Gameplay Genres - Restoration / Sims

Whilst pretty much every top hyper casual publisher has some kind of Restoration / Maker game in their portfolios these days, we saw this trend explode around 2 years ago.

Since the App Store was born, these types of games have been around in one form or another.

Back in the early days, these were almost exclusively aimed at kids and were way less “gamey” than the titles we see today. The player would simply go through a series of very simple, short processes and repeat them over and over.

Let’s take one of our favourite things in the world, making a cup of tea ☕ and break down the process as an example.

Fill the Kettle with water.
Boil the kettle.
Get a cup ( or mug ) out of the cupboard or rack.
Take a teabag out of the jar.
Place teabag into the cup.
Pour over the boiling water into the cup.
Stir the teabag around in the cup.
Wait patiently for the tea to brew ( 1-5 minutes ).
Give the teabag a squeeze.
Add milk if preferred.
Add sugar if preferred.

So there you have it, our version of the 11 stage process of the simple act of making a lovely cup of tea, gorgeous, chin chin! We can summarise this as the “Gamification of Everything”.

Taking our tea example one stage further, we could go right to the beginning of the process from cultivation of the tea leaves. Planting, watering, harvesting, drying and making the bags themselves.

Then there’s the distribution and selling, it goes on and on and all of these steps and stages of the process can be gamified. When we look at hyper casual, more often than not, Restoration and Maker games are rooted to Professions, Production and Hobbies.

This makes perfect sense. Popular studies agree that approximately 1/3 of your life will be spent at work. That’s 90,000+ hours over the course of a lifetime. Crikey!

When we look at gaming themes, this could almost be classed as the definition of relatable, mass market appeal. It pulls strong on peoples fantasies of having a different job and or a hobby they would like to pursue but for whatever reason can’t or haven’t got around to yet.

Just take CrazyLabs Phone Case DIY with over 100 million downloads and Academy favourites SayGames with Blend It 3D with 60 million downloads and The Cook with 40 million downloads!

Matching theme with demographic is of course critical to success but get it right and the results can be astonishing. Sure, the “Gold Rush” and appetite is not as strong as it once was, but there’s still 4 titles in the Top 100 right now & the principle thought process is still very powerful in game design.

In 2015 these were all the rage and, looking back now, we released 3 or 4 of these types of games. They actually did really well for us but, again, this is to illustrate that there are seldom new genres and most, much like fashion tastes, come in waves and cycles.

Of course now the Restoration / Maker genre is far more elaborate and sophisticated. Aided with the help of social media AMSR videos, the top 200 games charts is littered with everything from Tye Dying to wood turning.

Essentially any process that has logical steps can be broken down and gamified.

There’ll always be room for innovation and there’s really no limits of theme. Tap into the right theme at the right time and you can have a hit on your hands. We’ll have more on this in our creativity workshops.