How Neon Play uses hackathons to find the next hyper-casual hit
There are three things people ask/tell me about Neon Play.
- The one thing everyone mentions about our website is our “posh bog roll guarantee”.
- What was it like meeting the Queen?
- How do you come up with hit games?
So I’ll answer those three questions. The first two won’t take very long. The third one I’ll do my best.
1. Start with the basics
Despite creating loads of hits over the years, getting 150 million downloads and winning lots of awards, the one thing that everyone always talks about is the fact that we have a “posh bog roll guarantee”.
Yes, we have Andrex bog/toilet/loo roll, so every Neon Play employee wipes their bum with soft, strong, double duvet, luscious and smooth loo roll. No bummer.
2. So you met the Queen?
Yes, yes, we did. It all started off when Neon Play won the Cirencester Business Awards in our local town. Then we upgraded to our county and won two Gloucestershire Business Awards. That gave us the confidence to go national and I won Entrepreneur of the Year at the National Chamber of Commerce Awards. So that was all very exciting and we had loads of cheap, hard-to-read, glass awards and A4 frames all over the studio.
And then we thought, why not go for the big one, the Queen’s Award — the most prestigious business award in the UK, maybe the world. Maybe. No harm trying. So we entered away, filled out lots of forms and then sort of forgot about it.
A few months later, we got a very nice letter from Buckingham Palace no less (with their own postmark — how cool is that), saying we’d won a Queen’s Award for Innovation and we were being invited to Buckingham Palace to meet THE QUEEN. Yes, the real Queen in her actual home. My mum was dead proud.
3. How do you make a hit game?
Luck mostly. But you make your own luck.
Hits and misses
Creating hyper-casual games and finding a hit really is like a needle in a haystack. You need to create loads of prototypes to find the one game that has profit potential. It’s not enough to just create a game that’s really good fun. You need hard facts and data so a game can scale with a low CPI, decent retention and a positive LTV. Not easy.
So we do two things. Firstly we prototype lots and secondly we do hackathons.
Small, but perfectly formed (sometimes)
We are not a big company. There are 20 Neon Players under one roof. We need to find hits or misses fast. So testing quickly and early is really important.
Your time to shine
At Neon Play, we believe that giving the team the autonomy to make the games they want to make is really important. So the team either come up with their own ideas or we have a big document where anyone in the company can brain dump their ideas with a few bullet points, maybe a scamp/doodle and/or some imagery/animated GIFs, inspiration, etc.
Game in a day
We ask that programmers make a first prototype build within a day or two, so we can give some initial feedback. We don’t care how the game looks at this stage, so there is no need for an artist to get involved. Using cubes and spheres is fine — just get the core mechanics of the game.
Feedback loop
We then sit in a round table (literally, it’s a round table) and we discuss feedback and look to build on the ideas. Within a day or three, we’ll get a build that we think is worth putting to the art team, who get involved with models (sometimes bought) and nice colours, animations, FX, etc.
Test ASAP
And then we test ASAP for a few days with a small budget. That will get you enough downloads (hopefully about 200–250 players a day) to get some meaningful data on the CPI. At this stage, we are not too bothered by retention beyond day 1, as often there is not enough content to warrant more retention past the first day.
How long can you go?
A low CPI is vital, otherwise your game will never scale. If the CPI is OKish, we might relook at the game and see if we can improve the visuals, animations or even the CPI video and retest it. If the CPI is high, we will put the game on the shelf and move onto something else.
Unlock potential
If the CPI is low, we will then look at the game and add the content and depth it needs to get a more exciting day 1 and day 3 retention, and maybe day 7 if we are lucky. This might take weeks or sometimes months, but in general we have found that if it takes too long, there is only so much you can eke out of a game, however hard you try. Don’t be afraid to try something new.
Roller Splat
On Roller Splat, we first tested the game with no art at all and with just six levels. But when we looked at the data (we use GameAnalytics), we saw people were playing those six levels again and again. We had some good early retention data even with just six levels. So we knew we had something to work with.
Here is what the game looked like at prototype stage. The first version had a “door” to go out of once you finished the level. We binned that as it felt like you were having to complete the maze twice.
We then added more levels, improved the look of the game, added nice animations and a feeling of movement and power to the ball, plus haptics which really helped the feel of the game. The retention was amazing, the CPI was 15 cents, things were looking good.
Voodoo published the game and Roller Splat flew to the top of the USA charts and 80 other countries within days. It stayed at number one in the USA for three weeks (hard to do these days) and has over 55 million downloads — which feels like a lot of people playing our little game.
Sadly, copycats galore came out soon after — the worst culprits being Amaze and House Paint — plus dozens of others. But we had created a new genre — hyper puzzle games — and that felt pretty cool.
Hackathons
Every month, on a Friday, everyone at Neon Play stops working on their games and spends a day coming up with something new. This is a normal work day, not a 24 no-sleep-athon.
From time to time, we’ll have a theme (e.g. idle games), but ultimately the team can do whatever they want to do and no one will say they can’t do it. The only thing we ask is that there is a build of the game by the end of the day so we can play over the weekend.
Any nuggets?
Then we’ll play the builds and you hope that there will be two or three prototypes or ideas that get the juices flowing and you think might have potential. If we’re lucky, with only a day’s work, we will be ready to test (like we were on Roller Splat).
Weak or strong idea?
This summer, as I was going around the studio on Hackathon Day, one of the teams had this character on his hands and knees, dragging a big rock. People were chucking money at him as he went along this road. You could upgrade the rock to other items as you earned more dollars.
It was completely ridiculous and silly and I couldn’t actually believe that someone had come up with an idea that was so seemingly pointless. But it made me smile. I texted my business partner Mark saying, “This strongman game is wonderfully random. Man dragging stuff. Could be fun.” And then I played it over the weekend more and more and it really was fun.
This is what it looked like on Hackathon Day…literally, a man dragging a rock.
We thought that as it was so completely different that we should just CPI test on Monday, just to see what it was. And it was 7 cents. Not bad.
What a drag
We spent the rest of that week adding in a bunch of other silly objects to drag, from a toilet up to the International Space Station. Plus a bunch of FX and touches. But it only took three days and then we launched the game a week after the Hackathon.
This is the game as it launched…
Here are the top chart positions the game made — not bad for one week’s work.
In the hole!
Another game that came out of a hackathon was a disc that you needed to get into a hole, bouncing off angles and walls, etc. It was created by an Italian and he called it Buca, which is Italian for “hole”. We liked the odd name, so kept it as Buca. The game has been a pretty big hit with 7 million downloads.
Go Hackathon, go
So we would highly encourage studios, big or small, to embrace regular hackathons to unleash the creativity of your WHOLE team. It’s often the people who might not usually get the chance to put their own ideas forward who come up with the nugget of gold amongst the silty sands of averageness.
Nothing to lose
Ultimately you have very little to lose doing hackathons. Yes, you lose a day’s work. But you gain extra motivation for the team who break from their normal day to day work, and let them go wild with ideas in the nooks and crannies of their brains with no limitations or restrictions. You will get some terrible ideas, you will get some mad ideas, you will get copycats, but you will get something potentially unique and that is what you need in a cluttered app store.
So we’ve gone from Buckingham Palace to a man dragging a toilet. Such is life…
Oli Christie is the founder and CEO of Neon Play, a UK-based mobile games studio with hits like Roller Splat, Idle Tap Strongman, Buca, Soccer Kick and Cannon Man. And loads of failures and rubbish games too.
