How to Approach Casual Game Creation

Like so much in life, your success as a casual game creator is largely determined by your approach. And while Astrocade is ultimately meant to be an unrestricted creative space, successful games are more often than not the product of at least some foresight and planning. This lesson will demonstrate two vital steps in that process: finding your game’s core mechanic, or the “verb” at the heart of the experience, and planning everything that comes after that.

A good game mechanic is the product of a subtle but clever kind of brilliance, which makes them rare things. Coming up with a truly original one from scratch is no small feat, easily on par with writing a platinum pop song or inventing a joke no one’s ever told. Some game designers do it, of course (including some of our own Astrocade creators!) but it’s not the norm. Here’s a rough idea of how it typically breaks down:

• Rare: Every so often, lightning strikes and the game’s creator invents a new mechanic from scratch, then builds their game around it.
• Common: In the vast majority of cases, however, the game’s creator is one of many—perhaps hundreds—to build a game around a classic, tried-and-true mechanic.
• …Emerging: More and more, inspiration for new game concepts is coming from interesting places far from the world of gaming. More on this in a moment.

The vast majority of casual games are at least partially inspired by games that came before. In these cases, the originality of the mechanic is far less important than overall quality of the execution. Take a look at the history of the venerable match-3 mechanic, for instance:

And Candy Crush is far from alone! Here are a few more hugely successful casual games that were built on the traditions of previous games. Note that in each case, although the core mechanic was often copied directly, the surrounding style, storyline, and overall vibe of the new game was so different that it was accepted by players as a legitimately new experience:

• Angry Birds: Built on Crush the Castle
• Words with Friends: Clone of Scrabble
• FarmVille: Modeled on Farm Town
• Subway Surfers: Adopted Temple Run mechanics
• Survivor.io: Copied Vampire Survivors, inspired by Magic Survival

Ideas for game mechanics can be found, of course, anywhere games are played. Check out the leaderboards and see what’s most popular on:

More and more, casual game designers are looking to platforms like TikTok and YouTube shorts for fresh ideas. Think about ASMR slicing, power washing, DIY crafting, or color mixing videos: they’re popular, easy to understand, and often extremely satisfying. If only they were interactive…!

Found a viral video about pet grooming or dough stretching that zillions of people are watching? It could be the next big game mechanic. As an exercise, try designing a game around it.

Would you play this? Because I would totally play this.

If you’re looking for an easy way to break down the adaptation process, consider the 70/20/10 strategy:

70%: Borrowed from a successful formula

This might include core mechanic, key features (like classic power-ups or obstacles), and the overall game progression.

20%: Structural improvement

Could the original be better? Does the difficulty spike in awkward ways? Do certain parts of the game drag? Is the interface messy?

10%: Something completely original

How is your game’s theme, style, or look different? What about new features or bonuses?

Just because game mechanics are often copied or adapted from existing games doesn’t mean your job has been done for you! In fact, adapting a game concept is a challenge in its own right, especially on Astrocade, which tends to require simplification.

99 Nights in the Forest is a great example. Roblox and Astrocade are vastly different platforms, so a straight copy was never a possibility. Instead, significant thought went into distilling the expansive 3D original to a smaller, 2D form that could be played in under an hour on a phone.

Now that we’ve got our bases covered with the core mechanic, let’s look at the actual steps that kick off the creation of an entire game:

1. Inspiration: Discover a core idea from one of the sources we’ve covered here.
2. Adaptation: Take a first stab at adapting that core—and only the core mechanic—into a playable demo within Astrocade. Do not yet add features, styling, or polish.
3. Testing: Find out from real players whether you’re on the right track. If people aren’t already having fun, don’t move to the next step until they are. We’ll talk about how exactly to do this in the next section.
4. Refinement: It’s only here, when we have a playable, tested game mechanic in good shape, that we begin building the layers around it. The remainder of this course will pick up here.