Lewis Dowling, Author at Coda Labs

How we helped Hoop World reach half a million installs

On 22 October, the game studio, Tapped, launched Hoop World – a basketball game where you dunk increasingly impressive baskets. And over the last month, they’ve had a slam dunk themselves: it had over half a million installs, reached 4.7 stars on iOS with over 6,500 reviews and hit #4 on the App Store in the US for sports games.

We’re incredibly proud of Tapped – not least because they’re the first studio to go through our Golden Cohort program. As one of our Golden Cohort partners, we worked with Tapped on refining the idea, developing the game and teaching them how to grow and scale the game.

Speaking with our publishing manager, Ozan Daldal, we can see how we made this achievement together.

We put them in the driver’s seat

The main objective of the Golden Cohort is to let the developer take the wheel and learn to drive themselves. We’re there, alongside them, giving recommendations and supporting them in how to get to their destination. But they have the freedom to be creative and they get to see absolutely everything.

We explain when actions or reactions are necessary. And we teach them how to grow their studio themselves. Alongside that, we help them through financial support.

“The Golden Cohort program has helped us develop a deeper understanding into the world of hyper-casual game launches,” said Tapped’s CEO. “With a traditional publisher, you don’t really know what’s going on with the user acquisition or the monetization strategy and results. But with Coda, we’ve been able to see everything. They’ve been really open and communicative from the very start.”

We gave them the tools to test

By joining the Golden Cohort, we could guide Tapped through the process, give them the tools they needed to test everything and decide how to continue. Tapped was familiar with developing games, they have two under their belt already. But they were less familiar with the process after the launch.

When they came to us, they had a concept for a mechanic. But they were exploring a suitable theme. So over the course of the Golden Cohort, there were three key areas we helped them with:

Idea stage: The concept.

We tested the mechanic using different themes, seeing which one got the most traction. Our tests revealed that a basketball theme was the most popular variation for the mechanic, with a remarkable retention of around 50%.

Development stage: Features.

Through our tech gateway, Coda SDK, we could help Tapped to A/B test various ideas and features of the game while they developed it. While players were already extremely engaged with the game, we continued to test to understand how bonus levels or fail scenarios would affect the game. Through this, we managed to increase the life-time value (LTV) by 5% with A/B tests.

Launch stage: Marketing.

We helped them create marketing videos and test which ones would bring in the most new players. We also gave the information they needed to make decisions and see whether their game was profitable. And taught them how to scale.

In the end, we’re incredibly proud of the work Tapped has done on Hoop World. And we’ll continue to work with them to see it grow even more.

Do you have a game idea?

We’re here to help you create your game and build it into a successful title. So if you’d like to join our Golden Cohort, learn how to become an independent studio, and get the financial support and tools you need to grow, get in touch.

How Popular Girls became a popular game

How do you create a popular game? Well, the aptly named Popular Girls, can show us how. After it hit the number-two spot on the App Store in just a week, our publishing manager, Ozan Daldal, shares his thoughts on how other studios can reach the top-charts themselves.

Here’s what he said.

1. Gather your ideas

At Coda, we regularly run brainstorms and come up with ideas based on what’s currently trending in the market. We then upload those ideas to our Interactive Game Brief, a way of storing inspiration and collaborating on a project.

Once they’re on IGB, we can budge them along to our Concept Store to let studios pick an idea to work on. This lets developers choose an idea they’re passionate about to work on.

2. Test whether the idea is marketable

From those concepts, we can test whether the idea will actually work. Our Marketability Test checks whether an idea has legs and how likely it is that players will install the game.

With Popular Girls, we knew that it was an appealing concept. It was something that was really resonating with our players. This meant that 24 Play was able to focus their attention on what they’re best at: developing the game, knowing that it was likely to be a success.

“Hyper-compact games are more fast-paced and each level is a tiny success moment, which I think a lot of people want these days,” said Ozan. “This offers a constant pump of satisfaction. Playing a different mechanic each level keeps the game fresh and stops it from repeating itself. Our players also get to enjoy the diversity supported with high quality animations.”

3. Create a gameplan

We’re keen to work with our studios throughout the process. So using our Market Intelligence tools, we came up with a gameplan. This is essentially a design document that explains the game: a summary of the concept, what the artwork should look like and what levels we should include.

