5 Biggest Mistakes We Made Creating Our First Few Hyper-Casual Mobile Games

Don’t we all hate making mistakes? We all make mistakes in our life. They are part of our learning experience and they can also be our greatest source of learning.

In this post, we will share with you our 5 biggest mistakes made when creating our first few hyper-casual mobile games! Hopefully with this post, you can speed up your learning curve in making your games!

1. Outsourcing development

Yes, we hired outsourced developers, paying them fixed budget per game. They were just so much cheaper and made sense in every way considering our initial budget. Well, we only realized what a huge mistake this was down the road.

Communication — You cannot expect them to reply you promptly. It was really tough communicating with them and discussing about requirements. It will be worse if they are opposite of your timezone. Expect a few days turnaround time for each discussion.

Maintenance — If the game is completed, the contract is over. Any updates you need on your game has to be done by another developer or re-hire the same developer with a new contract. This created a lot of unnecessary downtime, discussing about the new contract details. If you hire a new developer, the new developer has to learn the old codes and make sense of it before any modifications can be done. This slowed down the process by a huge factor.

New Requirements — Halfway testing the game, we wanted to make a few tweaks to the game. Since it was a new requirement to the game, it incurred extra costs. So at the end, the game costed us much more than planned. Also since it was a fixed budget per game, we tried to squeeze in a “full” game. Putting in as much requirements as possible, for the same price. This created a lot of problems as the game didn’t quite turned out as planned and a lot of changes were required mid-way that incurred more costs again, which brings me to my 2nd point.

2. Using Waterfall Methodology

As you knew, we tried to squeeze in a “full” game from the start. Laying out all the requirements straight off the bat. Theoretically, it sounded good but it was only during the mid stage where we realized through testing, the game was not how we pictured it to be. We had to make corrections in many places and this Waterfall model was not kind to changes. It incurred a lot of changes and thus costs.

This was where we learned about Agile methodology — Scrum in particular. Scrum allowed for iterative designs, quick testing and feedback which was perfect for our needs. Bear in mind, for Scrum to work optimally, you most probably want an in-house team.

3. Thinking we will launch the first few games successfully

By overcoming the challenges faced during the initial phase, you would expect that the games would at least give you some returns? NO, it won’t!

You heard that right! The first few games you make most probably won’t make it to launch. Even if it did, it won’t hit the desired KPIs. Why? Because it will suck so much that no one will care.

Take the first few games as your learning opportunities. Make as many mistakes as you can so that your next games can become better and better. Eventually with this mindset, I can guarantee that it is just a matter of time before you create your first hit game!

4. No proper production framework in place

After understanding that you have to keep making games to be better because you learn from mistakes and experience — you just have to continue making games! So what gives you an edge? SPEED.

If you can streamline your production faster than your competitors, you will have an enormous advantage! So what are the key areas in streamlining your production?

Break up your production into phases — Creating a full game right from the start, having no idea if this game can even make it for your D1 retention benchmark is a recipe for disaster. What if you sink in so much resources into the game and it didn’t turn out as you expected? So instead, we break up into the game into phases. Phase 1 should have a set of basic requirements which includes the core gameplay loop, you don’t need any retention features in this phase. We use Phase 1 mainly to test D1 retention benchmark. If the players like what they see, they will most probably play again the next day. Subsequent phases should start to see more inclusion of retention features and additional polishing. Ideally, Phase 2 should be testing D7 retention so you would need enough content/features/polishing to test that. The last phase should be the official launch of the game, with all the needed updates, from data collected in the previous phases.

Soft Launch your games — We mentioned about breaking up your production into phases. Now we need to soft launch them to test the KPIs accordingly. Should your Phase 1 pass your first soft launch test, you can then proceed to plan more resources into the game for developing your Phase 2. This is the iterative approach so you will only need to spend resources in a game with potential! If your game does not hit anywhere near the KPI benchmark, kill the game and move onto the next!

5. Trying all game categories instead of mastering one

We tried most of the game categories, from puzzle to shooter. We realized that this approach was not efficient. Most lessons learned from puzzle games weren’t able to be applied in shooter games and vice versa. We just made our learning curve steeper.

It was then we realized we needed to stop spreading too thin and focus on one instead.

This approach helped us tremendously! We were able to focus on one category and made every production step modular, which streamlined our production even further!

Takeaway

Try to setup an in-house team as soon as possible. Use agile methodology in managing your games. Expect the first few games to be a flop, but most importantly, learn from them. Deploy an efficient production framework to properly utilize your resources. Last but not least, master one game category and get so good at it that people start to recognize your games in the market!

We hope our 5 biggest mistakes helped you in one way or another. Comment below if you have experienced something similar or you have something to share with us! We would love to hear your thoughts!