How to Develop a Game Like Smash Fest: Physics, Unity Stack, Cost & Complete Guide

Physics Cannon Game Development · 2026 Edition

A full B2B guide to building a physics-based cannon knockdown game like Smash Fest (com.flow.cannonball) in 2026. The rigidbody destruction system, the level design pipeline, the lives-and-coins hybrid-casual economy, and the Unity tech stack — with real India costs starting at $12,000.

1M+

Smash Fest downloads (Google Play)

4.5★

135K reviews · #5 top free Puzzle

+20%

Hybrid-casual IAP growth 2025

$12K

Starting build cost in India

In June 2026, a Turkish studio in Istanbul shipped a cannon game to Google Play. Within six weeks it had crossed one million downloads, carried a 4.5-star rating across 135,000 reviews, and sat at #5 in top free Puzzle — while the iOS build reached 2.5 million downloads at 4.7 stars. The game is called Smash Fest!, and its entire loop is three words: aim, shoot, smash.

There is no story. No multiplayer. No characters. A cannon sits at the bottom of the screen, a physics structure sits on a pedestal, and the player drags to set angle and power. That is the whole game. And it is currently outperforming the vast majority of games with a hundred times its feature list, because it nails the one thing that matters in 2026's mobile market: a creative-friendly hook with immediate comprehension and a satisfying physical payoff.

For entrepreneurs and publishers evaluating this category, the economics are unusually attractive. Physics destruction games have the lowest content-cost-per-level of any casual genre — once the physics system and material library are built, a designer can author 50 levels a week by arranging prefabs. This guide is the complete engineering and commercial roadmap for building a Smash Fest-style game with Capermint's Unity physics team.

What Is Smash Fest?

Smash Fest! is a 3D physics knockdown puzzle game developed by Flow Games A.Ş. and published on Google Play under the package com.flow.cannonball and on the App Store as id6748084174. The store description frames it as a festival arena where the player fires a cannon at fragile jars and heavy stones and watches chain-reaction destruction unfold.

The core loop is a single mechanic executed with high production polish: a cannon at the bottom of the screen, a physics structure balanced on a narrow pedestal, and a limited ammo count. The player adjusts angle, power, and timing; the shot connects; and the structure either topples off the platform or it does not. Success is measured by clearing the platform — every object must fall off the table.

Verified Product Facts

Developer Context: Flow Games A.Ş.

Flow Games is an Istanbul-based mobile game company operating from Şişli. Türkiye has become one of the most productive casual and hybrid-casual game development hubs in the world — the country produced Peak Games (acquired by Zynga for $1.8B), Dream Games (Royal Match), Rollic (Zynga), and Spyke Games, among others. Turkish studios have built a repeatable playbook: identify a hook with strong creative-ad potential, execute it with high polish and tight physics feel, and scale through paid user acquisition.

Smash Fest follows that playbook exactly. The mechanic is not novel — cannon knockdown games have existed since Angry Birds and Boom Blox. What Flow Games executed well is the feel: weighty destruction, satisfying material shatter effects, chain reactions that look impressive in a 6-second ad creative, and a clean festival art direction that photographs well on a store listing.

For a studio or entrepreneur entering this category in 2026, the lesson is direct: the barrier to entry is not the mechanic, it is the polish of the physics feel and the discipline of the level design pipeline. Both are engineering problems with known solutions — which is precisely why this genre is one of the most cost-efficient commercially viable categories to build.

Gameplay Walkthrough: The Four Structure Archetypes

Smash Fest's store screenshots reveal the four structural archetypes that define the level design language. Each one presents a different physics problem and a different optimal solution. Reading them in order gives you the complete design blueprint.

Core Mechanics Deep-Dive

Smash Fest's loop looks trivial from the outside. Engineering it to feel good is not. Below is the complete mechanical breakdown of what your build must implement.