“We’ve found that studios really appreciate this clear brief,” Ozan said. “They know exactly what we expect from them and what’s in our heads. Obviously, this is a collaborative process, and if they disagree or want to change anything, that’s completely fine. But having this first draft just makes sure that there’s no confusion and that everybody’s meeting expectations.”

This gameplan guides the studio so that they can focus on putting the elements together as quickly as possible. Creating one for yourself is a good way to make sure that everybody in the team is on the same page.

4. Optimize through testing

Lastly, we can run A/B tests and analyse each specific level to see how the players are reacting to the game. We make sure to share all these results with the developer so that we can optimize every aspect of the game. Do people drop off? Do they struggle with any particular level? Is it working?

“Transparency is key,” Ozan said. “Most publishers don’t share their testing data, or only specific parts of it. But at Coda, we want the studios to know exactly what’s going on: so they can see the same data we can. This makes it much easier to make decisions together and work collaboratively.”

Time it right

Ozan’s plan clearly worked. Popular Girls got twice as many downloads on its second day as it did its first, and reached number two on the App Store in just a week.

But he explained that a large part was around launching on the weekend.

“It took us three weeks in total to create and launch Popular Girls,” Ozan said. “And we launched on the weekend. We did this deliberately, to utilise our first cohorts perfectly. It also feels good to offer the world new entertainment for the weekend.”

Become a partner

We want to help studios make a killing, making games. So if you’d like to learn more about how to become a partner and work with us on our next title, let us know.

How Artist Life turned a failure to a top-charting hit

In just two weeks, Artist Life launched, rose up through the ranks and smashed into the number one spot on the Play Store, and number four on the App Store. But a few months ago, the idea was nearly scrapped before it was started. Its ancestor, a small prototype game, we thought was a failure.

So how did we take that failure and turn it into a success? How did we increase the playtime by around three times the original?

It all started with a concept: Colour Squeeze

In our Concept Store, studios can choose concepts that we know players are interested in. We’ve tested these concepts to see which are marketable.

And there was one concept that had great marketability: Colour Squeeze.

But three different studios had tried turning it into a hyper-casual game. In every instance, the playtime just wasn’t good enough.

“Colour Squeeze just didn’t work,” explained our publishing manager Verda Seneor. “The concept was clearly resonating with people. At this part of the story, we only knew that squeezing out paint caught our player’s eye. Everyone was clicking the video, but whenever we tried to build a game with those mechanics, players just drifted off and grew bored. It was incredibly frustrating.”

A change of perspective gave new life

While the mechanics weren’t working, there was clearly something in the idea. So we approached VOG Games with a new angle. Rather than trying to build a game that is just a repeat of the marketing video, we decided to craft something with multiple mechanics, all around the same theme. Which is where hyper-compact comes in.

“We all love creativity, on some level. But it was the lifestyle of an artist which was really attractive for this game. We realised that it wasn’t the mechanic that people wanted, but the fantasy,” Verda said. “So we decided to change tact and started working with VOG Games to make a hyper-compact game instead.”

The hyper-compact genre is much closer to a simulation. The focus is on graphics and a sense of becoming the character, almost like an interactive TV show. Artist Life was born.

Working together with the studio

At Coda, we don’t just leave studios on their own. We’re with them throughout the journey, from the idea to the monetization. Over the course of Artist Life’s journey, we helped with:

Creating a game plan. Using our Market Intelligence tool, we were able to come up with a game plan that detailed what levels we should create.
Organising the team. Our Interactive Game Brief kept all our inspiration, like the artwork, together in one place for everyone to see.
Optimizing the game. Our testing tools, for marketability and gaming, helped us make sure we were keeping the cost per impression and churn as low as possible.

“We helped VOG Games at all stages of the funnel, and they were absolutely fantastic the whole way. It was a very hands-on process for both of us. We’d speak every day, share ideas, and work together on new mechanics.” Verda said. “We started this journey together, and we’re still working closely now: checking the data and optimising the game.”

Growing together

While working on Artist Life with VOG Games, we’ve both learnt a lot about how to work together. Namely, how to create successful games faster and better.

This is more than a journey of one game, it’s about both studio and publisher growing together and regularly creating games that will break into the charts. So now, it’s time to start getting to work on the next game.

Become a partner

We want to help studios make a killing, making games. So if you’d like to learn more about how to become a partner and work with us on our next title, let us know.

Two top-charting games in two weeks

This week, we’re thrilled to announce that two of our developers have hit the top charts at the same time. That’s two games in the top-five charts in the last two weeks: Popular Girls from 24Play and Artist Life from VOG Games. Both were published by Coda Platform, and both were made possible through our ideation tools and services.

