What Makes a Game Hypercasual?

[Music] so this session is about what makes a good hyper casual game so it's very suited to anyone who's thinking about getting into hyper casual games or it may be if you've created a hyper casual game and you want to make you better how many here have heard of quali let's get in the right place

how do one second the clickers not working so look they just thought it out to the back so hopefully the slides are becoming shortly in the meantime let's have a think how we can get stopped it's good to know when when you've got this is how will that we kick off an average conversation or a great a few seconds to the sides together so something you've been involved in making games for a very long time and

what would you say is that I mean I don't want to try and cover the material going to later yeah what would you say is the sort of thing that really kind of fundamentally feels different about what we're doing with a hyper casual type content there may be some of the more casual stuff that you were doing before happy nation days when you kind of you're doing more white oh there we go yeah we might be there we might be there we might not be that veteran developer and in the past I've remained development companies and I've been in industry for 30 plus years how I've seen it change and especially with respect to hyper casual is it's about honing one key mechanic one key part of the gameplay and it's almost like the pinnacle of creativity I'd say because you're trying to make that there's nowhere to hide you're trying to make that one key that have gameplay feel

amazing so amazing that you want to keep playing past the next ad it's that traffic design line which is I forgot who is some Frenchman I've written the name of the person you know design is not done when there's nothing left to add design is done when there's nothing left to take away I think might be casual is really at the bit to me of that so not sure why we still having troubles sure it's or earlier and but apparently they're going to continue looking it's only because we've had no problems this morning it's all been smooth I'm just gonna get a paper copy of my slides just in case I need to talk I think that principal were somewhat hinting at their this idea that this is important when I'm looking at this actually the template I can be worked on I'm looking at trying to find out what's the one movement on the screen you do if you're assuming a phone like the experience will seem that but if you

were assuming your own experience what's the one interaction and why is that one interaction song and they're getting down to that sort of basic level of really deep you know part of the problem kind of the way of looking at things and really just getting rid of the rest of the it's in and affecting that way I think that's where the idea of game play like this I think is so powerful trying to work out I'd say I'll keep talking but Fitz I have this terrible habit of when there's problems I just do the talk and it's very bad of me but fitness is a great way of looking at it if you think about fidgets manner that simplicity of mindset that they need to connective ate someone's attention for that moment it's very different in creating a skyrim cuz i thumbs up doing identify you've some but I find myself doing you know the hyper cacher like moments in bigger games like Skyrim I spent so much time just picking flowers why why did I pick

flowers it's diary but I spent hours and hours doing it anyway I'm sorry Thurman the technical problems I'll talk to we might fit the first initial slides so to see what happens [Music] sort of fly under the radar a bit but in court for 2019 we are in number five by downloads games publisher in the US App Store we also in 2019 had 12 number-one hits the average in one a month now when you start thinking about how the casual you might think

does it have lots of ads and get it some revenue from format revenue does it have a short lifespan where players are playing for days while there than weeks does it can it be developed quickly in terms of weeks rather than months but none of these things really define a hyper casual game so what we're going to do in the presentation when they get it working is work through three key principles okay and we're going to iterate those through that and show you examples and what we've done in terms of our games in honing those principles as they're not fixing the technical problems the first principle is to do with mass appeal this probably the one

that you're most familiar with and you can measure that here with CPI everyone here knows what CPI is yes yep it's cost per install and you need to have very good ads and creative in order to get a low cost per install and to do that you need satisfying visuals and satisfying moments and a player really needs to get what the game is all about within the first three seconds the second principle is bite-sized gameplay okay and we measure that with number of sessions and that's all about the mechanics is needs to be synced satifying and simple mechanics and the third principle is short-term stickiness

and we measure that with strong retention and that comes from having a satisfying loop and a progression that keeps the player playing through the 1st 2nd 3rd 4th day so we're gonna get to the point where I can't actually talk to you without the slides and so when you so we look at day 1 retention and we have a threshold where it needs to be able 40% and if it does then then we look at

signing that game along with other metrics CPI we're looking at 50 cents in the US percentage that means but how do you actually take stickiness is that the measure or is it just we measure it with retention so and so they keep the key match you would be our day 1 retention when we initially look at prototypes and concepts that's why it doesn't need a huge amount of levels because we're only looking at the first couple of days when we do our initial testing yeah we do a prototype that we test on the store

yes yeah I will go into details about how you get that stickiness which i think is what you're driving it so I go through each principle one by one and say what we do everyone in this room you try I think if you give me your card afterwards I look at sharing the slides with you okay so with CPI and improving your mass appeal first thing is to have inoffensive visuals okay so there you want to be my inoffensive it needs to be a wide theme it needs to be genderless

culture but not to the extent where everything so cute but it does need to trans transfer to whatever territory and global country that you're looking to put us in the second thing after inoffensive visuals is you need a satisfying moment and the example I was going to show on the slides was our own drop and smash game which has is all about smashing objects with other objects drop where you drop an object from a high platform and obviously that smashing of the objects is an instant satisfying moment that you can show in an ad and people get it in the first three seconds okay let me just move okay that's it

okay presenter laughs men hopefully we've got some [Applause] not

okay we step through the three things principals which is Ritchie ated here we said about mass appeal low CPI and offensive visuals said about the threshold that we use is 50 Cent's [Applause] number of sessions where we look for more than to add a strong daily weigh on attention we talked about 40% this is about question your idea and I was using to quali games an example here so whenever you have a continuity concept so when you prototype look measuring against these three principles so this one is tres ace which is a prototype that we developed if you go