The Aim-Power-Fire Input System

• Drag-to-aim with trajectory preview: the player drags anywhere on screen; the cannon rotates to match the vector and a dotted arc preview shows the projected path for the first bounce. The preview is a client-side simulation of the same physics parameters — it must be exact, or players will feel cheated when the real shot deviates.
• Power from drag distance: drag magnitude maps to launch impulse, typically clamped between a floor and ceiling so a short flick still produces a usable shot. Non-linear mapping (ease-out curve) gives finer control at high power, where precision matters most.
• Release to fire: impulse applied at the cannon muzzle transform. Camera shake, muzzle flash particle, and a low-frequency boom sample fire simultaneously. This 120-millisecond feedback window is where the game either feels heavy or feels cheap.
• Limited ammo per level: the ammo count is the difficulty dial. Smash Fest ties coin reward to level difficulty (20 / 50 / 100 coins), which strongly implies ammo scarcity is the primary difficulty variable.
• Win condition — clear the platform: every object must leave the pedestal surface. Objects that fall to the sand are cleared; objects that remain resting on the table are not. This is checked by a trigger volume covering the platform top, evaluated after the physics has settled.
• Settle detection: the game must wait for all rigidbodies to reach sleep state before evaluating win or fail. A naive fixed timer produces false results; the correct implementation polls total kinetic energy across all active bodies and evaluates when it drops below a threshold for N consecutive frames.

The Material Physics System

Everything interesting in this genre comes from material differentiation. If every block behaves identically, the game has one puzzle repeated a thousand times. Smash Fest's screenshots show at least four distinct material classes, each with different mass, restitution, friction, and destruction behaviour. This material library is the core content system your studio must build first.

Material Interaction Matrix

Unity Physics Engineering: The Hard Part

This is the section that determines whether your game ships at 60 frames per second on a mid-range Android device or gets one-star reviews about lag. Physics knockdown games are deceptively demanding: a stack of forty contacting rigidbodies is a far heavier computational load than most 3D games ever generate, and it happens precisely at the moment of maximum player attention.

The Seven Optimisation Disciplines

• 1. Solver iteration budgeting. Unity's default solver iteration count is tuned for general gameplay, not stacked towers. Stacks need higher iteration counts for stability, but raising the project-wide default is wasteful. The correct approach is to set a low project default and override Rigidbody.solverIterations on the specific structural bodies that need it. Unity's own guidance is explicit on this: keep the global default low, apply higher per-body values only where detail is required.
• 2. Layer collision matrix pruning. The cannonball does not need to test collisions against background props, debris particles, or the beach floor decoration. Every unnecessary layer pair costs CPU on every frame. Define layers for Projectile, Structure, Debris, Platform, and Environment, then disable every pair that cannot meaningfully interact. On dense levels this alone can cut physics cost by 30 to 40 percent.
• 3. Collider simplification. Never use a mesh collider on a stackable object. Box, capsule, and sphere primitives are dramatically cheaper and more numerically stable in contact resolution. A can is a capsule or a low-poly cylinder primitive, not a mesh. A bottle is a capsule with a box neck, not the render mesh. Visual fidelity is the renderer's job; the physics representation should be the simplest volume that preserves the gameplay feel.
• 4. Sleep threshold tuning. Rigidbodies that have settled must go to sleep or they consume solver time forever. Raise the sleep threshold above Unity's default so settled stacks deactivate quickly, and implement a forced-sleep pass that explicitly puts bodies below a velocity floor to rest. This also fixes the micro-jitter problem where a stack never fully settles and blocks your win-condition evaluation.
• 5. Contact count budgeting per level. Set a hard design rule: no level exceeds N simultaneous active contacts on your minimum-spec device. The can pyramid archetype is the stress case — forty light objects in mutual contact. Budget it, profile it on a real low-end device, and cap the object count in level design accordingly. This is a design constraint, not just an engineering one.
• 6. Debris pooling and lifetime capping. Shatter effects spawn fragments. Fragments are rigidbodies. Without control, a chain reaction spawns hundreds of fragments and the frame rate collapses at the exact moment of maximum visual payoff. Pool all fragments, cap the simultaneous live count, disable fragment-to-fragment collisions entirely, and fade fragments out after a short lifetime.
• 7. Fixed timestep discipline. Physics runs on the fixed timestep, not the render frame. A too-small timestep multiplies cost; a too-large one makes fast projectiles tunnel through thin colliders. Use continuous collision detection on the projectile only (never on the structure bodies), and tune the fixed timestep to the lowest value that prevents tunnelling at maximum shot velocity.

