Editor’s note: This article was written by our friends at Homa Games. We recently did a game jam with them. And we’re happy to announce the winners and results below.
Another Game Jam edition is coming to an end as we announce the winners of our Arcade Idle HomaJam, and we have many! With the best quality submissions we’ve seen so far, the games in this jam achieved outstanding scores and presented the most promising ideas under the theme of Arcade Idle.
Arcade Idle is a new subgenre that combines the main attributes of idle and adventure arcade with a cool hypercasual look and feel. This clever mix removes all of the complexities of resource mining games, but retains their core ability to engage and results in hybrid games with medium / low CPI but much stronger game time metrics that can hit 30+ minutes.
With games such as Harvest It, Craft Island and Farm Land, Homa Games continued to develop the new category over the course of 2021. As the novelty aroused great interest in the Hypercasual community, we recognized its potential and decided that Arcade Idle will be the subject of our next jam in collaboration with GameAnalytics.
In June, more than 30 developers and studios worked on their best arcade idle ideas and were able to test them on Homa Games ‘HomaLab platform while using GameAnalytics’ tools as their main analysis source. Our HomaBelly SDK was made available to all participants, which enables smooth integration with the tools.
In the world of hypercasual, the overall complexity has to be broken down, even for idle games. From the economy to the controls and the design of the game, simplicity should always be the focus. For this reason we organized webinars for the participants and gave them tips from our in-house experts to improve their prototypes and creatives taking into account the new genre specifics.
And the winner is…
We had outstanding submissions that went for the main Grand Prix of 250,000 and the three guaranteed prize categories rewarding the best CPI, the best RRD1 and the best playing time. Dragon Attack, Ethereal Games, and Improbable Games were the award-winning developers, receiving $ 5,000 each for these different categories. In addition, we always want to celebrate our favorite post and that of the woes, as well as the most active and helpful participant in the community.
As for the Grand Prix winner, who has not yet been announced, there could actually be more than one! This HomaJam edition was special as the games, on average, had the best metrics to date, with a CPI lower than the Arcade Idle average and high playtime as this tends to be the norm for the genre. So some games had made it to the next level and could be released soon … stay tuned.
In this sense, the theme of the competition was crucial. All of the games tested made the potential of the Arcade Idle subgenre within the Hypercasual category even clearer, as the final numbers show. In addition, the variety of themes and interpretations of the theme that we saw among the submissions shows that game developers have a great opportunity to evolve the genre and use it to develop creativity.