They’re games of a similar vein, part of a growing genre of hyper-compact simulators that focus on an ongoing story broken up with mini-games that keep players engaged.

Artist Life hits number one

It’s been just two weeks since we released Artist Life, developed by VOG Games. And it’s already hit number one on the Google Play store. It’s also one of the top-ranking simulation games on the App Store, too.

The title is a hyper-compact simulation game. You play as a budding artist, looking to make a living through your photography and drawing. Customers visit your humble abode and commission you for various tasks. The game is ultimately about choices. Those choices are sometimes everyday, like what to watch on TV. And sometimes large, like whether to sell your art or ask for more social media followers.

These decisions send you on a journey through an artist’s life, including whether to date or not. And they’re broken up through mini-games of your activities, such as setting up your camera equipment. Download it for yourself.

Popular Girls hits number two

Just this weekend, we released Popular Girls into the world, developed by 24 Play. And it’s already hit the number two slot on the App Store. A resounding success, which clearly shows how much demand there is for hyper-compact games like these.

Popular Girls aims to take you through your school days, choosing who you’ll be friends with, how you’ll increase your followers, and seeing whether you can become the most popular girl.

Over the course of the game, you’ll make key decisions broken up by puzzles and mini-games to solve. Give the game a go.

Creating a hyper-compact game

This style of game overlaps a lot with the hyper-casual genre. However the key to a good, satisfying hyper-compact game is variety. Rather than creating a single mechanic, you’re instead guiding the player through a journey with lots of different games inside. Where you’d typically have levels breaking up the experience, in a hyper-compact game you have completely different mechanics.

This keeps things fresh for the player, and keeps them engaged. But it also means that you don’t need to stretch an idea further than necessary. No need to come up with a thousand novel ways to create a puzzle. Instead, you create a new mechanic instead.

Discover new trends for yourself

If you want to keep on top of trends like the hyper-compact genre, and get into the top charts before anybody else, check out our Market Intelligence tool.

How to self-publish your game, from start to finish (Part 2)

Welcome back to our series on how to self-publish your own game, where we’ll show you that teaming up with a publisher doesn’t have to be your only option. In part one, we covered how to come up with prototype ideas, test their marketability, create your adverts and track the right metrics. If you haven’t read it already, check it out.

All of this advice is a little taster of what you can learn from our training programme, Golden Cohort. This is where we teach studios on exactly how to self-publish their game and give them the tools to become independent.

Now, let’s look at how to actually launch your ideas and make money from them. Launching, monetising and optimising. Start the countdown: it’s time to launch.

Step 5: Soft launch your game

Soft launching is where you release your game to a small audience, with less marketing. You’re testing your game out, dipping your toes in the water and seeing how far you might be able to go. But why not just immediately launch?

Well, before you release to the whole world, you’ll want to perfect your creatives, see how different networks behave and optimize your bids. This is the time to gather data and test out your theories. It’s your last chance to plan and prepare.

Explore the different channels

There are three areas you’ll want to get ready:

Social media: Have you got all your channels set up? Facebook. TikTok. Snapchat. Get them ready and familiarise yourself with how their advertising works. You can get a lot of installs by creating content and paying for space.
The ad networks: An ad network works on behalf of brands, like you, to buy ad space. There are plenty to look at, like Unity, IronSource, AppLovin and Mintegral. They’re the easiest way of getting your adverts out there.
Organic traffic. You’ll naturally get installs through the Apple and Play stores. But make sure that your descriptions are polished and enticing. The better your images, text and videos, the more likely someone will install. It’ll also improve the chances you come up in the search results.

Start big, ease off, find the balance

When you start your soft launch, you’ll want to make a big splash in your chosen geography to get the first chunk of installs. This also forces the ad networks to push your creatives. So bid high to make sure you secure those spaces.

But make sure you keep your budget low. You don’t want to overspend. You bid high, budget low. This means you end up with great ad placement, but don’t try and reach the whole world at once.

Slowly increase your budget, lowering your bids, and work to find that sweet spot for each network. You’re looking for a return on ad spend for day zero (D0 ROAS) of around 85%.

If you need inspiration or want to research what kinds of adverts to make, check out Creative Insights and look through the library of examples.

Step 6: It’s time to monetise your game

There are two ways to make money: in-app purchases and ads.