Feel Engineering: What Makes Destruction Satisfying

Physical accuracy alone does not produce satisfaction. The genre's top performers layer non-physical polish on top of the simulation:

• Impact hitstop: freeze the simulation for 40 to 80 milliseconds on a heavy impact. The brain reads the pause as weight. This single technique does more for perceived impact than any amount of particle work.
• Camera shake scaled to impulse: shake magnitude proportional to collision impulse, with a hard ceiling. Never a fixed shake — the variation is what communicates that one hit was bigger than another.
• Material-specific audio layering: wood thud, stone crack, glass shatter, metal clang — each with three to five randomised variants and pitch jitter to prevent machine-gun repetition on chain reactions.
• Slow-motion on the winning shot: when the final object leaves the platform, drop the timescale for roughly 700 milliseconds. This is the screenshot moment and the ad-creative moment.
• Exaggerated impulse over realism: real physics is disappointing. Multiply the transferred impulse above physically accurate values so structures explode outward rather than slumping. Players want spectacle, not simulation accuracy.
• Haptic feedback: a short vibration on impact and a longer one on level clear. On iOS use the taptic engine impact generators; on Android use the vibration effect API. Small addition, disproportionate effect on perceived quality.

The Level Design Pipeline: Where the Economics Are Won

A Smash Fest-style game needs hundreds of levels to sustain retention. If each level requires an engineer, the business does not work. If a designer can author levels in a visual editor using prefabs, the cost per level drops toward zero. Building that pipeline is the highest-leverage investment in the entire project.

Market Opportunity: Why Hybrid-Casual Physics

The 2026 casual market data makes an unusually clear case for this category. According to Sensor Tower's State of Mobile 2026 analysis, casual in-app revenue rose only 1.3 percent to roughly $81.75 billion while downloads fell 7.2 percent to 50.4 billion — growth now comes from players spending more, not from new installs. Within that flat market, one segment grew: hybrid-casual was the only casual segment to grow in-app purchase revenue, up 20 percent to $4.2 billion, with hybrid-casual puzzle as the standout performer.

Three structural signals make physics knockdown particularly well positioned within that growth:

• Hybrid-casual now beats hypercasual on retention. Sensor Tower's 2026 data shows leading hybrid-casual games have surpassed hypercasual leaders at Day 1 retention, with the gap widening further by Day 7. Meanwhile, traditional casual games' Day 7 retention has declined steadily since early 2022. The structural advantage sits exactly where a physics game with a coin economy and level progression naturally lands.
• Rising CPMs have made ad-supported models viable again. Rising install costs correlate with rising ad rates, which improves in-app advertising revenue. Deconstructor of Fun's 2026 analysis notes this dynamic is making high-volume ad-supported games economically viable again after several difficult years.
• Creative-ad honesty is now a ranking factor in practice. The 2026 breakout pattern is immediate comprehension, satisfying core mechanics, and creative ads that accurately represent the experience. A physics destruction game is one of the few genres where the ad creative and the actual gameplay are naturally identical — there is nothing to fake. Smash Fest's own worst reviews come precisely from players who felt the ad promised easier levels than the game delivered, which is an avoidable design error rather than a genre limitation.

Competitive Landscape

Physics knockdown is a mature mechanic with a crowded low end and a thin premium end. That shape is the opportunity: dozens of low-quality clones, very few well-produced titles with proper meta-progression.

Development Cost Breakdown (India, 2026)

A physics knockdown game is one of the most cost-efficient 3D casual categories to build. There is no multiplayer backend for the MVP, no character animation rig, no narrative content, and no complex UI systems. The cost concentrates in three places: the physics feel engineering, the material and VFX library, and the level authoring pipeline. Below is the full mid-tier breakdown at India rates of $20 to $50 per hour.