back there you can see you're tracing over a a drawing and each level was a different drawing so did have a strong appear went up ties what everyone likes to draw as proven by our drawer it's game which is our one of our biggest downloads this game cater to bite-sized sessions it does because each level is fairly small because each one's a small drawing but the user can take as long as they want and it doesn't actually following the lines it doesn't actually progress that much says the reason that and I went to my own game play addictive and satisfying that we're looking for where is drop and smash for instance has a strong visual appeal as we said about smashing stuff on the on the screen and

that's easily captured on video [Music] bitesize session every time you drop for an object onto another object that's a new level and then moment gameplay and progression and satisfaction comes from having different objects the ability to have finishing news we your rag doll character can jump off the platform as well and then we also allow you to upgrade the power and Heights and things like that that's on the pixels there also other tests you can put your idea through first thing is your game playable in portrait mode most people want to play in one hand like this and you can't really do that with a a landscape mode game can be played with one a single hand with drawing games surprisingly is very hard to draw with just a thumb so it doesn't quite pass

pass that test is there a to strength of progression unless you get other drawing techniques in there the the only sense of progression is to see a new picture in this particular case drop-ins match definitely portraits can play the single hand because the control is about tapping the screen with with your thumb and is that chance of progression yes because you you continually gain more power more objects to smash in the height of the platform we talked about inoffensive visuals and I use shoot at 3d is an example there this is one of our biggest hits last last year and you can see we haven't distilled the idea in the

visuals down to two cubes but we have removed most of the things that we would say makes the theme too narrow and it's not really a shooting game the food people have played it it's a puzzle game and the satisfying moment again I'm using drop and smashes example next one is four sessions if we want to increase the number of sessions you need a very easy to simple mechanic and you can read the sort of phrases I often hear from the hyper cut about hyper casual games but with a simple satisfying mechanic what you need is something like this so for instance the one on the left and mechanic is you tap and it jumps and he jumps across a preset art okay quickly that gets old and boring it's very binary you can master it it is

simple but it's not satisfying the one on the right is where you tap and hold and then you adjust the arc and then you release and you jump now that has a lot of nuances but is still simple but it gives you a lot more in the terms of satisfaction and again we're going to use plank as an example that where you tap hold the plank lengthens then you release and it drops the plank on to the next pillar and then finally progression improves retention because players want to play more of a game they enjoy the need to have a little bit more know that the game is going to expand a tiny bit more and I'm using jetpack jump here as an example because you can get further and further and gradually you get to travel to new locations around the world and

it's that progression to see a new location which drives you on and then the other way to drive retention here that women use here is the illusion of depth and clean up 3d is a bit like an i/o game you can instantly change direction the controller chases you what I mean by that is wherever you put your thumb that's where the controller is so it's very mobile specific design if you increase in size and actually increase the size within a level you can consume more and more of the objects enough so that eventually gets to a point where you can suck the walls down you go outside and then you get your vacuum cleaner cars and buildings and things like that and then there's no bad decisions the player can go in any direction they want it gives that illusion of a lot more depth even though the levels are very fairly confined so just and this we're gonna give some

examples based on each principle using qualies games so the first one is plank in order to get good CPI you've got bold colors with simple gradients and blocky characters and animals you have lupa and then you've got tore it I'm not gonna read it or the slides out but you can read them they're all of these games have done over 20 million downloads so they work same with improving the number of sessions needs to be satisfying a simple mechanic we've gone into a plank already looper is all about you tap to add the beets but it's not just about beets it's also a puzzle game because you don't want to collide with the other beets that are going around on the on the track and then withdraw it it's a bit like picture me if you know the board game you compete against other people to create a recognizable drawing before

anyone else so you don't have to be the best drawing but you do need to be the best of producing something recognizable and finally the even proving retention you need a satisfying loop and the projection with plank you get all these animals that follow you around it looks quite cute with all these square anymores following you after it you with looper you get more and more levels of different music and there's hundreds of levels and with draw h you actually open up new words and therefore new challenges stuff with the other players so then just to Reece rates it's just those three again any questions I sort of wid through that because I knew I was living out of time I was expecting to go on longer I'm gonna sneak a couple of questions because I think after all that I mean frankly I mean I think he deserves a round of applause for just continuing [Applause] Thanks and also hugely useful and

intimate information packs so quick question if anyone wants to take it what's the communication channel sorry I'm Mike hi Mike I'm obsessed with hyper casual so a lot of questions but what's the channel that you communicate with developers what I use how often do you communicate and how do you keep it's a vibrant industry hyper casual how do you make it so even the communication is vibrant so it's now you know communicate once a week or so we have a talented new a team and so in order to we grow out to being a developer marketing and doing users acquisitions for our own games so we have a very talented marketing u18 that we now use for our expanding publishing business and they've learned so much from doing our own games it is

all about creating that eye catching and amazing creative art that that gets across the the game is that answering your questions we're kind of more talked about that people who the developers as opposed to the players yeah no okay so in this sense your publisher I'll be developer yeah what would be the communication channel we say hey I've got a game do you want to test it out okay so most of our submissions come from our website visit since you go on there on the home page there's a submit to submit your game button hit that it takes a few basic details including a link to a prototype or demo one my team guarantees to look at it and we will do feedback on it we do within three working days okay and so you'll hear back for us within three days and we'll

let you know whether we want to proceed and the first stage is for us to do a you a test on the game thank you very much [Applause] [Music]