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 hyper casual.
Checklist:
- The main focus of your prototype should be the core mechanic. Your prototype should work properly and run smoothly.
- Homa Belly SDK integration
- Around 10 minutes of core gameplay
- Polished core mechanic
- No bugs
- ~ 14 days of development time
- The prototype should be visually appealing to users.
- Juicy visuals
- Quality and trendy assets
- No pixellation on shades
- Minimal UI and environment
- Your game should feel satisfying and should have:
- Basic visual and haptic feedback
- Sensitive feedback
- No need for stores and advanced progression.
- No need for too polished art and environmental details.
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 hyper casual, our goal is to reach:
- CPI < $0.4
- D1 retention > 35%
- D3 retention > 15%
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.