From Helix Jump to Little Farm Story: How h8games reinvented itself

• Helix Jump launched in 2018 with short development time and reached over 800 million downloads.
• Partnership with SayGames sparked the studio’s pivot from hypercasual to hybridcasual.
• Little Farm Story became a $1.2M monthly IAP success while maintaining h8games’ hypercasual core.

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Oleg Batrakov is CEO & co-founder at h8games.

Little Farm Story: Idle Tycoon, an idle arcade created by developer h8games and published by SayGames, has grown to over $1.2M in monthly IAP revenue just one year after its global launch.

But behind this success lies a long journey: from early premium experiments and painful failures, to the hypercasual era crowned by the explosive success of Helix Jump - more than 800 million downloads - and finally to a complete reinvention of the studio in the hybridcasual space.

Early steps in the premium segment

It all started in 2016. By that time, my partner Oleh Khromov and I had already worked at several studios: we had both reached senior roles at Gameloft and later moved to Gumi, where we were tasked with building a large team for an ambitious AAA project - despite barely understanding how to make a AAA game in the first place. Unsurprisingly, nothing came out of it: within a year the funding dried up and the studio was shut down.

Each of us ended up with about $20,000. We could either go back to full-time jobs or try to create something of our own. We chose the latter. Back then, it genuinely felt like forty thousand dollars was enough to actually build “something meaningful.”

The team quickly started to dissolve as people left in search of stable salaries. By the time we released our first game, The Little Fox - a beautiful and highly original premium runner - there were only three of us left.

We were inspired by Monument Valley - its aesthetics, its precision, its sense of a tiny, perfect world. We truly believed in the game and even reached out to Apple to secure an editorial feature. But we overlooked something obvious: our friends, whom we asked to test the game, couldn’t even pass the first level. It was that difficult.

We did get the App Store feature nomination, but we earned only $8,000 to $10,000. It was nothing compared to the time and money invested. Still, we followed the premium games path and made our next game - Pengy Has a Dream, even more experimental and complex: players had to draw ice platforms in the air to help the character reach the end of the level.

Both projects were commercial failures. And then came the final straw: the Saint-Exupéry estate filed a lawsuit against us for using fragments of The Little Prince in The Little Fox.

We relied on the rule that a work enters the public domain 60 years after the author’s death, but didn’t know about the exception: if the author died in the war, the copyright term is extended. We had to urgently remove the game from the store.

Over time, it felt like we were constantly pushing against the wind. No matter how much effort we put in, it wasn’t getting any easier - which meant we were simply moving in the wrong direction. After Pengy Has a Dream, we finally reconsidered our approach to premium games and decided to focus on what we truly loved: creating and refining mechanics.

The rise of hypercasual, the age of individualism, and the painful lessons of growth

This is how our hypercasual era began. We were completely out of money, and Oleh was literally knocking on every publisher’s door, sending out prototypes to anyone who would look at them.

We worked briefly with Ketchapp, but the real breakthrough came in 2018, when Voodoo wrote to us and offered a very generous contract. Our very first game with them, Fire Rides, took off immediately - for the first time, we saw real payouts, numbers we had never even imagined. It was incredibly motivating.

Five or six prototypes later, Helix Jump happened. We made it in a day or two, and in testing it showed a CPI of just a few cents and day 1 retention above 50%.

Three days after that, the game was already live in the store with a million downloads. The entire journey -from the first build to that first million - took just a couple of weeks. It was a dizzying high, the kind of success that defined an era: back then, you could just pour traffic into the game and it would grow on its own.

Hypercasual completely shifted our mindset. Coming from Gameloft and Gumi, where everything revolved around teams, processes, and large structures, suddenly we were in a world where one person could make a hit in a single day.

It was a time of sharp individualism and fierce competition - everywhere, not just for us. After that first success, it was easy to lose your head in the euphoria. It felt like you could do everything on your own - and get rich fast. It was a real stress test for our partnership. Oleh and I managed to stay together through that period, but it wasn’t easy.

And then we started to drift off track.

1. The era of “almost good enough” prototypes

There was a period when we would make a prototype, see good metrics, and simply abandon it. For example, a quick-and-dirty prototype made in three days would show retention of 47% when the target was 50%.

Instead of refining it for another three days, we’d say: “No, this isn’t serious. We need something truly amazing. On to the next one.”

At the same time, competitors watched our account like hawks. We would publish a prototype, and two days later clones would appear everywhere. The competition was brutal. As a result, we weren’t finishing our ideas - but others were earning from them.

2. The illusion that talent alone can create magic

Then we swung to the opposite extreme: we believed that if we simply gathered a group of talented people in one room, great games would appear on their own. We rented a house in Kharkiv, hired five strong developers, and every few days, I would drop by saying, “Just make something great - like Helix Jump.” Of course, nothing came out of it.

Now I understand why: without internal discipline, no external system will ever work. You can’t simply hire talented people and expect them to win the Olympics - and that’s exactly what the hypercasual market has become: an Olympic-level competition.

You need to go through dozens of prototypes together, burn yourself on failures together, and grow together. To win the Olympics, you need real training. It was an important - and painful - lesson.

Re-evaluation and the return to games

We eventually spent all the money we earned from Helix Jump - and not just on games. We opened restaurants, made music, and shot videos. Oleh opened a bar in Kharkiv, and I filmed a short movie that I’m now submitting to international festivals. It was a bright, creative chapter - but already far from game development.

