Arcade Idle HomaJam: A Winning Theme

Editor’s note: This article was written by our friends at Homa Games. We recently ran a game jam with them. And we’re thrilled to announce the winners and results below.

Another game jam edition comes to an end as we announce the winners of our Arcade Idle HomaJam, and we have many! With the best quality submissions we have seen so far, this jam’s games reached outstanding metrics and presented the most promising ideas under the theme of Arcade Idle.

Arcade Idle is a new subgenre that combines idle and adventure arcade’s main attributes with a chilled Hypercasual look and feel. Removing all complexity from resource mining games, but preserving its core ability to engage, this clever mix translates into hybrid games with medium/low CPI, but much stronger playtime metrics that can reach 30+ minutes.

With games like Harvest It, Craft Island, and Farm Land, the new category has been in constant development in the course of 2021 by Homa Games. As the novelty raised a lot of interest in the Hypercasual community, we understood its potential and decided that Arcade Idle would be the theme of our next jam in partnership with GameAnalytics.

In the course of June, more than 30 developers and studios worked on their best Arcade Idle ideas and were able to test them on Homa Games’ platform HomaLab while using GameAnalytics’ tools as the main source of analytics. All participants were provided with our HomaBelly SDK, which enables a smooth integration with the tools.

In the Hypercasual world, complexity overall needs to be removed, even for idle games. From the economy to the controls, all down to the design of the game, simplicity should always be at the core. That’s why we organized webinars for participants and provided them with tips from our in-house experts to enhance their prototypes and creatives having in mind the new genre specificities.

And the winner is…

We had outstanding submissions opting for the main 250K Grand Prix and the three guaranteed-prize categories that reward best CPI, best RRD1, and best playtime. Dragon Attack, Ethereal Games, and Unlikely Games were the awarded developers who will receive $5000 each for these different categories. Furthermore, we always want to celebrate our favorite submission and that of the jammers and the most active and helpful participant in the community.

As for the Grand Prix winner, which hasn’t been announced yet! This HomaJam edition was special because the games in average had the best metrics so far, with lower CPI than the Arcade Idle average and high playtime, as it tends to be the norm for the genre. That’s why a few games had made it to the next stage and could be published soon… stay tuned.

In this sense, the theme of the competition was key. All the tested games made even more clear the potential of the Arcade Idle subgenre within the Hypercasual category, as shown by the final numbers. Furthermore, the variety of subjects and interpretations of the theme that we saw among the submissions shows there’s a huge opportunity for game creators to keep developing the genre and use it to unlock creativity.