Spiral Craft 3D: a Game Downloaded by Millions and Inspired by a TikTok Trend — Hit Story #1 — Part 1
Here is the first article of our “Hit Story” series, where we are going to show you the development steps we go through and some anecdotes about our mobile games. You will find exclusive backstage content, never-seen screenshots, bits of concepts, explanations for our decisions, and more.
This time, let’s talk about Spiral Craft 3D, with the voice of Paul Giovannini, Lead Game Developer of the project:
Spiral Craft 3D is a new satisfying game released by Dual Cat on May 20, 2021.
In this lovely game, you play as Astro. After an accident with an unpredicted meteorite, Astro needs your help to find his friend and repair his rocket. By gathering resources with a highly satisfying mechanic, you will craft amazing machines in order to build your own world and discover new planets.
This mobile adventure/crafting game is available on Android and iOS.
This Hit Story will be split into 2 parts:
- Part 1: From Ideation to Prototype
- Part 2: Improvement Phase and Things We Learned
From the game concept to the very last version, epic fails to amazing discoveries, here is the story of Spiral Craft 3D!
Part 1 : From Ideation to Prototype
Setting up the idea 💡
New trend detected : Exploration and craft 📈
Every Thursday, our team gathers up to play some new games that our insight tools pointed out. It was at this moment that we discovered a new game trend that users loved: a mix between exploration, crafting and decision-making perfectly balanced to suit Hyper Casual gaming.
It was a wonderful discovery for us. Indeed, in the Hyper Casual industry, games often have what we call a ‘Level-Based’ structure: these are games where you have a clear and satisfying task to achieve which will repeat over and over in different levels with new interactions to discover or new traps to challenge the player.
However, crafting games were different and we were hooked! Freedom of movement, lots of wonderful choices, amazing structures to build and more! We were thrilled by this new tendency!
All lights were green to start crafting a new game following the emergence of this trend. In this new structure, we saw a wonderful way to let our curiosity and creativity express themselves! We had millions of ideas colliding with one another, leading us to improve even more on the satisfying and exciting aspects of this genre.
Let’s design our own crafting game!
Analysing crafting games 🔎
Once we’ve decided to create a crafting game prototype, we first analysed this type of game to understand the key points that we will have to focus on.
We have taken as our starting point the hypothesis that Craft Island was really addictive because of the exploration aspect. Indeed, players are driven by this question: “What will I discover next?”
To answer that question, they will have to cut trees in order to get more resources and craft new machines or bridges to access new areas.
If we refer to the Game Motivation Model overview and descriptions from Quantic Foundry, this question may involve the Creativity Motivation model, especially the Discovery aspect. Players will enjoy the game because they want to explore and discover new biomes.
Thus, the exploration aspect is really important in crafting games. After deeper analysis, we made a crafting game checklist.
In order to create a crafting game we should have these key elements 🔑 :
- a top-down camera that follows the player 🎥
- a joystick to move the player around 🕹️
- an exploration/discovery system allowing the player to discover new places 🧭
- a crafting system allowing players to use their resources and giving them a sense of progression ⛏️
However, we thought that something was missing!
Indeed, what if the player doesn’t like the core feature of cutting trees? They won’t play Craft Island nor Lumbercraft even though those games contain what they may be looking for: Exploration and Discovery. The action that allows you to gather resources should be extremely fun and satisfying so that the player will be hooked.
We wanted our game to be enjoyable even through its main feature only. The exploration and sense of progression should come second. If players love doing a satisfying action in the first place, they will enjoy doing it for a specific reason throughout the game.
Then, we have to add a new item to our checklist:
- a satisfying and engaging game mechanic 🤩
So what about this main mechanic? How will we find a satisfying and refreshing new core mechanic that could be enjoyed by everyone?
Finding inspiration on TikTok
To answer that question, you have to know that every day at Dual Cat, we explore trendy satisfying concepts from Pop Culture and Social Networks, in order to find fun ideas that may be enjoyed by everyone. Thus, while we were looking for this magic missing feature, we discovered what we called the “scraping trend”.
These types of videos are really appreciated on TikTok judging by reactions and engagement on every scraping video.
After finding this trend, you can easily understand what we did:
On the one hand, we have a brand new game concept using crafting and discovery, on the other hand, a trendy satisfying mechanic from TikTok.
So we thought about merging those two amazing ideas in our new game concept, and that is how Spiral Craft 3D came to be!
