perception of the individual. Hence it seems to be impossible to recreate that experience perfectly, we will create some "Triggers" which can give that feeling. These are:

• Visual Triggers: These triggers mostly rely on visual elements and feedbacks such as atmosphere, environmental elements, animations and visual effects.
• Dynamic Triggers: These are the elements that the player will experience apart from the visual elements. It is possible to include the controls* and level design as dynamic triggers.

* Controls will have a balance between the rigidity of a toy and the flexibility of a human character. We are trying to create a comfortable system that will enhance the experience in this manner.

       Since our target audience for "Nostalgia" is people who were kids in the '90s, the assets will be created according to that. However, we are welcoming all the players who want to know more about the genre and the '90s era.

- Doruk