In-app purchases make a great profit, but most players won’t ever make a purchase. So for hyper-casual, you’ll want to focus on ads. You want to find a balance between showing enough ads to make a return, but not too many that you start irritating players. You’ll need to test the frequency and placement of those ads to make sure you’re getting it right.

You then want to introduce in-app purchases that encourage your long-term players to stick around and spend money. Maybe that’s a way to turn off ads or maybe it’s in-game currency or skins. Give them a reason to pay that feels rewarding.

There are a few key metrics to measure

Playtime. How long are people spending on your game per session? The longer, the better. But exactly how long is good, depends on the sub-genre of your game.
Retention. How many players are still active after a certain amount of time. You’ll want to track day one and day seven, at least. The more people return, the more likely they’ll spend money or the more adverts you can show them.
IMPDAU. Impressions per daily active user. This is how many ads you’re showing your players per day, on average. The more impressions, the more you’ll be making.
eCPM. The effective cost per thousand impressions. This is how much you’re making per a thousand adverts you show. Roughly.
ARPDAU. Average revenue per daily active user. This tells you how much you’re earning from your users every day.
LTV. Life-time value. This is the average amount you’re making from your players from when they start playing until they stop.

There are three kinds of advert you can show

Banner ads. These are usually small, up the top (or bottom), and are pretty unobtrusive for the player. On average, advertisers will spend about 70% of their budget on these. But they’ll only make up about 5% of your earnings, with an eCPM of about $1.
Interstitial ads. These are the ads that take over the whole screen and interrupt the gameplay. About 25% of an advertiser’s budget will be for these, and they’ll make up about 70% of your earnings. The eCPM is usually around $30.
Rewarded video. These ads are where you give an in-game prize for watching a video. The player actively has to choose to watch them, so they’re quite effective. But advertisers only put about 5% of their budget towards them. Even so, you’ll make a good 25% of your earnings from these, as the eCPM can be around $40.

It can be an absolute headache to juggle all this, so you’ll want to look for a mediation platform to help you out. We can help you with this and help you find the best price and have the relationships you need to get set up with a mediator that’ll work for you.

Step 7: Acquire more players

Now it’s time to launch for real and spread out. In this phase, it’s a little like driving a car: you can either accelerate, brake or steer.

When you’re accelerating, you’re looking to scale your game and get the most installs possible. This will inevitably cost more, but lead to the most revenue. Aim to get as high on the charts as you can, as that will boost your organic installs.

Once your profit margin is looking healthy, it’s time to hit the brakes and balance out your return on investment. This is similar to how you’ll have approached your soft launch. It’s worth remembering that things will naturally slow down over time. Hyper-casual games very quickly change and players drop off all the time. So bear that in mind.

Lastly, you’ll want to start steering. Optimize your game to get as much value from your players as possible. You’ll want to focus on six areas:

Look to increase your retention first. You want players to stick around.
Refresh your ads and creatives to make sure that players don’t get fed up with them.
Manage your budget for each network.
Localise your game for each country you’re targeting.
Analyse your competitors to see what they’re doing.
Run brainstorms to come up with new marketing ideas.

Should you need any help with acquiring more users, our Golden Cohort programme provides a publishing manager, as well as access to user acquisition experts.

Golden Cohort has everything you need to self-publish

If this all seems like too much, we’re on hand to help. Join our Golden Cohort and get the advice and tools you need to make sure you’re getting the most value from your game.

Our Golden Cohort programme teaches studios exactly how to self-publish and become independent. That includes tools to automatically find you the best bids, test your ideas and research the market. You’ll also get help from your own publishing manager, user acquisition and monetisation experts, and marketing artists.

If you’d like to find out more, check out our Golden Cohort and apply to see whether you can benefit from our GrowthCloud technology.

Until then, good luck self-publishing your game.

Where do you find killer hyper-casual ideas? Coda.

This industry needs a shakeup. It needs a change. From our experience, you usually need to smash through around a hundred prototypes before you even find a marketable idea. That’s one hundred fresh ideas. One hundred mechanics to develop. One hundred tests to run. All for one hyper-casual game.

Let’s put that in perspective. It takes – on average – two weeks to create a prototype. So if you need a hundred prototypes, it’s going to take almost four years to find that one idea. And that’s before you even start marketing it.

While that might sound daunting at first, it’s clearly possible. Sensor Tower found that the hyper-casual genre had 31% of the downloads among the top 1,000 games. And newzoo reports that the mobile gaming market will hit $90 billion in 2021.

