How to Make a Simple Hyper Casual Game (Step by Step Tutorial)
This month (July 2021) I published a four part tutorial on YouTube on how to make a simple hyper casual game called “Square Fall”. The objective of this game is to dodge the falling squares and collect the colored squares to gain points. The tutorial consists of four easy-to-follow parts:
- Initial project setup (11 steps)
- Create the start screen (9 steps)
- Create the game (35 steps)
- Create the gameover screen (11 steps)
Each part shows you everything you need to do step by step starting from a blank project. Once you’ve learned this formula you can then use it to build your own hyper casual game ideas!
The tutorial is done using Defold which is a free, lightweight and open source game engine. Defold is a great 2D and 3D game engine (my personal favorite) and allows you to publish on multiple platforms including Android, iOS, macOS, Linux, Windows, Steam, HTML5, Facebook and Nintendo Switch.
Part 1: Initial setup
In this part you will start by downloading Defold and the assets folder:
Most of the steps in part 1 involve creating the project, setting up some of the files and folders and adding in the assets like fonts, sounds and images etc.
Follow through the video for part 1 below:
Part 2: Start screen
This is the shortest part of the tutorial which is simply for creating the start screen. The start screen is very basic and only has a title and play button. The play button will transition to the game screen so that the player can start the game. You will set all of this up using the gui and gui script that you added to the start folder in part 1.
Follow through the video for part 2 below:
Part 3: Game
Part 3 is the longest part of the tutorial and probably the most difficult as it is mostly filling in code. In this part you will create the full functioning game which includes animating the squares and the circle, checking and responding to player input, detecting collisions, increasing the score and difficulty, playing the particle emitter, and transitioning to the game over screen.
Follow through the video for part 3 below:
Part 4: Gameover screen
This is the final part of the tutorial and is fairly straight forward and easy. It is very similar to part 2 so a lot of it will be repeating things you have already done. The gameover screen consists of two labels and a replay button. The first label is for the score that the player got in the game they just finished and the second label is for their all time best score. The replay button will transition back to the game screen and start a new game.
Follow through the video for part 4 below:
That’s it! Now you can run the game on your devices or on the web and give it a good test run. I hope this tutorial was helpful and if you liked it and want to see more please subscribe to my YouTube channel:
If you’re interested in getting the full source code and vector design file for this game or you just want to support, feel free to join the Patreon:
