Target Audience

Who is this game for? What makes it fun and appealing?

Game Appeal

Intense Time Pressure and Conflict

Intense fast-paced high-pressure gameplay.

You have to be constantly engaged and making decisions, be good at managing your time and attention. Be fast and decisive.

Every second is an opportunity cost. If you are not doing something useful, you are falling behind other players. If you make good decisions quickly, you pull ahead.

You are racing for domination.

Gameplay Variety

Large variety of interconnected game mechanics give multi-dimensional gameplay. The game mechanics fit well together and have cross-cutting implications.

Every decision has consequences. You are constantly considering your opportunity cost – making trade-offs about where to invest your time, attention, and resources.

The diversity of gameplay mechanics gives players the chance to develop their own unique playstyles and try different strategies every game, making the game exciting to replay.

Emotional Moments

Emotional tension from facing the consequences of your mistakes and poor decisions.

Emotional reward from making good decisions that pay off, and from exploiting the mistakes and vulnerabilities of other players.

Skill-based Gameplay

You get better at the game as you play more. Your skill and experience are the primary things that determine your success, not chance (and certainly not pay-to-win).

The gameplay effects due to the randomness of the procedurally-generated map and spawn location are quickly dwarfed by the consequences of your skills and decisions.

Macro Play

MineWars is fundamentally a real-time strategy game. You build your empire by capturing cities, taking control of the map, constructing infrastructure, and managing resources.

As you become more experienced, you reduce your cognitive overhead. You become more decisive with your actions.

Build intuition and instincts for how to react to different situations. What game mechanics to focus your attention on. How to adapt to the map's geography.

Learn how to plan well for the progression of the game and set yourself up for success.

Micro Play

The Minesweeper-inspired gameplay is how you fight other players.

Get good at parsing the Minesweeper digits. Glance at the screen and instantly know what to do, where to click.

Get good at your defense game. Know effective mine/decoy formations and quickly deploy them appropriately to the situation.

Infinite Replayability

The procedurally-generated map guarantees that every game is a unique experience.

Learn to navigate the unique geography of each particular map and your spawn position in it.

Also, competitive PvP games are replayable by nature …

Social Dynamics

… your opponents are other humans that also learn and get more skilled, and everyone has their own unique playstyle.

Play psychological mind-games with your opponent.

Alliances Extension may greatly expand the scope for this.

Audience

The highly-determined competitive strategy player is the primary target of this game.

Spectating Experience

Such a game is likely to also be engaging to watch, not just play.

There is a whole separate e-sports-like potential audience for this game.

Some people may be more interested in spectating and analyzing the matches of other players, rather than playing the game themselves. Offering good spectator and replay experiences can provide a lot of value to the community.

Being able to watch offline replays, not just live matches, is also a valuable tool for analyzing matches and learning from prior experiences. Game replay and analysis features would be valuable to both spectator/analyst and to player audiences.

Who do you play against?

The playerbase could also be categorized based on who they most likely want to play with.

Some players may prefer to play against their friends or at local tournaments. They may prefer a LAN session.

Some players may prefer to play against strangers. They may prefer online matchmaking.

Some players may prefer to play with a semi-restricted number of people on a community server.

The above is just a list of possibilities. It is not necessarily a development goal to support all of these multiplayer modes, but it's important to point out that it would increase the playerbase.