Guidelines for Strategy Game Design

A functional and lightweight game design manual by Level 99's D. Brad Talton Jr,
on how to create tense, dynamic, decision-driven games.

§ 5.1 - The audience is clearly defined.

§ 5.1 - The audience is clearly defined.

§ 5.1 - The audience is clearly defined.

Players are the most important part of a game, so choose them with as much care as any other component.

Err on the side of being specific. If you say this is a game for 30-something engineering types, that doesn’t mean that a 12-year-old couldn’t play it. What it means is that it’s successful if 30-something engineers enjoy it, and that we don’t need to worry too much if the 12-year old doesn’t.

Accessibility is only relevant in the context of the game’s audience. A game that doesn’t use any text may be more accessible in an absolute sense, but it won’t be more accessible to a target audience that knows how to read. For this audience, the accessibility gain of replacing text with icons may be trivial. It may even result in lower accessibility for that audience.

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