5 - Target audience

This blog post will go into detail about our chosen target audience.

"For adolescents and teens, whose interactions with peers are so central to their lives and development, the pandemic’s shrinking of their world has been especially difficult." There's many more staments like this as well as articles on the pandemic having a negaitve effect on mental health. We believe that mental health, especially among the young generation, is not taken seriously enough. That's why we wanted to focus our target audience exactly on this age group .

We set our target audience as follows:

Teenagers, young adults (13-19), who feel lonely, struggle with mental health - especially during pandemic,
are often alone at home, don’t have anyone to talk to about their problems.

In order to better illustrate the usage of the game we created the following 4 personas:

Marius (16) - feels lonley because of lockdown

Natalie (18) - pressured under exam stress

Susy (14) - just got her heart broken for the first time

Jack (17) - bullies other kids because he has problems in his own family

User Journeys:

Marius (16)
feels lonley because of lockdown

Due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic schools are closed and classes are exclusively held online. For Marius this means sitting alone at home all day since his parents are still able to go out to work. Both of them work long shifts and only come home at around 9pm.

After finishing his classes in the afternoon Marius usually just lays in his bed for a bit because he feels so exhausted and empty. As soon as these feelings get to much, he grabs his phone and starts playing video games for the rest of the day.

On this day, however, he is tired of playing the games he usually plays. So he starts scrolling through the game store. And that’s when he stumbles across our game.

Natalie (18)
pressured under exam stress

It is Natalie’s last month of school and final exams are approaching. After school, she wants to become lawyer and because she knows how hard this will be she is quite ambitious in everything she does.

But there’s more to this story. Natalie becoming a lawyer is not her own biggest dream but her mother’s. She is very strict and only wants to see Natalie have the best grades in school. Naturally, Natalie feels a lot of pressure from her mom. Does she even want to become a lawyer?

On this day, she is once again preparing for finals. Her mother told her that if she studies all afternoon she is allowed to take a walk in the evening. After spending three hours of non-stop readig her body signals that it is enough.

She picks up her mobile phone and starts scrolling through instagram. And that’s when she sees an ad for our game.

Susy (14)
just got her heart broken for the first time

Out of nowhere Susy’s first boyfriend broke up with her last Tuesday at school. In front of all her classmates. She still feels very humiliated. Finally, something was going right in her life, but now everything is back to being crappy again.

She’s refused to go to school all week, just staying in her room. Her dad has tried everything, but she just doesn’t want to talk to him. It is moments like these when she misses her mom the most.

A gentle knocking on her door takes her back to reality. “What do you want dad?”, she asks. “I thought you might like this!”, answers her dad as he slides a flyer for our game under the door.

Jack (17)
bullies other kids because he has problems in his own family

Once again he hears his parents shouting at each other downstairs. He just wants to live in a normal family.

He just can’t help it but get angry when he hears his classmates talking about their recent family trips, having dinner together and just in general all the things all these perfect families do. He especially hates Kyle, because his mom picks him up every day after school. Jack isn’t sure if his mom even know the school’s address. Projecting his own feelings onto Kyle, he starts bullying him.

A loud noise from downstairs brings himinto reality. He turns on his TV on full volume, but he can still hear their voices. Suddenly, an ad on the TV screen catches his attention - an ad for our game.

(For some reason, itch.io doesn't let me paste image into the devlog :( so you will have to go on our figma board, if you want to look at them https://www.figma.com/file/JTeZ0yRoX1B8Zf1O9tgOba/AGD-IND20?node-id=0%3A1 - it might take some searching tho, sorry!)

See you next time, hopefully with a less depressing post <3