In this section I will be going over my experience in Voodoo hyper casual games development.
During this experience in Milan, I took part as a gameplay programmer in one of the new small internal studios of Voodoo, iterating fast on games prototypes for the hype casual mobile industry together with a small team of 4 people.
Voodoo is a Paris-based video game company best known for shaping the global hyper-casual and hybrid-casual market on mobile. Founded in 2013, it built a distinctive publishing model that scouts small studios, provides rapid prototyping frameworks, and scales promising concepts with rigorous user-acquisition and data-driven iteration. Hits like Helix Jump and Paper.io demonstrated Voodoo’s knack for simple, one-touch mechanics transformed into endlessly replayable loops.
At Voodoo, I was selected to join a dedicated small internal studio in which I was directly involved in the design and development of several hyper-casual mobile games, working on everything from initial ideation to prototype testing. My role included creating simple yet engaging mechanics, polishing the “game feel”, and optimizing gameplay loops to maximize retention. I also collaborated with the publishing and analytics teams, learning how to apply data-driven insights to improve performance and scalability. This project gave me valuable hands-on experience in the fast-paced world of hyper-casual development.
The prototypes I developed range from, infinite scrollers to puzzle games, with an enfasi on the later. The work consisted in giving a twist on existing ideas to be then tested on the Voodoo platform.
I worked mainly on developing match and math puzzle games and all the team members were active participants in the ideation process.
We worked tightly with a Voodoo publishing manager to deliver the best possible prototype in the least time possible.
This experience thought me the value of good code architecture, being able to reuse the same code in multiple projects was key. Unfortunately due to the tight time constraint 90% of the time that was not possible.
Even though I really enjoyed working with my colleagues, who were all very skilled professionals, the stressful work environment prevented me from learning and improving as much as I wanted.
More over the ideation process and creative environment were heavily constrained by the Voodoo publishing managers, who discouraged new and innovative ideas in favor of slight twists on old ones.
The main takeaway from this experience is that I will try to avoid the hyper-casual industry as much as possible in the future.