Cost by Build Tier

Tech Stack

Must-Have Features

Tier 1: MVP Core (Ship at Launch)

• Drag-to-aim with accurate trajectory preview matching the real simulation exactly. Any divergence between preview and outcome is read by players as the game cheating.
• Limited ammo per level as the primary difficulty variable, with a clear on-screen ammo counter.
• Clear-the-platform win condition evaluated by trigger volume after energy-threshold settle detection, never a fixed timer.
• Minimum 3 material types with visibly different mass, friction, and break behaviour. Without material contrast there is no puzzle.
• Lives system with rewarded-ad refill. Five lives, regeneration over time — but always with a rewarded-video bypass. This is Smash Fest's most-criticised omission and your easiest competitive win.
• Coin economy tiered by difficulty. Smash Fest's confirmed structure (20 / 50 / 100 coins by difficulty band) is a proven model worth replicating.
• At least one booster purchasable with coins — extra ammo, a bomb shot, or an aim-line extender.
• Impact feel package: hitstop, impulse-scaled camera shake, material audio variants, haptics, and slow-motion on the clearing shot.
• Offline play with local save. Physics games are commute games. Network dependency at launch is a retention tax.
• Interstitial pacing at one per three to four levels maximum, with a hard cooldown timer. Every competitor in this category is punished in reviews for exceeding this.

Tier 2: Engagement Layer (Months 1 to 6)

• Daily challenge level shared globally, with a leaderboard on shots used. Drives the daily session habit at very low content cost.
• Cannon skins and trails as pure cosmetic IAP. Zero pay-to-win, high margin, and they make the ad creative more varied.
• Multiple environment themes — beach festival, winter, desert, night carnival — unlocked by progression or purchased. Theme swap is cheap because the physics is identical.
• Star rating per level based on ammo remaining, creating a replay incentive on already-cleared levels.
• Seasonal events with limited-time level packs delivered remotely. This is where remote level delivery pays for itself.
• Share-the-shot clip capture on spectacular chain reactions. Organic acquisition through user-generated social content.
• Battle pass or collection meta to lift IAP conversion beyond the coin-pack ceiling. This is the specific mechanism behind hybrid-casual's 20 percent IAP growth.
• Difficulty-band selection so players who stall can drop to an easier band rather than churning outright.

Monetisation Strategy

The hybrid-casual model is what separates a $4.2 billion growth segment from a flat one. Ads alone cap your ARPU; IAP alone limits your install base. The winning structure runs both, with the ad layer funding volume and the IAP layer funding depth. For lifestyle and puzzle hybrid-casual titles, ad revenue share sits around 41 percent — higher than action or strategy hybrid-casual at 18 percent — so a physics puzzle game should lean ad-heavy while still building a real IAP economy.

Development Timeline

Engagement Models

Why Capermint for Your Physics Game

ASO and Store Listing Strategy

A physics knockdown game lives or dies on its store listing before a single player touches the physics. Smash Fest reached #5 in top free Puzzle partly on execution and partly on listing discipline: it is categorised as Puzzle, not Arcade or Action. That single choice matters enormously — Puzzle is the largest download category in mobile gaming and ranks second by total time spent, so a Puzzle placement puts the game in front of a far larger and stickier audience than Arcade would.

User Acquisition and Creative Strategy

This is the genre's structural advantage and the reason it keeps producing breakout titles. A physics destruction game is one of the very few categories where the ad creative and the actual gameplay are naturally identical. There is nothing to fabricate — you record real gameplay, and it already looks like a satisfying ad. Compare that with puzzle games that advertise a pull-the-pin mini-game they do not contain, or RPGs that advertise gameplay that appears at level 40. The 2026 breakout pattern identified across market analysis is consistent: immediate comprehension, satisfying core mechanics, and creative ads that accurately represent the experience. This genre satisfies all three by default.