So there’s value – and cash to be made – in hyper-casual games and they’re rapidly becoming more and more popular. But how are studios going to get all the ideas they need?

Studios need to become more independent

If studios are going to grow, hire more developers and keep pace with the market, they’re going to need more of a share and have more options for them. At the moment, publishers dictate the process and take a huge share.

This approach won’t keep pace with the sheer number of prototypes that studios need to create. Publishers are looking for ideas, when this could easily be done by the studios themselves. By shifting the responsibility over to studios, and allowing them more independence, it’ll actually help both sides of the equation.

This is why we’ve released new models for working, like our Golden Cohort, to allow developers to take back control, take a bigger share and come up with ideas themselves.

Studios need to be able to research

It’s no good just blindly running a brainstorm. You need the facts and data to serve as inspiration. What’s popular? Which sub-genres are doing well? What kinds of mechanics are the top-charting games using? These questions can only be answered using market intelligence tools that analyse the market and update regularly.

Not only that, studios need to be able to research the current trends in advertising. What’s getting players to click through and download your game? A good idea only works if the advert is catchy enough.

This is why we’ve created tools like Market Intelligence and Creative Insights, so that developers can do their own research and make their own decisions.

Studios need tools that focus on hyper-casual

Sure, there are tools out there that help studios research and test game concepts. But they’re all too broad, covering too many genres. They don’t tend to look deep into the hyper-casual industry specifically, which means the data can be misleading. It could easily set developers down a path that would only really work for a different genre.

So we’re creating tools that focus on the hyper-casual industry and provide the data that studios need, completely transparently.

Studios need tools that are free

Even if studios can find a tool that helps them come up with ideas, the solutions out there are expensive. And most developers don’t have a huge amount of capital behind them to fund their independence. They can’t afford these vast tools.

So when a studio partners with us, we give them access to tools for free. They give them the ability to research and test, without them needing to invest in expensive tools.

At Coda, we’re focusing on solving these problems

We’re going to change how hyper-casual games are made. And help studios make a killing, making games. It should be practical and easy to make a livelihood and even thrive. It just needs the right tools and systems in place to give studios the freedom they need. So we’ll create them.

And studios need the data – so we’ll provide it. Clearly and transparently. We’ll make sure studios can see exactly what’s working and what isn’t. Whether that’s for a prototype or for their advertising.

That’s why we’ve developed our suite of products, all tied together through our Interactive Game Brief, so that you can organise, collaborate and store those ideas. We’re creating market intelligence tools to find the ideas. Building ways to get creative insights into how to make your adverts. Filling a concept store to save you time, so you can work on ideas that have already been tested. And testing tools to make sure your idea is viable.

All for free. All focused on the hyper-casual industry. And all to help you on the journey to independence. We’ll be there along the way, guiding you towards success. But we want to level the playing field.

Are you ready? Become a partner and start today.

Are you ready to make a play for the top charts?

We’ve decided we need to shake up the industry and break the trends. It’s time to give you back control and level the playing field. So we’re making it easier to find, research, test and market your ideas. More options. More insights. More opportunities to find your next top-charting hit.

Let’s look at how we’re bringing everything together to grow your games.

We’re here to help you make a killing, making games

There are too many obstacles in the way of great game studios. In general, you need to invest hundreds, if not thousands, of hours into testing your ideas, researching the market and building a team. Meanwhile, finding ideas and discovering trends can be difficult. Only one in a hundred prototypes survive the first stage of testing. When each prototype takes about two weeks to create, it can take years before you find that first marketable idea. Worse still, the tools to help you find those ideas don’t tend to focus on the hyper-casual industry or don’t show the information you need.

This is a major problem in the industry: it’s become easier and easier to create games, but the business side hasn’t caught up. The tools to research, market and monetize your games are decades out of date. They’re unwieldy, unfocused and restrictive.

That’s got to stop. We want to see you making a livelihood out of what you love. We want to see you gain your independence. Take back control and make a killing, making games. That’s why we’re reshaping the publishing industry. Smashing the barriers and changing up how things are run. That’s why we’re going to change how you build and release games.

We build the tools that help you grow

We’re going to give you back control of your games, help you come up with ideas and move through the game’s lifecycle. Train you up on the skills you’ll need to market your game. And focus on hyper-casual games, so that the data is more relevant to your goals.