Now that we’ve identified what we should focus on to produce a crafting game and what our main mechanic should be, we can start thinking about what our game should look like!
Design Phase ✏️
During this phase, we gather all ideas that we’ve had and we start designing the game. It’s at this moment that we think deeply on what is achievable and what isn’t, thinking about the time we have. We also anticipate every issue that we may encounter during the development phase, which will come after the design phase.
Then, we create a game design document that will explain what the game may look like, what the in-game interactions will be like, what the player can do, etc, …
Here is one part of the first concept document for Spiral Craft 3D, the Concept Art.
As you can see, our first design document wasn’t that far from what we finally achieved!
Once this document was ready, we knew exactly where to go and we could then start making the game!
Toy Phase : From a simple idea to a satisfying prototype ! 💡➡️ 🕹️
3 days : from concept to reality 🏗️
In the Hyper Casual industry, trends appear and disappear really quickly. Thus we can’t spend too much time developing a prototype, because a trend may be exploited by someone else and already be old-fashioned by the time we get to it. And we don’t want to lose time or money on a game that is dead on arrival. To avoid this issue, we created a development phase called the Toy phase.
The Toy phase is a short sprint which aims to validate if the concept is worth spending time on. The challenge could be explained like this: “3 days to craft a fun game”. So we have to be organized and know where we want to go.
For this prototype, we focused on the 3 key crafting game elements:
- resource gathering (digging and creating spirals) 💎
- crafting machines (drilling machine and rocket) 🚀
- upgrading machines (speed up, increase stocks, …) 🆙
Regarding the crafting aspect, we decided to go with 2 resources: Spirals and Stars. Spirals will be used to create bridges while stars are used to build special machines and upgrade them.
After 3 days of work, this is what our prototype looks like:
At this point, if you’ve already played Spiral Craft 3D, you can identify the skeleton of what the final game will be in this video. What’s more, we played it a lot and had tons of fun, which is always a good sign in game development!
Our user-testing gave us good results so we decided to invest more time polishing it.
2 more days : make it shine ☀️ 😎
During those two days, we focused on polishing the game. The aim is to make it engaging for the player, the prototype should look like a real finished game so that people can anticipate what they will have to do in it.
Thus, we put the accent on:
- changing colors to make the game more attractive 🎨
- polishing the spiral aspect to make it smoother and more satisfying 🌀
- changing placeholders icons to make the game more understandable ✨
- adding accessories to the main character to enforce the space and exploration context 🚀
Two days of adjustment later, this is what the Spiral Craft 3D prototype looks like:
To achieve this result in only 5 days, we used many development tools. At the risk of stating the obvious, here are some rules that we follow in order to boost our development speed!
Dev strategy for fast prototyping
Stack features and don’t re-invent the wheel ⚙️
In order to make our game quickly, we identified what tasks our development teams were doing over and over when they worked on a new project. Then, we found a way to automate these tasks with a game template. This template could be seen as an empty shell with a game user interface, some transitions and a coin system already ready to use. Our development teams just have to create their game loop inside this shell to have a working prototype!
This template is just an example of the numerous tools in the development stack we built during the last 3 years. Indeed, during the Toy phase, we aim to get a working prototype to experiment on the fun of the idea. So we should consider using every tool already existing in order to save some time.
As an example, the biggest challenge for us was probably the scraping mechanic. However, thanks to a tool we developed for our previous game Laser Cutting, this feature was really easy and quick to implement (see our previous article).
Code quick and smart 👩💻
In order to iterate quickly to create new feature and to test mechanics, we have to code fast. However, coding fast is not coding quick, dirty and randomly. Coding fast is coding efficiently. Thus, we try to apply as much as we can the S.O.L.I.D principles. It allows us to create scalable-maintainable-adaptable project and so we encourage everyone to look into it!
Conclusion
To create Spiral Craft 3D:
- we imagined the game from two trends: crafting games and scraping videos from TikTok 🔎
- we analysed and understood the game mechanics required and the users needs 🔬
- we gave our idea 3 development days 🛠️
- we polished it during 2 days to get a highly satisfying core game 🍬
After marketing tests from our User Acquisition team, it appeared that the Spiral Craft prototype had the potential to carry Dual Cat’s value all over the world so it entered in its second development phase: the creation of a soft launch game version.
So, in the second part of this article, we will share with you how this small prototype became a game that millions of users already love!
Stay tuned for the second part, in which we’ll delve into the mistakes we’ve made along the way, and what we learned from them! 🔈