The Creative Formats That Work

• The single perfect shot (6 to 10 seconds). One cannonball, one structural weak point, total collapse. No UI, no text overlay for the first four seconds. This is the highest-performing format in the category because it delivers the full value proposition before a viewer can hit skip.
• The failure-then-success pair (15 seconds). Show a naive shot that barely disturbs the structure, then the correct support-removal shot that collapses everything. This communicates that the game has depth, which is what separates an install from a retained player.
• The escalating structure montage (15 to 20 seconds). Rapid cuts across all four archetypes — twin towers, mass wall, load-bearing castle, can pyramid. Communicates content volume and variety in a single view.
• The playable ad. Physics knockdown is well suited to playable ad formats: one shot, one structure, instant payoff. Playables typically deliver higher install intent than video in this genre because the mechanic is fully understood in a single interaction. Critically — make the playable difficulty match early real levels. Smash Fest's own reviews include a player stating the ad levels were far easier than the real game and deleting because of it. That is a self-inflicted retention wound.
• Slow-motion payoff cuts. Drop the timescale on the collapse moment in the creative itself. The slow-motion destruction frame is the single most shareable and most clickable asset in the category.

KPI Benchmarks: What Good Looks Like

Before committing paid user acquisition budget, a physics puzzle prototype should clear these gates. These are directional benchmarks for hybrid-casual puzzle in 2026 — a prototype sitting weak on three or more is a learning asset, not a scaling candidate.

Related Capermint Services

Reference App: Install and Benchmark Before You Build

Smash Fest Clone vs Original Build: What Buyers Actually Ask For

Most enquiries in this category arrive using one of four phrasings, and each implies a different scope. Here is what each actually maps to commercially:

Key Terms in Physics Game Development

Rigidbody

The Unity component that makes an object obey physics. Every block in a knockdown structure is a rigidbody, and the count of simultaneously active rigidbodies is the primary driver of CPU cost.

Solver iterations

How many passes the physics engine makes to resolve contacts each step. Higher values produce stable stacks but cost more CPU. The correct approach is a low global default with per-body overrides on structural objects.

Settle detection

The logic that decides when a shot has finished resolving. Correct implementations poll total kinetic energy across active bodies rather than using a fixed timer, which prevents both premature and sluggish win evaluation.

Solvability runner

A headless batch tool that fires thousands of randomised shots at each level to confirm it can be cleared within its ammo budget. The single most important quality gate in this genre.

Hybrid-casual

A monetisation model combining hypercasual's snackable ad-friendly loop with casual's meta-progression and IAP depth. The only casual segment to grow IAP revenue in 2025, up 20 percent to $4.2 billion.

Hitstop

A 40 to 80 millisecond freeze on heavy impact. A non-physical polish technique that does more for perceived weight than any amount of particle work.

Deterministic physics

Physics that produces identical results across devices and frame rates. Required for replays, shot-of-the-day challenges and same-level leaderboards. Must be architected up front, not retrofitted.

Live Ops

Operating a shipped game as a live service: seasonal themes, events, remote level packs and A/B tested economy tuning, all delivered without an app store update.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does it cost to develop a game like Smash Fest?

In India in 2026: a basic MVP with the core physics loop, three material types, and 60 to 100 hand-authored levels costs $12,000 to $26,000 per platform. A mid-tier build equivalent to Smash Fest — full material library, level authoring tooling with solvability verification, 200+ levels, lives and coin economy, remote level delivery — costs $37,000 to $79,000 per platform, or $58,000 to $122,000 for both iOS and Android. A full Live Ops platform with seasonal themes, daily challenges, tournaments and a battle pass costs $75,000 to $150,000 per platform. The same mid-tier build at a US or Western European studio runs $110,000 to $240,000. Request a custom scoping call.

What game engine should I use for a physics knockdown game?

