From Prototypes to a Hit Game
How rapid hyper-casual prototyping evolved into a long-running commercial mobile game.
Lead Unity Developer
Fun-To-Mass Games 2018-2022
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In 2018, I joined a small hyper-casual game startup. We built dozens of prototypes, testing different game concepts and moving quickly from one idea to the next based on early product metrics.
Eventually, one concept performed well enough to keep developing: a car falling down a mountain, smashing through the environment and gradually destroying itself along the way.
I handled the programming and built the first playable version in roughly one to two weeks, with most of my attention going into game feel: tuning the falling, impacts, destruction, and sense of constant progression. Despite its rough form — simple Unity Terrain, cube-based environments, and a basic upgrade economy — the first test already showed strong product metrics.
Over the next year, that prototype evolved into a full game. The core gameplay became deeper and more varied, while the project gained a much richer progression structure, vehicle customization, economy, and other meta features that gave players more reasons to keep playing beyond the original mechanic.
My work covered the technical side of the project end to end. I led development together with one junior programmer, working alongside a lead designer and the founder driving the product, while owning the overall technical direction as the game grew.
Later, we developed a larger-scale sequel, pushing the same idea toward more realistic visuals and considerably more complex physics, including deformable geometry and scenes with hundreds of destructible objects.
A major part of my work was physics-heavy: vehicle behavior, destructible environments, and preserving the feel of movement and destruction as the game became more complex. Beyond the core gameplay, I worked across UI, vehicle customization, progression and monetization features, subscriptions, third-party SDK integrations, and the broader architecture needed to support the game as it expanded.
The most valuable part of this experience was the breadth and continuity of ownership. The technical approach I established in the first prototype became the basis for the game’s feel and strongly shaped how it evolved afterward. Building dozens of prototypes also gave me a strong practical sense for rapid gameplay iteration, while taking one of them all the way into a long-running commercial game gave me much deeper exposure to mobile marketing and to the engineering decisions required once an experiment becomes a real product.