Prototypes are about the market potential. Your prototype will need to conform to marketing standards in order to be appealing to players. Requirements for hyper casual and hybrid casual games differ. In this article, we will cover prototyping for hybrid casual.
Checklist:
- Core gameplay:
- Homa Belly SDK integration
- Around 40 minutes of gameplay for the first prototype
- Your hybrid casual game should be easy to play (i.e. simple mechanics)
- It should consist of quick rewarding sessions (i.e. short core loop)
- It should have juicy, marketable visuals (i.e. custom / unique assets)
- ~ 1 month of development time
- Casual progression
- Accumulate ressources by playing and spend them to progress
- Metagame options available:
- RPG: upgrade character, unlock weapons and skills like in Archero
- City building: Build a city, unlock ressources like in Bubble Buster 2048
- Collection: Collect rare items/animals like in Aquarium Land or Rodeo Stampede
- Narrative: Merge Mansion on the casual side, and Dreamdale
- PvP: Leaderboard and player confrontation like in Mob Control
- Polished core and non-core elements in the prototype
CPI test
We use ads to run a basic campaign of your game over a few days to analyze the potential of the game. We will mainly look at CPI results while also checking Day 1 retention and Average Session Length. The creative team needs 1-2 days to prepare ads for the game and then a CPI test takes 2-3 days.
Depending on the type of your game (hyper casual or hybrid casual), our expectations from the CPI test differ.
For hybrid casual, our goal is to reach:
- CPI < $1.0
- 4000s CPTD3
- 20% game completion
If your prototype almost reaches these numbers, we might want to try some modifications to try to get there. So, there can be more than one CPI test.