Gradually, it became clear: we were standing at a crossroads. Either we shut down the studio and move on with a different life, or we return to games - but this time in a mature, structured way, without relying on pure inspiration and luck.

We chose the second option. We felt we had to take that path - that the experience we’d accumulated in game development was too valuable to throw away.

We came back to hypercasual - and quickly realised the old engine wouldn’t start anymore. In 2022, we started looking for new partners - and that’s how we found SayGames. At the same time, the war in Ukraine began. Part of the team shifted focus, and some people left the country. In the end, there were five of us left - and that’s how we entered the next chapter of the studio’s life.

I remember our first visit to the SayGames office in Cyprus very clearly. After a long period of turbulence, it was the first time I felt like I was finally surrounded by genuine and lively people again, people who are open-minded, take hits, experiment, and stay open to what comes next.

With the publishing team, we immediately fell into a dialogue where both sides were open to searching and trying, despite our different backgrounds and significant experience.

Later, I had an important conversation with Yegor Vaikhanskii, CEO and Co-Founder of SayGames. I told him: “I want to optimise my involvement somehow - the constant race is exhausting.” Yegor replied: “If you step back from this, no one will build it for you.” It was a conversation about responsibility - about the kind of inner drive that can’t be outsourced.

If you stop wanting this, nothing will move. In the end, that personal drive is the only real fuel behind progress.

The shift from hypercasual to hybrid and the birth of Little Farm Story

Our collaboration with SayGames marked a major shift in our thinking - a transition from hypercasual to hybridcasual.

We came in with a classic hypercasual mindset: the only thing that matters is CPI, one killer mechanic, one strong ad hook. From day one, Yegor told us the opposite: “Don’t look only at CPI. Look at LTV, in-apps and depth. CPI will follow.” At the time, it sounded like heresy. 

Everything inside us resisted - but there were no real alternatives, so we took the leap of faith.

The first attempts were painful. We made a racing game inspired by market leaders - but it had none of our core qualities: no tactility, no signature feel, no soul. It was an attempt to transplant someone else’s idea without our own meaning behind it, and naturally, it didn’t take root.

After that failure came disorientation: hypercasual was dying, our in-app attempts weren’t working. At some point it became clear: we had to figure out what “our” game looked like. That required a completely different mindset.

The mechanics, the content scope, the production process - everything had to change. We were stepping into territory we had never worked in before. SayGames helped us adjust our approach and move toward hybrid-casual in a more structured way.

That’s how the Little Farm Story began.

Yegor brought the idea for the setting and the meta. We added our ASMR energy - those tactile, “feelable” mechanics that make us happy to touch and play with. But we had absolutely no idea how to design in-app monetisation. On every call, Yegor kept repeating: “You’re giving your entire game away for free.” And we were terrified. It felt like if we raised resource costs, players would just think we were being greedy and leave. 

The first in-app that truly worked was born almost by accident - the worker. Not a perfect balance design, not a clever resource pack - just a tiny character who helps you on the farm. We added him because we liked watching him wave his little hand next to the crops. Then we checked the metrics and saw that almost everyone was buying him.

The worker became a bridge: a paid element that didn’t feel manipulative, but instead felt like a natural continuation of our sincerity and the “human” part of the game. Today it’s the best-performing in-app purchase in the project.

In parallel, our internal perspective was shifting. We forced ourselves to play big free-to-play games and spend money on them to understand the economy from the inside out. We discovered that in-apps are also part of the game, a specific kind of fun, a psychological experience, not just a monetisation mechanic.

Simply put, Little Farm Story is a hybrid of two energies:

• our hypercasual tactility and ASMR feel,

• and the depth of hybrid design that SayGames brought into the process.

We stayed true to ourselves: we embraced an idea that came from outside, but executed it our own way.

How we build a team: From function to creativity

When we began working on Little Farm Story and the projects that followed, it became clear that we didn’t just need a team - we needed our team.

In recent years, the “people as functions” mindset stopped working. There was a time when you could “carry” a project with tool knowledge, logic, or narrow expertise. Today, 90% of those tasks can be handled easily by AI - and that flips the rules of the game.

We live in a postmodern world where functions blur, and a team becomes a team not because of complementary hard skills or shared KPIs, but because of shared energy - a vibe, a sensitivity to creating something alive together.

This is why our hiring approach is very different from the traditional one. We can hire someone whose formal skill level is objectively lower, but who has something unusual - whatever it may be: a sense of style, a strange hobby, a way of telling stories, a worldview, or a sensitivity to what’s happening around them. Something that sets them apart from being “just a function” and makes them alive. Skills can be upgraded. The team helps people adapt. The environment helps people grow. But this unusual spark - that is the thing that matters most, and it becomes part of the product.

When such a team comes together, all the “programmer stuff” fades into the background. Team spirit stops being about HR activities, meetups, or pizza during crunch, it’s something entirely different.

Work becomes a part of your life, and a colleague becomes someone with whom you share a meaningful portion of your time. They must be interesting, alive, genuine and someone you enjoy working with every day.

And when that collective vibe forms, the very thing we were chasing finally appears: creativity.

Not just building functional prototypes, but making games where you can feel the human touch behind every detail.

Conclusion

The journey of h8games can’t be reduced to a simple linear trajectory. It’s more like several lives lived inside one studio: from attempts at premium arthouse games, through the euphoria of hyper-casual hits, to discovering the real value of the team, structure, and honest creative work.

Little Farm Story became more than a successful project - it became the result of this internal evolution and growth. And perhaps, it’s only the beginning of the story the studio is ready to tell in the years ahead.