Furious Avocado

A small team doing big things

Founded just over three years ago in 2020, Furious Avocado has quickly become one of the most successful hyper-casual game studios in the world. With hundreds of millions of downloads across their hit games - Tie Dye and Candle Craft - this ten person team has achieved great success in the hyper-casual market, working with leading games publishers such as Voodoo and Crazy Labs.

Driven by this early success, and by the uncertainty pervading the hyper-casual space in the wake of IDFA/ATT changes, the Furious Avocado team now look to “step into the waters of casual gaming” but all the while maintaining the same “agile mindset and constant exploration” that have been key to their success so far.

Planning for the transition

The team at Furious Avocado have been planning their transition into the hybrid-casual market for some time, exploring the market, looking at the types of games that are successful, and thinking about how they can leverage their existing skills and experience to build games that are bigger, deeper, and more engaging than their hyper-casual counterparts.

Building, running, and maintaining two hugely successful games with a team of just ten is no easy feat. Add in the plan to now build server-based games with deeper gameplay mechanics and more complex social and competitive features, and it starts to sound impossible to do without growing the team or sacrificing the success of their existing games.

The Furious Avocado team, longtime users of Nakama, were already familiar with Heroic Labs and so, in the course of their research into building the inventory system for their upcoming title, they reached out to us and were excited to learn we had a new product that seemed tailor-made for their needs.

Enter Hiro

Hiro is a game framework that enables game studios to rapidly build games with complex gameplay mechanics and social features, reducing typical development cycles by 12-15 months and dramatically improving the productivity achievable with a small team. Hiro is built on top of Nakama, our leading open-source game server, and is designed to be used by game studios of all sizes, whether working in Unity, Unreal, or TypeScript.

Most importantly for Furious Avocado, Hiro enables them to move quickly - it’s as simple as adding a plugin to their Unity editor and they’re able to instantly start working on adding engaging meta features to their core gameplay. Even better, the powerful combination of Hiro and Nakama enables them to do so without the need for any dedicated server engineers, or even hiring any additional developers at all! This is a huge win for a small team like Furious Avocado, enabling them to focus on what they do best - building great games.

A Hiro’s work

Furious Avocado’s upcoming entry into hybrid-casual/casual games is an arena-based (think Clash Royale) card battler with a complex inventory system, deep gameplay mechanics, and a strong focus on social and competitive features.

Using Hiro, the team can quickly build out the core gameplay mechanics, including the inventory system, enabling them to then focus on the game’s unique features and gameplay. Hiro enables game developers to build complex systems, such as inventory in a matter of days, rather than weeks or months, and to do so with a small team.

Building the inventory system with Hiro and Nakama becomes as simple as creating the JSON definition files describing the cards along with their corresponding rarity and cost in the game. (You can see an example configuration here to get an idea of just how quickly this can be done.)

The time savings to be gained by Furious Avocado in the development of the intricate inventory system going into their upcoming title is only compounded by the expansive feature set for which Hiro enables this type of rapid development.

Along with the Inventory system, the Furious Avocado team are already leveraging Hiro’s Economy, Rewards, Unlockables, and Achievements.

And when they are ready for them, Hiro provides many more gameplay systems to add, such as Energy, Event Leaderboards, Teams, as well as Analytics and Social integrations.

Looking ahead

The Furious Avocado team are excited to be building their upcoming title with Hiro, and are looking forward to leveraging the many features and systems that Hiro, Nakama, and Heroic Labs provide to build the next generation of their games.

Having already proven themselves as a powerhouse already in the hyper-casual space, with the help of Hiro and Nakama they are now well on their way to doing the same in the hybrid-casual/casual space, competing with studios many times their size.

We’re excited to be working with such a talented team, and (like you) we can’t wait to see what they build next.