Unity is the correct choice for essentially every mobile physics knockdown game in 2026. Its built-in PhysX rigidbody physics is mature and well documented, it deploys from a single codebase to iOS, Android and Windows (Smash Fest itself ships on all three), it has native Unity Ads, LevelPlay mediation and Unity IAP, and India has by far the largest available pool of experienced Unity C# engineers. Unreal is overkill for this genre — you pay for rendering fidelity you will not use on mobile while making the build heavier. Godot is viable for a very lean prototype but its mobile monetisation SDK ecosystem is considerably less mature. Unity DOTS Physics only becomes worth the complexity above roughly 200 simultaneous rigidbodies, which good level design should avoid regardless.

What is the hardest engineering problem in a physics destruction game?

Performance during the destruction moment. A stack of forty contacting rigidbodies collapsing in a chain reaction is one of the heaviest computational loads a mobile game can generate, and it occurs at the exact instant of peak player attention. Solving it requires seven coordinated disciplines: per-body solver iteration budgeting rather than a high global default, layer collision matrix pruning, replacing all mesh colliders with primitives, raising sleep thresholds plus a forced-sleep pass, hard contact-count budgets enforced in level design, aggressive fragment pooling with fragment-to-fragment collisions disabled, and fixed timestep tuning with continuous collision detection on the projectile only. Smash Fest's own reviews reference frame rate drops during heavy physics, which shows even a well-funded studio can miss this. Capermint profiles every physics build on real low-end Android hardware, not just flagships.

How do you make sure every level is actually solvable?

With an automated headless solvability batch runner. This is a build-time tool that loads each level, fires several thousand randomised shots at varying angle and power combinations within the assigned ammo budget, and reports the clear rate. Levels that no randomised strategy can clear are flagged and rejected before shipping. The same runner produces the average shots-to-clear metric, which feeds the difficulty scoring heuristic used to build a smooth curve across hundreds of levels. This matters commercially because unsolvable or unfairly tuned levels are the single most damaging review category in this genre — Smash Fest's own review section contains exactly this complaint, describing structures that should topple but do not and levels that force coin spend to progress. The runner typically costs two to three engineering weeks and prevents that entire class of failure.

How long does it take to build a Smash Fest-style game?

A basic MVP ships in 6 to 10 weeks. A mid-tier build with authoring tooling, full material library, 200+ levels and a complete meta economy takes 4 to 7 months. A Live Ops platform with seasonal content, daily challenges and a battle pass takes 6 to 11 months. The critical path is the physics prototype in Phase 02: if the destruction does not feel satisfying by roughly week four, no amount of content or art will rescue the product, and the correct decision is to keep iterating on feel rather than proceeding to content production. This is why Capermint front-loads a playable physics prototype before any art or level work begins — it is the cheapest possible point to discover that a hook does not land.

Why is hybrid-casual the right model for this genre?

Because it is the only casual segment that grew. Sensor Tower's 2026 data shows casual in-app revenue rose just 1.3 percent to roughly $81.75 billion while downloads fell 7.2 percent — but hybrid-casual IAP revenue grew 20 percent to $4.2 billion, with the top ten hybrid-casual titles posting 67 to 100 percent year-over-year IAP growth between Q1 and Q2 2025. Hybrid-casual also now beats hypercasual on Day 1 and Day 7 retention, while traditional casual retention has declined steadily since 2022. A physics knockdown game maps naturally onto the hybrid-casual structure: the snackable, ad-friendly core loop of hypercasual plus the meta-progression, coin economy and cosmetic spending depth of a real casual game. For lifestyle and puzzle hybrid-casual specifically, ad revenue share runs around 41 percent, so the model should lean ad-heavy while still building a genuine IAP layer.

Should I copy Smash Fest's lives system exactly?

Copy the structure, fix the flaw. The five-life system with time-based regeneration and difficulty-tiered coin rewards (20 coins for regular levels, 50 for very difficult, 100 for super difficult) is a proven, well-balanced economy worth replicating. What you should not replicate is the hard 30-minute wait with no rewarded-ad bypass. This appears repeatedly in Smash Fest's own reviews as a session-ending frustration — one reviewer describes it as self-defeating for an ad-funded game, since it actively pushes an engaged player to open a competitor instead. Always offer a rewarded-video life refill and a cheap coin refill. You monetise the impatience rather than punishing it, you keep the session alive, and you convert a churn event into an ad impression. This is the clearest single competitive opening in the category.

