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How to make killer creatives for your hypercasual game

May 18, 2023 in Games | 8 min. read
How to make killer creatives for your hyper-casual game | Hero image
How to make killer creatives for your hyper-casual game | Hero image
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Your hypercasual game concept could be fantastic and your visuals could be beautiful, but your game’s profitability and scale comes down to creatives. If your creatives don’t attract users and have a low cost per install (CPI), it will be extremely difficult for your game to climb the charts affordably and quickly.

Lolita Snopkova, creative team lead at Supersonic, sees a few thousand creatives go through the studio each month. She shares tips for building hypercasual creatives that lower CPI and help you unlock scale. Keep reading and get ready to knock it out of the park on your next project.

Tips card: Building hyper-casual creatives that lower CPI

The basics at each step of the user funnel

What’s the most important rule to create great creatives? While there’s no single secret to success, a piece of general advice is to think of your creatives like a game – but instead of 1,000 seconds of playtime, it’s 30 seconds of a potential player's attention.

Users go through a similar funnel watching an ad as they do playing a game. Both creatives and games start with the visuals, which aim to engage players in seconds. Then there’s the gameplay, which shows people the mechanics and goal of your game. Lastly, there’s the emotional aspect, or the feelings players get when watching your ad or playing your game. You need to have it all – great visuals, clear gameplay, and tap into the right user emotions – to achieve a low CPI. Let’s talk about best practices at each stage of this funnel to make sure your creatives are hitting the mark.

Visuals

Your creatives need to contrast the main elements of your game, like the characters and the background. This doesn’t mean ramping up the brightness or saturation – it just needs to stand out so anyone can quickly understand your game and get engaged.

GIF of examples showing hyper-casual creative assets that display contrast

Using color associations from real life can help clarify the game mechanic to even the most inexperienced players. For example, red indicates danger – color the enemies or obstacles in your creatives red so players innately understand to avoid them.

Bright, cartoonish colors also help lower CPI. This color palette reaches a broader audience, which is crucial for success in the hypercasual market where your target players are everybody.

Gameplay

Make gameplay and your game’s goal clear within five seconds – imagine yourself as a player who’s never seen your game before. In this short time, you should answer burning questions, like:

  • How do I play?
  • How do I control the game?
  • How do I win?

Try testing different gameplay scenarios in your creatives to generate various feelings and emotions from users. You can use the same elements, like skins and environments, but changing just the gameplay can be a quick fix that taps into player psychology and lowers CPI.

GIF of examples showing hyper-casual creative assets that vary gameplay perspective

Be sure to depict characters in the “playable zone” – this is the area on the screen that they would be controlling the game. Showing the characters where players would be tapping, sliding, and so on to control them, which makes your creative feel more immersive, accurate, and engaging.

Player psychology

Feature scenarios in your creatives that emphasize emotions. If it’s relevant for your game, use real-life scenarios that feel more powerful and relatable. Aim to tap into the strongest human needs, which include frustration, safety, love, and self-esteem/self-actualization (e.g., the desire to be an artist or an athlete). Showing a fail scenario in creatives is also an effective tactic to touch on these feelings and lower CPI.

GIF of examples showing hyper-casual creative assets that display varied human emotion

Try choosing common objects from real life that players associate with human needs and feelings. For example, using food emojis in a hypercasual puzzle game is instantly clear.

Make your creatives feel playable to give your audience an understanding of how they would feel playing your game and tempt them to install. Take Move People (also, Make 'Em) as an example. In an early version of the game’s creative, a couple is shown with the directive “Make them hug.” A later version shows the same couple and directions, but includes targets on the screen that feel like a more natural explanation of how to control the characters. This makes the experience more dynamic and emotional for players – they’re not just passive viewers anymore; they’re imagining themselves playing your game.

GIF of Move People game creative asset variations on a couple hugging

Thinking outside the box to keep lowering CPI

Your game’s creatives are essential for scaling up and lowering CPI, but if your game has a CPI over $0.50 even after hitting all the key points above, then it’s time to go back to the drawing board. It’s going to be next to impossible to lower CPI enough to scale affordably. But if your game’s CPI is around $0.50, follow these tips to decrease it.

If your game’s CPI is over $0.50, even after excelling at the user funnel, it's time to try a new concept

Try a different camera angle

Different camera angles can give users a new experience that engages them more effectively and lowers CPI. Just make sure that when you’re trying out new angles, you maintain clarity in the gameplay.

For the game Mad Dogs, we changed the camera angle and, in doing so, changed the logic of the game. Placing the camera behind the dog in the game makes it seem like users are playing as the dog, though they’re still controlling the boy character. This camera angle makes the game feel more real without changing the mechanic. The success of this creative at lowering CPI led us to change the game build and implement a few levels that lets users play as the dog.

GIF of examples showing hyper-casual creative assets that display different camera angles

Use various themes

Different themes create different environments that attract new audiences. Test different themes in your creatives to see which lower CPI and reach a broader audience. If the winning theme has a particularly low CPI, you could integrate it into your build (like we did with the Mad Dogs example) to boost in-game metrics.

You can also try testing new themes and new camera angles at the same time – mixing and matching can have a big impact on your game’s CPI.

Finding your hero creative

There’s not one special trick to designing creatives that lower CPI and unlock scale. You need to test your creative’s visuals, gameplay, and its ability to tap into user psychology to achieve the balance that helps you succeed. Iterating and continuously testing your creatives ensures you set your game up for maximum profitability and scale.

This article is based on Lolita’s presentation as part of the SuperSessions 2021 series. Below, find the full video of the session. Submit today to publish your next game with Supersonic.

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May 18, 2023 in Games | 8 min. read

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