How we worked on new hybrid mechanics in State Connect years after its release

These days, especially in mobile game development, and even more so in hypercasual, it’s incredibly hard to launch a game from scratch and break into the top charts. It’s usually smarter to develop existing projects long-term, especially if you already have titles that perform well and have a loyal audience. We’ve got hypercasual projects that’ve been performing steadily for over five years and still get regular updates.

When State Connect, a hypercasual strategy whose popularity peaked around 2021–2022, first launched, it didn’t include any hybrid mechanics. But its solid, retention-driven core gameplay made us confident enough to experiment — we wanted to add a second gameplay layer, refresh the visuals, and introduce new systems to support hybrid monetization.

Spoiler: there were several failed iterations and hypotheses that didn’t pan out. At some point, we even considered shutting the project down, but we couldn’t shake the feeling that the core still had untapped potential.