Making Art For Hyper-Casual Mobile Games
Our team has a combined 10+ years of experience in making game art for many platforms, stretching from web browser games to mobile games. In this post, we will be sharing with you our experience in making art assets, specifically for Hyper-Casual mobile games. We will be touching on 4 different areas:
- How different is it for hyper-casual mobile games?
So what is the difference between making hyper-casual art assets and other game art assets? Based on our experience, the answer comes out to no difference at all. They are based on the same art making fundamentals when creating any art assets.
The first most important thing is to understand the concept behind hyper-casual games. From our extensive play-throughs across hundreds if not thousands of hyper-casual games, it is based on a very simple idea; minimalist art style.
This minimalist art style works hand-in-hand with the hyper-casual gameplay, which creates a very intuitive and easy-to-learn game environment.
For even the experienced artist can sometimes find themselves struggling to adjust to the minimalist concept. Like I love to say, even a guitar virtuoso finds it hard to create a pop-punk song.
2. Less is More!
We have learned that it is about the approach, and not the technique. You can use any technique that you would like but the “soul” of the hyper-casual must be felt by the player. Remember that less is more — you do not have to create state-of-the-art AAA artwork.
In hyper-casual mobile games’ production timeline, it is usually a few weeks. In our experience, we must be able to create all the art assets for a hyper-casual game in 1–2 weeks time frame. This is why minimalist would work best as they tend to require less production time.
Two very good examples for the minimalist art styles are Stack and Helix Jump. The art styles are simple yet effective. They are also minimally beautiful. In order to create this level of artworks, my recommendation to you is to play as many hyper-casual games as you can.
In PlayX, we have a culture for everyone to play at least 10 hyper-casual mobile games a week and share what are the things they have learned. This cultivated the sharing culture and allowed for continuous game improvements.
3. Juice up your game!
Like any other games, juice is a very important part of hyper-casual games. We would recommend you to take a look at “Juice It or Lose It” and “Secrets of Game Feel and Juice” to better understand what juice means.
You have to keep “squeezing” your game until the juice feels satisfying. You can try to make your animation more bouncy, add some screenshake effect, explosion particles, add real-time scoring and such. You can also try to design the most optimal UI and make the controls feel more responsive and intuitive. Basically anything that makes the game feel better!
Here’s a “juicy” illustration from one of our prototypes. You can see how we have slowly added juice from the left to the final version on the right:
Another good example of a satisfying hyper-casual game: OnPipe. The satisfaction when the corn gets peeled or when the grass gets weeded out. You feel it too right?
Another popular trick is to add color zoning. It is a dynamic color change that adds freshness and more level diversity. This is to prevent players getting bored of the same art assets as they progress through the levels. Stack is a fine example of this zoning as shown below.
You can observe that by utilizing color zoning, it quickly changed the game ambience and created more color varieties using the same assets.
4. Optimize your assets
One important thing that must never forget is optimization. In hyper-casual games, small app size is a must. Try to optimize the assets without sacrificing its quality. Here are some useful tips for optimization that can be used:
- For animation sprites, use fewer PNG assets. We have learned that dev can animate generic animation inside Unity which could save a lot of file size.
- You can use third party optimization software to reduce the size of your PNG sprites, such as PNG gauntlet or TinyPNG.
- If there are large 2D assets (like background) that are more than 1MB in size, consider breaking them up into two parts which will allow Unity to load them faster. Unity loads two images below 1MB faster than one image above 1MB in size.
- Export 2D assets in phone resolution as opposed to tablet resolution as Unity scales them up (this is Unity’s default behavior).
- If you made animation in Adobe Animate/Flash, you can export it into Unity easily using third party software called GAF .
So after understanding how to optimize your game assets, let’s understand the effects of it other than having a smoother performance. From our study, having a smaller app size can do wonders for your game. It can increase your app conversion rate, and in turn generate more revenue for you! So remember to put more weight into optimizing your assets and you are on your way to a successful game launch!
We hope that this post has helped you understand better in making art for hyper-casual games!
We will continue to update on our blog new exciting learning experiences! Follow us for updates and comment below to let us know what you wish to see next!