It starts with our Interactive Game Brief (IGB)

Bring everything about your game into one place. It’s your team’s hub to catalogue and collaborate about your game, from ideation to acquisition.

Once you’ve signed up and joined as a partner or through our Golden Cohort (our self-publishing program), you’ll be able to get access to all our tools. And through IGB, you can use all six of our tools. We’ve designed each to be transparent, showing you exactly what data you have, easy to use and more useful than any of the generic tools out there. Over time, you can use more and more of these services, and become more and more independent.

So here they are, in the order you’ll likely use them.

The Concept Store

This is a single store-front filled with concepts that you can browse and choose. Pick a pre-vetted concept that we’ve run through testing and you can drop it straight into your Interactive Game Brief and start working on it. And the best thing? These ideas are ten-times more likely to find you success.

Market Intelligence

It’s tough to know what’s popular and trending. What games should you research? With Market Intelligence, you can discover those trends and catch them early. Inspire your ideation and research your competitors.

Creative Insights

A vast library of all the adverts from the top-charting games. All those creatives in one place, so you can research what works and what doesn’t. Is it best to show someone winning, then failing, in your ad? Or maybe three failures in a row? Creative Insights shows you not only the best creatives, but helps you find what style of ad is trending.

Marketability Test

Will your idea sell? Once you’ve got your creatives sorted, it’s time to test. See how many people click your ads and install your game (whether that’s through Facebook or Tik Tok). Keep track of the data you’ll need to figure out your strategy and grow your studio.

Our SDKs

Now you’ve released a successful game, we have a host of meta-mechanics you can plug into your game to save you time, and help monetize your titles. All out of the box, with no need to program anything new. Need in-game currencies? Access to Unity or Adjust? What about a shopfront? Just plug it all in, with one SDK. Easy peasy.

GrowthCloud

Optimize your bids, so you always make the most from your ad space. And why have a team, when GrowthCloud can do the work of ten user acquisition managers. If you’re part of our Golden Cohort, you can acquire more users, manage your budget and monetize your game. All automatically. GrowthCloud will handle it all.

Get the data you need, when you need it

Behind the scenes, we’ve brought together our vast data-lake – filled with anonymous information about the gaming industry from multiple sources – and developed a machine learning algorithm that can predict, automate decisions and report on the data you need.

Need a hand? We’ll still be around.

Along your journey to independence, you might need advice or technical support. Whatever it is, we’ll still be around to help. Keep control, but don’t be afraid to ask for our help. Our experts can help you set up your services, teach you how to use our tools or give you pointers on how to run your own ideation.

Airport 3D! How to go from idea to success

Q. Hi Ozan. Congratulations on the release of Airport 3D! How did this venture come about?

Arcadian and Coda published their third game together, Real Drive 3D, back in February to great acclaim; the game reached number 5 in the top charts. After celebrating the game’s success, we all sat down and carefully analysed why Real Drive 3D did so well. We quickly realised the success of the game was largely based on the steering mechanic. The core mechanic was unique to this game.

What we’d managed to do was to take something elaborate and realistic from mid-core games and mould it into the hyper-casual world. We’d taken this concept and executed it into a simple, easy to play game.

So naturally the question soon became: How do we implement this mechanic into another game? We all thought the idea of holidays and flying would be topical, as people around the world were desperate for one during the winter of the pandemic. Piloting planes and managing an airport through driving different vehicles became an obvious choice for our next project.

Q. So once you had this idea, what did the collaboration process look like?

These came in the form of intense ideation sessions. We mainly used Slack and spoke directly on calls frequently. But once we landed on the game idea we started something we call an Interactive Game Brief here at Coda. Using that, we could consolidate everything into one place and make it really easy to find.

We’d document different popular videos, such as difficult takeoffs or shuttle buses in action. That then helped generate ideas surrounding the mechanic we used for Real Drive 3D.

Why I like the Interactive Game Brief is because, particularly for this game, it gave us structure to our ideation phase, especially when we started to think about levels. We knew that we could combine all these mechanics and themes, right from the beginning. We could then build on that. It's fantastic for collaboration because it acts as a real, living framework to ideate with.

The Interactive Game Brief documents the whole ideation process and provides a solid structure to publishing a hit game. You can go back, check you haven’t missed ideas or refer back to the original philosophy. It really narrows down the ideation process into more promising avenues. Otherwise, you’d risk chasing down blind alleys.

