Funcell Games is one of the leading developers of the hit games 9 Months, Idle Human and Stairway to Haven. Their latest project, Perfect Lie, is a hyper-casual narrative game and requires a lot of resources to create all the content. However, despite the challenges, the developers, in partnership with Supersonic, have managed to bring the game to the top-2 level on Android.

The genre of hyper-casual narrative game

The narrative simulation game genre has enormous potential and demand among users at the moment. Each level is unique, unlike other hyper-casual games, and this gives more scope for creative implementation.

The idea for Perfect Lie belongs to my 10-year-old nephew! The kid is always suggesting new things, and one day he gave us a concept based on a character who is constantly lying to avoid going to school. After a little analysis, it turned out that there are no games based on lies, so the team took up this idea.

Abhishek Malpani, founder and CEO at Funcell Games

Funcell Games created a prototype and tested it on the Supersonic platform through Facebook, IronSource and Tik-Tok channels, after which the test showed a high level of marketability and user-level interest.

Content building in narrative games

During the testing phase, the developers had a few small levels that players were quick to tackle. That’s why, when the game was created in partnership with Supersonic, the focus was on adding content to improve APPU (a unique retention-based and time-of-play metric that Supersonic uses to assess potential LTV).

Unlike other types of hyper-casual games, narrative games need to be carefully crafted. It is the variety that players expect when playing this type of game. Features such as dialogue and animation must be carefully and individually designed for each level.

Hyper-casual narrative games need a huge amount of content – we moved even faster developing high-quality content thanks to the Supersonic team’s suggestions and feedback

Abhishek Malpani, Founder and CEO of Funcell Games

The development team was extremely efficient in developing content – and progressed even faster thanks to the level designer from the Supersonic team, who provided suggestions and feedback. For example, thanks to him, mini-games appeared, further diversifying the levels and gameplay. At the same time, there was a lot of advertising going on, Supersonic gave a lot of freedom to the developers to create their own variants.

Side note: “Making games should be your passion” Interview with Abhishek Malpani

Building profitability with A/B testing

When it came to monetizing the project, the partnership with Supersonic came at the right time.

Supersonic’s expertise and knowledge in monetization helped us scale LTV very quickly, and they suggested A/B tests that led to significant boosts in ARPU

Abhishek Malpani, Founder and CEO of Funcell Games

Supersonic also offered to test unique videos with rewards and creative calls to action (e.g., ‘Get Cool’ versus ‘Stay Nerdy’), which led to an increase in ARPU on iOS of over 8%.

According to the CEO of Funcell Games, the collaboration between the development team and Supersonic was easy – they always had a transparency of testing results through the LiveGames platform, and effectively implemented all winning elements. In addition, working closely with the monetization team, the developers were able to take the successful reward videos from Perfect Lie and easily incorporate them into the new games they were working on with Supersonic.

Thanks to the game’s design, creativity and monetisation optimisation, Perfect Lie was set up for a successful launch. As a result, it ranked #2 on Android by downloads in the US and quickly became profitable.

Partnership as a key to success

Supersonic is the best publisher in the world. We look forward to collaborating further, continuing to improve Perfect Lie. We should well expect a new joint hit in the near future.

Abhishek Malpani, Founder and CEO at Funcell Games

Developing a narrative hyper-casual game is an incredibly time-consuming and complex process that requires an experienced development team and an enormous amount of resources. Fortunately, Funcell Games was prepared to face any difficulties for the sake of developing the potential of their project.

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