Tips & Tricks While Developing a Hyper Casual Game
Do you want to develop your own Hypercasual game and earn some money? Than you should consider these tips & tricks…
Notes
You should know this information.
You will never feel able to ready to code a game.
But if you never start, you will never make progress and never achieve a success. So don’t think other super-minded coders are starting their first game with 100% knowledge. You will be tackled, failed, feel overloaded but you should keep up trying. Climbing the Everest is not fun if you can climb it easily.
Before the Development
You should prepare yourself a document called “Game Design Document”. You should write down your ideas, your drawings, your mechanics here. Don’t try to be so strict while writing this at start. You can go hard on yourself later, when you have more knowledge
Finding the Idea
Players needs to understand the game purpose at first glance. Graphics needs to be simple and understandable and not to confuse the player.
eg. Simple colors with understandable indicators.
Mechanics has to be so simple such one click, one slide or at most two.
eg. Clicker, Stacking, Sliding, Falling, Growing, Rising, Turning are the most used game mechanics.
Developing the Game
Developing The Base of the Game
Base are the common mechanics that are used for most of the Hypercasual games such as level compilation, success feedbacks, fail feedbacks, UI’s, Character (stickman) animations, Character controls etc. You need to be use this base while developing other games in the same style.
Code has to be Expandable
You develop a rock for example. You need to be able to turn this rock into a rocket missile if it needs. Single Responsible coding is necessary. For example, when you develop something that makes the object shine, than if you use this shining ability to another object, the new object needs to to shine properly and if you delete it, the old object need to be working properly.
Mock the Graphics
To not interrupt the development phase, graphics can be mocked with simple objects and handled after the coding phase. Code cannot be dependent to the graphical models.
Optimization is the Key
Hypercasual games wants to be in every kind of device that can able to run it. So optimization is the most necessary step in development phase if it affects the frame per second.
Deadline, Deadline, Deadline
Don’t expect your game to be the most impressive one. You need to define a deadline and stick with it. If the game can be published with minor bugs that doesn’t affect the gameplay, you may accept them. MVP is important.
Art of earning money, Ads
If you want to earn money, Hypercasual games has different style of monetization. Instead of selling in-game products, Hypercasuals earns money with ads. Such as “Watch the ad and complete the level”, “Watch the ad and earn X game money”, showing ads at every new level etc.
Graphical Models
You Are Just One
Don’t hesitate to use pre-developed (free or paid) mechanics or model packets if needed. You do not need to re-invent the wheel.
Least Triangle Polygons
Your models has to have the least triangle polygons, but that doesn’t means that your models needs to be low poly. This phase can be executable in the optimization phase too.
Colors that We Knew
Colors needs to be exact and familiar. For example red is enemy, blue is friend, green is objective, yellow is gold. With this method you will lower the learning curve of the players.
UI Modelling
Hypercasual UI’s needs to be has the least information in it. For example, Level progress, tutorial UI (eg. if your game has tap and hold, you need to specify that at start of the game) and etc.
UX Desing
Your game needs to be used simply. For example if your setting button creates a list of selections, than the same settings buttons can be used for closing it. If you place the closing button so far, the player can be tired or bored of your game.
Publishing
To track the user interactions, user playstyle, how many people downloaded it, how many people used In-App Purchase market (CPC), how many people entered the store download page (CPI) you can use an analytics tool such as Iron Source, GameAnalytics etc. This way you can understand the player behaviors and fix the needed parts regarding their actions.
Publishing to The Stores
A real Hypercasual game wants to be in every store to hug every possible income, *coughing* player ! Here are some Store that you don’t want to miss to publish on;
Huawei AppGallery (Free publishing fee)
GooglePlay Store (Paid publishing fee)
Apple AppStore (Paid publishing fee)
Amazon AppStore (Free publishing fee)
End
I hope you’ve learned something today. Thanks for listening, see you in a new article
