I built the fake game from the ads: the story of Evo Squad

Everyone has seen that ad. A huge squad runs across a bridge, grows as it passes through plus and multiply gates, and melts the enemy horde coming the other way. The ad ends, the game gets downloaded, and something completely different opens.

I've been seeing these ads for years. I've made ad videos for games at studios, so I also know why they look like this: they grab attention. But one question stayed with me. If the game in the ad is that appealing, why doesn't the real thing exist?

In February 2026 I decided to give my own answer and started the series "Turning a fake mobile game ad into a real game".

Five episodes, five steps

The series came out as five episodes on Instagram and YouTube between February and April 2026. Each episode added a new piece to the game.

1. Episode 1: The bridge, the camera angle and swerve controls that follow the finger smoothly. A formation that widens on its own as the squad grows. Since hundreds of characters would be on screen, I picked an optimized character pack instead of heavy models.
2. Episode 2: Shooting, enemies with normal, elite and boss versions, plus, minus and multiply gates, and exploding barrels. Comments said the map was too narrow, so I started by widening it.
3. Episodes 3, 4 and 5: New weapons, a new main character and a new monster made with Meshy AI, plus a level system.

From series to game

When the series ended, I had a game that imitated the scene from the ad. But that was exactly the problem with those ads: there's a one-minute scene and no game behind it. Why would someone who played a few levels come back the next day?

I planned the game again around that question. What I took from the ads stayed: choosing gates, the squad growing and shrinking instantly, a crowd that fills the screen. On top of that I built something meant to be played for a long time.

• Campaign: A boss with its own attack patterns at the end of every fifth level.
• Squad and evolution: Cards from chests level up soldier types, which evolve at the top level. That's where the name comes from: Evo Squad.
• Arena: At the end of a short run, a clash with a rival army's defense: towers, a commander and a flag.
• Daily content: Quests, rewards, a season pass, leaderboards and an endless mode.

I set games like Clash Royale, Clash of Clans and Royal Match as my quality bar. Reaching them isn't easy, but setting the bar high makes me ask "is this good enough?" on every screen.

A crowd has a cost

In the ads, hundreds of soldiers run at once. That's easy in a video; on a real phone every soldier is a separate model, a separate animation and separate bullets. It's been the thing I've worked on most since the first episode.

Today's solution: at most 40 soldiers are shown on the road. The rest merge in groups of ten into a golden elite soldier. When a merge happens, the soldiers fly towards the elite, it swells for a moment and settles, and "MERGE x10" appears on screen. The performance problem got solved and the game got a new satisfying moment.

Where it stands today

The gameplay is complete. The game has a 20-level campaign, five weapon tiers, six soldier types, an arena, a shop and daily content, and it's in 7 languages. The art is being refreshed now, and the release preparation comes next.

I wrote about how I picked the new icon, logo and art style in a separate post.

The most important thing this series left me with: building the one-minute scene from the ad is the easy part. The real work is turning that scene into a game people open again the next day.

I keep sharing the development on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. The details and the episode videos are on the Evo Squad page.