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KEY HIGHLIGHTS

🗒 Core to Casual often requires a deep dive into the core mechanics and translating part of this into familiarity.

📈 The Familiarity can be leveraged to get an initial higher amount of players to try the game and retain them.

🔐 By understanding and keeping the depth while removing the complexity of a game you can ensure you don’t lose the hook of the genre.

✂️ Taking complexity and moving this preferably into a meta-structure for your more mature players can leverage your long-term retention.

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW

In my current journey of close to 9 years in the industry, I’ve been lucky enough to work on some of the earlier adopters of the Hybrid Casual model, even before the Hybrid Casual wording was “a thing.”

It would be valuable to share the pitfalls we found in these earlier games and how we handled them to success and sometimes failure.

Most of the games I worked on were based on Core gaming experiences from PC or Console platforms, and we attempted to mold them into something Casual gamers could understand and enjoy. For example, one of the games, “Power Painter,” was a Tower Defense game that had the goal of introducing this genre to the masses. A tower defense that anyone could play.

In trying to create a successful title that follows this mantra, I found that a deep understanding of what makes these genres work on platforms other than mobile can be a lifesaver.

Translating Complexity

In my experience, understanding the complexity and reducing it while keeping the essence of the core gameplay alive can ensure that more people can enjoy the experience.

Though this might sound very “straightforward,” the complexity of core gameplay is often hidden if you do not fully understand it.

For example, when making Power Painter, we quickly realized that complex systems like “Interest,” “free tower placement,” and “upgrading towers,” which are pivotal in the genre, wouldn’t necessarily work for the audience.

Merging Genres to Leverage Familiarity

This leads to the second point that we realized. By finding ways to merge genres and leveraging familiarity, we were able to find a bigger audience and translate some of the complexity into more interesting gameplay that we took from other genres. 

For example, by using the idle genre, we opened ourselves up to exploring the “merge” genre. This was a first for tower defenses, but by understanding that players would want to upgrade towers and keep growing their power and understanding that merging was more intuitive than opening a menu to upgrade them, we found a way to leverage familiarity to increase the adaptability of a more “hardcore” game genre.

This lesson is valuable because we’ve seen it happen again quite recently. Games like My Little Universe or Z Defense figured out similar ways to leverage this. As players got increasingly used to moving characters around with a joystick, and we already knew from core games that building out bases or other places of power is a powerful retention tool, a combination started to happen. 

Instead of opening menus and looking at your creations from a top-down, far-away view, creating a disconnect and a less engaging, casual experience, these games use places where you need to move your character to build out these bases and expand your place of power. In essence, the results are the same; however, moving a character around is already something players are familiar with.

Understanding and Keeping Depth

So, of course, this doesn’t always work or go the correct way. When the auto-chess hype started around us, I was hoping to recreate the success of Power Painter by applying the same logic to the auto-chess core gameplay.

Again, this can be done by implementing familiar mechanics and reducing complexity. One of the great issues we had when working on this project was that our long-term retention, starting as early as the D1 to D3 funnel, was never able to solidify. Even with an above-market average D1, somehow, the players didn’t want to stick.

The Auto-Chess gameplay was also a rather complex one. To make it easier, we removed a lot of the complexity while trying to maintain its depth. However, during this process, we went a little overboard. Instead of making a really simple variant like Homa’s successful Merge Masters, we wanted to create a more in-depth and monetizable variant, somewhat similar to what SUPERCELL tried later with Clash-Mini (unfortunately also to no avail). I feel like one of the biggest mistakes we made here was to remove synergies.

Synergies are a big part of creating a “broken” or “powerful” auto-chess team. When we made this decision, we felt that it was something too complex for a casual version of this title. 

However, we missed the insight that this brought the most and clearest depth, the biggest pitfall of translating these core games to the casual audience.

It is very easy to “water down” complex systems, but there is a huge chance that doing so will cause you to lose the essence of what makes these core games engaging. This ties back to the original point I made, which was understanding the core game through and through before casualizing it.

Utilizing Lost Complexity in the Meta

Important to keep in mind is that even though the original threshold for complexity is relatively low for casual players, they are willing to invest in it as they mature in the game. This is a best practice you see across all genres, from hybrid to casual to hardcore. But the cool thing about translating original core gameplays to casual ones is that you can use the complexity you cut away to create an engaging meta loop.

Retaking the example of Power Painter, our most impactful update was adding a simple gacha system. In essence, we took the upgrading of towers and translated it into the gacha system. This worked alongside the merging for power as a separate system players wouldn’t have to learn until they matured in the game. This worked so well that we started to experiment with removing added simplicity for older players to ensure that the experience wouldn’t be tedious.

We realized that merging becomes a “hassle” the longer you play the game. Initially, we monetized this by allowing players to watch ads or buy the Auto-Merge trait. However, strangely enough, the retention we gained from giving people “auto-merge” later down the line for free was more valuable than the short-term conversions we would get from selling it. So even though the merge mechanic got us our initial audience, we transformed them into more core players, moving their focus away from the merge interaction and into the more complex systems.

Conclusion

I hope that some of my insights might help you work with and understand the hybrid-casual genre. The core things to take away are:

• Core to Casual often requires a deep dive into the core mechanics and translating part of this into familiarity.
• Familiarity can be leveraged to get an initial higher number of players to try the game and retain them.
• By understanding and maintaining a game’s depth while removing its complexity, you can ensure that you don’t lose the genre’s hook.
• Taking complexity and moving this preferably into a meta-structure for your more mature players can leverage your long-term retention.