Identifying relevant characteristics for the development of a hyper-casual game

Abstract

The game industry works to meet the needs of millions of users, so developers are actively improving existing games and developing a new one. Hyper-casual is a game with a simple plot, simple mechanics, and a primitive user interface. Despite the seeming simplicity, such games are popular and bring significant profits to developers. The life cycle of a hypercasual game can be quite short – a few weeks, or months, which also involves a limited time to develop such a game. It is advisable to have a tool to identify, evaluate and consider the characteristics of successful hyper-casual games. Therefore, the actual task is to develop a structure for describing a hyper-casual game so that, based on such structured data, a decision can be made regarding the relevant characteristics of a successful game. Hyper-casual games in the entertainment industry are one of the genres of games for mobile platforms. To determine the relevant characteristics of such a game, it is necessary to accumulate data on successful games, determine the general characteristics common to all hyper-casual games, to structure the obtained data, and select the characteristics that affect the success of the game. To decide on the relevance of characteristics, it is worth analyzing the structured data describing the game. The selected characteristics will be implemented in the hyper-casual game. The relevant characteristics of the game are a significant criterion for choosing a game engine for game development. According to such criteria, it is worth evaluating popular game engines – GameMaker, Godot, Unreal Engine, and Unity. To decide on the best engine, it is advisable to use the analytic hierarchy method. Facebook Analytics will be used to accumulate data on the success of the developed game. The proposed concept of determining the relevant characteristics of various information technologies will allow combining such technologies into a single system.