The rise of the hyper casual “Mini Game” games genre really kicked in around early 2020 with the likes of Suji Games and GameJam leading the way.

The game design is typically a series of short session, popular hyper casual game mechanics that are stacked next to each other offering the player a constant variation in gameplay level by level.

Whilst there’s definitely some dovetailing with the “Restoration & Makers” or “Simulation” genre, on a more basic level, these can be just a series of mechanics that are visually matched to their overarching theme.

Using many already successful core game mechanics in their own right, we see Pull the Pin by Popcore is usually used as is some kind of matching mechanic.

The key, as always, is to present to the market a fresh take or theme and adopt any new mechanics that are trending.

The “Choosing Mechanic” and “Posing Mechanic” are pretty hot right now for example so these would be perfect to introduce into your game.

One massive benefit to Mini Game games is that you can constantly update and “plug in” any new trend relatively fast with the added bonus of keeping your marketing fresh.

This was the exact strategy of Color Switch back in the day where Eyebox Games, already a hugely successful development team with games published with Ketchapp, used pretty much every popular 2d game mechanic on the store to pump out weekly updates and propel the game an epic 250+ million downloads.

Now it’s unlikely that this could be reproduced at this scale today, however, it’s certainly food for thought and this strategy still seems to make a lot of sense.

So, if you’re looking to build your own take, whilst you could make more of a simulation style game where you take any profession or skill process and break that down into stages, it’s more about a strong game theme that will hold everything together and give you plenty of poetic license.