IzyPlay Game Studio, a gaming studio with 30 team members, strives to produce engaging, easy to play games. Its mission is to create fun and immersive titles that engage players across the world. The team believes that gaming is the perfect medium to tell stories. The challenge is to gain an audience. According to PocketGamer, 3.5 billion hyper casual games were downloaded in Q3 in 2021. This places immense pressure on small studios, like IzyPlay, to break through the noise in a saturated market.
In response to the evolving industry, IzyPlay pivoted its model to focus on building games in the hyper-casual realm. In 2020, it launched 2 free-to-play games, which earned more than 12 million downloads. IzyPlay strives to curate a significant quantity of games in a short timeframe, while simultaneously maintaining quality. Regularly creating unique content at such a grand scale can be a challenge, not just for IzyPlay but for developers across the whole industry.
The Brief
Engaging audiences at a global scale is challenging, but IzyPlay was already gaining a foothold in the hyper-casual gaming market with its dedication and passion for gaming and storytelling. Despite its successes, the studio wanted to transform its game development process to increase efficiency and produce more high-quality games at pace.
As a developer, there is an exponential amount of pressure to keep producing new game concepts, but there aren’t enough hours in the day to meet the demand this presents. Pressure
is coming from all sides; not only from publishers but from competition in the games industry too.
Everton Vieira, Co-founder and CEO at IzyPlay Game Studio explains: “We developed more than 100 games in 2020, but this mass generation of content was daunting and unsustainable without the proper tools and support systems. The main challenge was quickly coming up with ideas for a collection of games that act as a front door for nongamers. We aspire to build ‘easy to play, easy to learn games that retain interest from people who might not be interested in traditional gaming.”
This is where Ludo comes in.
The Process
Ludo, a game developer's best friend, helps developers to efficiently ideate hundreds of ideas for hit games with a toolkit to research and brainstorm in one integrative space. Ludo is the only platform that uses AI and machine learning to inspire creativity in game developers. It produces new game concepts, suggests art ideas, provides data insights, generates images, and organises ideas, it can even collate a custom Game Design Document.
IzyPlay recognized the need to flip its creative process and incorporate new tools and practices. It took a leap of faith and explored Ludo. Vieira continues: “Ludo has revolutionised our ideation stage of creating new games by grounding our prototypes with data. Being data-driven, by using Ludo, really helps us to produce game concepts that are more likely to succeed. The integration of Ludo into our ideation process helps us to target trends in the market, boost creativity, and streamline the ideation process.”
The Results
“We utilise Ludo’s toolkit all the time,” Vieira says. “It is used in all of our ideation processes and we find it to be very helpful. In fact, we have created many new games with the assistance of Ludo.”
By utilising the Daily Trends and Top Charts features, IzyPlay is able to leverage the data to inform which genres and topics they should prioritise in development. Vieira continues: “We predominantly use Ludo in the ideation stage to identify popular themes and topics that resonate within the top charts. These insights help us to identify where wide audiences exist, so we can build desirable games. The trends feature, for example, makes it easier to see what concepts appeal to players, rather than spending time ideating something new entirely.”
IzyPlay has used Ludo to ideate and researches several games, including Adventure Miner. Adventure Miner has had great success, reaching over 4 million downloads. IzyPlay used Ludo to collect key information about mine games, the studio was then able to recognise what was popular in the games industry and bring together significant key trends to build the successful hyper casual game.
IzyPlay really recognizes the benefits of Ludo; Vieira proclaims: “We use Ludo within the ideation process every time we are designing new games. We have built a number of prototypes with the assistance of Ludo, and it is only the beginning!”
Tom Pigott, the CEO of Ludo, is happy to see how his platform is shaping the game development industry. He said, "Our work with IzyPlay Game Studio is a perfect example of how Ludo's integrative toolkit can support successful game developers."
“We're so pleased to see the incredible games the studio has created, utilising our tools powered by our state of the art AI. Using features such as Daily Trends and the Game Ideator can produce phenomenal results and save studios hours conducting market research. We are thrilled that IzyPlay regularly uses our platform to ideate and spur inspiring game concepts from data, and can’t wait to see what they make next!”
Ludo provides all the tools necessary to seamlessly brainstorm every component of a mobile game. The games industry is competitive, dynamic, and constantly evolving in the current digital age. Revolutionise your game development by integrating Ludo into your ideation phase, which will keep you in pace with the industry. There has never been a better time to try Ludo! With its new Free Tier subscription, all of Ludo’ features are now available to all. If you’re a developer about to embark on your next game creation journey make sure to make Ludo a part of it!
