Saturday, June 25, 2022

Target Audience - when making something that is not going to be popular.

Target audience for my book:

  1. people who want to make a solar system, not just a world. Chapter 12 features mostly a Key world  
  2. they dont want to read a number of books without having to go through the analysis "Which book should I follow"
    1. GURPS Space
    2. Traveller ISW world generation
    3. Wikipedia
    4. Traveller World Generations 
    5. https://donjon.bin.sh/scifi/system/ (I don't know the tables behind this and if I want to disagree, you can edit the Spreadsheets tables so you can change the outcomes)
  3. They want to make a solar system with a few Clicks. Only https://donjon.bin.sh/scifi/system/ has one click - create a solar system all others has to co through a 30-60 step process - It may be "FAST" but Total Cost of Ownership - includes LEARNING TIME and improvement time. 
    1. the people who naturally are smart and figure things out are OUTLIERS, they're not most gamers. Writing gaming material for OUTLIERS is not the goal. I like writing game material for PEOPLE LIKE ME: people who are just average but LOVE learning and want education and science to be accessible (Like the Vlog brothers hank and john green, and many other science communicators that have become very critical in our society to fight misinformation and anti-science views). 
    2. Making INACCESSIBLE material is part of a LARGER problem - especially where I come from where there is active historical revisionism going on.  
  4. They want to KNOW the limits of the game mechanics vs the real science so they can know what to ignore, workaround, and change.  
    1. I walked through it when I made a Space Ship Generator Spreadsheet back in 2013 when youtube was not yet catching on, now I will go through the documents and allow people to make make their own decisions or work with the compromises I made. There is more of an audience that don't mind someone explaining a Spreadsheet to them and how the code works NOW than almost 10 years ago.
  5.  If you want to Commission the Artists and Students that made it for Additional material - specific for your game - they can use the work and the audience goes like "I can have a more detailed world generator". 
  6. My writing - where I took creative liberties tries to Answer the Questions: 
    1. I WANT TO USE DELTA V budgets, the Rocket Formula (in a spreadsheet), etc... I can only use this in a Solar System with ORBITS, gravity, and FEATURES (like disks and zone). I want the PCs to decide where to go in the solar system based on the features and their resource budgets. 
    2. I want a more sophisticated INHABITANT generation tool that factors some of the same tools my favorite writers already use: power structure, power source, cultural aspects and lenses, conflict, etc... From someone who Travelled and Studied other cultures in the real world - someone who is from a 3rd World country but grew up with an Western Education and media consumption. Someone who works with different nationalities regularly. So the Cultures feel different and some of the Gray Areas are pretty much can be attributed to the forces of Market, Environment, Culture, and Politics. I can't travel so much (Budget and Health wise, but I want to feel like I visited the countries I want to visit - and no not Comfy Developed Countries where many Rights and Privilages are a given - but working with people where these are scarce). 
    3. Figuring out How to make a Hex Map for people who need some 2d Refences for travel. 
    4. (later on) showing how to use the Delta-V budget map and a simple Spreadsheet subsheet in the provided Spreadsheet. (A Kingdom for Want of a Nail, - the ability of reality and the ref to RAISE the stakes of the game with anything - and the players working with the uncertainty that anything can raise the stakes of the game). 
    5. I WANT pictures of my Planets but I'm not a 3d graphics person. I want many of them cheaply, as well as the option to easily commission them. I want someone to make a 3d Model of my solar system so that I can WORLD BUILD to my hearts content. Later on Take Pictures of my starship making orbit etc... 
    6.  
My audience is probably

1) my age or older 40s at the very youngest. The audience is much younger, most of them like something more artistically sophisticated - I dont have that budget and I am Definitely TOO OLD with obsolete tastes - even if I am trained in aesthetics. I'm weak with colors and Typography - the new works are more mastery of kerning, use of space and Color theory - the priming of emotions through color. I'm very weak at that - my aesthetic was always on the Technical and Practical - I grew up trying to imagine the internals of spaceships and Mecha - and working on construction and manufacturing - I like working with biomechanics of motion and human behavior. Whenever its Color Theory - I've worked with too many projects when I was a graphic designer to stop caring about aesthetic because the client's is the only thing that matters and my aesthetic taste should only mirror the client and never my own. Be in a profession where it requires A LOT OF TRAINING only to be ignored and blamed if something goes wrong. As well as one of the WORSE paid professions in the Philippines, relative to the cost of education and Practice. 

2) their TRPG hobbies overlap with their Science and History and Politics interests 

3) they want accessible stuff, not the stuff that requires someone who is more sophisticated to understand. They'd rather watch youtube video of people explaining it step by step - where they can scrub the timeline or get to the parts they want than have to go through the whole thing. 

4) Probably highly skeptical of authority (not going to sell among my fellow Filipinos. specially now that the Tiktok algorithm is being used in the most FB embedded population in the world with 96% usage
5) DIYer and is a NOVICE in many things, and completely comfortable with it and celebrates it.   

6) Small social groups, tiny and shrinking (see Age). 

Somoene will go - hey for 10usd this is not bad and has so much stuff. Hey I can write a novel with this. I can make more believable cultures and peoples with this. At the same time: I only want 20-40mins prep - click click click DONE!!! I made a solar system and my Players can do what ever they want, and I dont care if they "Break" the world. 



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