Marketability Testing: Find a game idea that works

This week, we've updated our platform to add Marketability Testing – a space on our platform to test out game ideas before you fully commit. All for free. You can run multiple tests, see how much demand there is for the idea and decide whether it’s worth pursuing. All you need is the name of the game and gameplay video.

Over a hundred games pop up on the US App Store every day. So studios need to trial ideas and release them as quickly as possible. It’s crucial to know whether an idea is worth the effort. And you don’t want to waste any time making that decision.

That’s exactly why we’ve created Marketability Testing. It’ll speed up the process, help you see all your ideas in one place and give you the freedom to experiment.

Forge your own path: Join our new self-publishing program

It’s time to answer the call to adventure and take back control of your games. Today, we’re excited to announce our self-publishing program – Golden Cohort – where we’ll choose eight studios to set themselves up with the tools and processes to become truly independent. Those eight will learn as a group, create a community between themselves and have us on hand for any questions.

Over the last few years, it’s become easier to create games. But when it comes to publishing, the industry is sorely lacking. Studios don’t get much say in the games they create, they don’t usually keep the intellectual property, and publishers can take up to 90%. Wouldn’t it be better if you made your own choices?

Golden Cohort is a program that helps you become an independent hyper-casual studio.

Get help, whenever you need it

As a cohort, you’ll have the other seven studios to learn from. And if you need a hand, our experts will be right by your side. We’ll be there every step of the way, advising you on how to structure your teams, run your tests and set up all the tools that you’ll need.Get financial support and earn more

You’ll keep the majority of the profits from your games. And we’ll give you financial support if you need it, so you can focus on growing your studio without any cash flow worries.

This isn’t a publishing deal

We'll only take a small profit share of any games you launch as part of the program. We don't expect you to have any games lined up and you won’t be tied to us. You can still work with other publishers. And any games you make afterwards are all yours. This is about seeing you through to independence.

If you decide to stick with us afterwards and keep using our tools, we’ll charge an even smaller percentage of the profits. You only pay if you launch a game. No upfront or hidden fees of any kind.

What’s the criteria?

We’re looking for eight ambitious studios that’ll work relentlessly and bring their best people. There are four key criteria:

You’ve published at least one game. And it needs to have – or is on track to have – more than five million downloads. This needs to be through an established publisher.
You can dedicate one development team. This team needs experience in creating games and we’ll also need a lot of time from your founders.
You don’t have any contracts stopping you from self-publishing. So double-check your contracts before you apply.
You’ll hire or dedicate one person for growth. This person will be the start of your growth team.

We put them in the driver’s seat

We gave them the tools to test

Idea stage: The concept.

Development stage: Features.

Launch stage: Marketing.

Do you have a game idea?

1. Gather your ideas

2. Test whether the idea is marketable

3. Create a gameplan

4. Optimize through testing

Time it right

Become a partner

It all started with a concept: Colour Squeeze

A change of perspective gave new life

Working together with the studio

Growing together

Become a partner

Artist Life hits number one

Popular Girls hits number two

Creating a hyper-compact game

Discover new trends for yourself

Step 5: Soft launch your game

Explore the different channels

Start big, ease off, find the balance

Step 6: It’s time to monetise your game

There are a few key metrics to measure

There are three kinds of advert you can show

Step 7: Acquire more players

Golden Cohort has everything you need to self-publish

Studios need to become more independent

Studios need to be able to research

Studios need tools that focus on hyper-casual

Studios need tools that are free

At Coda, we’re focusing on solving these problems

We’re here to help you make a killing, making games

We build the tools that help you grow

It starts with our Interactive Game Brief (IGB)

The Concept Store

Market Intelligence

Creative Insights

Marketability Test

Our SDKs

GrowthCloud

Get the data you need, when you need it

Need a hand? We’ll still be around.

Q. Hi Ozan. Congratulations on the release of Airport 3D! How did this venture come about?

Q. So once you had this idea, what did the collaboration process look like?

Q. Right. So how does the Interactive Game Brief work?

Q. And how did this help with Airport 3D!?

Well, it certainly worked for Airplane 3D! Thank you, Ozan. And best of luck with your next Arcadian venture.

Run as many tests as you need

We’ve split out our old process

Test concepts as a partner

Give it a go for free

Create and test your own concepts

Form your own teams

Get help, whenever you need it

This isn’t a publishing deal

What’s the criteria?

Ready to start calling the shots?

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G01 Edinburgh House
170 Kennington Ln
London, SE11 5DP