Do I need deterministic physics?

Only if specific features are on your roadmap — but the decision must be made before you write the physics architecture, not after. Unity's default physics is not deterministic across devices or frame rates, meaning the same shot can produce different outcomes on different phones. For a straightforward single-player knockdown game this is fine. It becomes a blocker for three features people commonly want later: replay systems, shot-of-the-day challenges where every player must face an identical scenario, and any leaderboard comparing performance on the same level. If those are planned, the options are a deterministic physics backend, server-side authoritative simulation, or designing the meta so exact reproducibility is never required. Retrofitting determinism later means rewriting the core, which is why Capermint raises it during Discovery on every physics engagement.

How many levels do I need at launch?

Minimum 100 for a soft launch, 200+ for a global launch, and a pipeline capable of adding 40 to 60 per week thereafter. The reason the pipeline matters more than the launch number is retention economics: engaged players in this genre clear levels quickly, and running out of content is a hard churn event. The good news is that once the material library and authoring tool exist, marginal level cost is designer time only — no engineering, no new art. This is why physics knockdown has the best content-scaling economics of any 3D casual genre and why studios frequently use one physics engine to power several re-skinned titles across a portfolio. Capermint architects the engine to be re-skinnable from the first sprint so a second or third title costs a fraction of the first.

Does Capermint provide post-launch support for physics games?

Yes. Physics games live or die on post-launch tuning. Capermint's Dedicated Team retainers cover: telemetry-driven difficulty rebalancing (identifying churn-causing difficulty spikes within days of launch), new level pack authoring, seasonal theme production and remote delivery, ad mediation waterfall optimisation for eCPM, IAP and battle pass A/B testing, device performance regression testing as new Android hardware ships, and new game mode development such as daily challenges and tournaments. The 30-day post-launch bug fix window is included in every Fixed-Price engagement. Most physics game clients continue on a Dedicated Team retainer for 6 to 12 months to run the seasonal content pipeline. Discuss your Live Ops roadmap in a free scoping call.

Is it legal to make a Smash Fest clone?

Yes, provided you build your own version rather than copying theirs. Game mechanics and rules are not protected by copyright — only specific assets, code, artwork, audio, names and trademarks are. You can legally build a cannon knockdown game with the same core rules, exactly as Smash Fest itself builds on a mechanic established by Angry Birds and Boom Blox before it. What you must not do is copy their art assets, decompile their build, reuse their name or produce confusingly similar store creatives. Every Capermint engagement delivers original art, original level content, an original title and code written from scratch or from our own reusable libraries, with 100 percent IP and source code transferred to you. Request a free scoping call.

What is the cheapest way to launch a physics cannon game?

A white-label or re-skin route: an existing, proven physics engine re-themed to your brand with your own art, levels and economy. This costs $12,000 to $28,000 and ships in 4 to 8 weeks because the hardest and most expensive component — the physics feel engineering and performance optimisation — is already solved and battle-tested. The trade-off is less differentiation. If you plan multiple titles, the smartest structure is to commission one fully custom engine at around $55,000 and then produce each additional re-skinned title for $9,000 to $18,000, because the engine cost amortises across the whole portfolio. Request a free scoping call.

Which company should I hire to build a game like Smash Fest?

Look for four things specifically: shipped Unity physics titles in the portfolio (not just general mobile apps), demonstrable low-end Android performance profiling practice, an in-house level authoring and solvability verification pipeline, and hybrid-casual economy design experience. Capermint Technologies, founded in 2014 in Ahmedabad India, has shipped 500+ games across 40+ countries with a 4.9-star Clutch rating and works at $20 to $50 per hour — roughly 60 to 70 percent below equivalent US and Western European studios. Every engagement includes a signed NDA before scoping, an itemised quotation within 48 hours, and full IP and source code transfer at handover. Request a free scoping call.

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