Hypercade Docs

Using Sonar

4 min read

Using Sonar

Sonar is part of the Hypercade portal at app.hypercade.io (UI mounted at /sonar/). This guide walks you through login, creating a new analysis, and reading your report.

Logging in

Go to app.hypercade.io and enter your email. We send you a magic link — click it to sign in. If you don’t receive the link within a minute, check your spam folder or request a new one. Sonar, Radar, Launcher, and Scorecard all share the same login.

Dashboard

After login, you see a list of all intelligence reports you’ve requested. Each report shows:

  • Game title
  • Comp titles you provided
  • Report status (analyzing, ready, or error)
  • Date created

Click a report to view the full analysis.

Creating a new analysis

Click “New Analysis” and fill in:

  • Game title — the name of your game in development
  • Comp titles — 2–3 existing games closest to yours in tone, mechanics, or audience
  • Pitch deck (optional) — PDF or PPTX. If you provide one, Sonar’s digest_deck stage uses it to ground the analysis in your stated genre, audience, and design intent rather than just the concept line

Click “Analyze” and Sonar starts the pipeline. Stages run in parallel where possible; you’ll see a live progress trace in the dashboard. Most analyses complete in well under an hour for a typical comp set.

Reading your report

The report opens on the Executive Summary — a short read of the audience, key risks, and headline recommendations. Below that, the report is organised so backwards-looking (“who’s the audience”) and forward-looking (“what to do about it”) sections sit alongside each other.

Executive summary

The headline read. Start here, then drop into whichever section is most useful for what you’re doing.

Audience profile

Platform distribution, fandom-type breakdown, and Quantic Foundry motivation mapping. Tells you who the audience is, where they live, and what they want from games.

Comp analysis & genre baseline

Sales context from Gamalytic — comp performance, genre saturation, revenue distribution, regional patterns — plus comp-audience overlap. Math is computed deterministically; the LLM does the qualitative reasoning around it.

Weighted segment ranking

Communities and audience segments scored on relevance and reachability. This is your seeding playbook — start with the top entries.

Game design implications

What features, difficulty profile, and narrative positioning the audience signals call for. Advisory: Sonar surfaces the implications, your team makes the design call.

Diagnostic layer

The forward-looking pass:

  • Audience alignment — a three-band verdict (aligned / mixed / misaligned) with strengths and risks grounded in upstream evidence
  • Market trajectory — what’s growing, what’s declining, what’s changing
  • Gap analysis — the specific gaps between current design and competitive position
  • Prioritised recommendations — ranked, each tied back to a gap, risk, or trajectory signal

Risk flags

Anything you should know about — dormant accounts, sentiment drift, consolidation onto one platform. Flags don’t mean “don’t target these fans”; they mean “understand the risks before you invest.”

Comp recommendations

Sonar may suggest comps you didn’t consider, with overlap reasoning attached. Worth investigating before you finalise your set.

Questions about your report?

Email [email protected] with:

  • Your game title
  • Specific sections you’d like clarification on

We can walk you through the findings or discuss strategy around what you’re seeing.

Data refresh

Reports are a snapshot at the time of creation. Sonar updates daily, so communities and sentiment change over time. Request a new analysis any time you want the latest data. Most studios refresh their analysis 2-3 times during development.

Next steps

Use your Sonar report to:

  1. Prioritize your early access list - invite key creators and community leaders identified in the report
  2. Plan your seeding timeline - target top communities first, expand to secondary communities as you get closer to launch
  3. Validate your game’s audience positioning - does your design match what this audience wants?
  4. Inform your marketing creative - use the motivation and sentiment data to shape your trailers and messaging

Backlinks