Simon van Wyk

This year we decided to open up our games division to agencies and brands looking to gamify their campaigns, and the first two brands up to bat were Shelflife and Chery, both needing easy-to-play mobile games with a leaderboard, but for different reasons.‍

The background‍

Shelflife were launching Pharell’s Jellyfish sneakers across South Africa, but had the idea of using a game to get around the sneaker’s scarce supply. For those who aren’t sneakerheads, a big problem with limited edition sneaker launches is that hundreds of people can pitch up to buy a sneaker of which there are only a handful available. It’s often the first in queue who get to buy the shoes, and if those early risers are sculptors, then the true fans miss out.Traditionally a raffle would solve this problem, but Shelflife wanted something a little more interesting and trendy.

That’s where we came in. We made a game that people could play outside the shop on their phones, that was easy enough that everyone could join in the fun, but that also required enough skill that we could use a leaderboard to determine who would ultimately win a chance to buy the shoe. Players would sign up with a unique code they got from a physical wristband they were given on the day (our way of ensuring that any winner was actually at the event, and not just a bot playing at home), and then they’d select the shoe colour & size they were playing for. Each shoe colour & size had its own leaderboard so players could see how they were doing, and whoever had the highest score on their board by the cutoff time would win.

The game was so successful for the Cape Town and JHB launch, Adidas decided to use it for their Dubai launch as well.

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Duck&Craig got in touch because Chery were looking at launching a competition to win their new hybrid car, but wanted something a little more interesting than signing up to a mailing list or sharing a tweet. They needed something fun which would engage their community and increase awareness of their new car.

We stepped up to the plate to create an old-school retro racer where each notch up the leaderboard would increase your chances of winning the car. To help educate players in the process, we added billboards that highlighted the car’s USPs, and then quizzed players at checkpoints about them in reward for extra lives.

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‍The power of leaderboards‍

Both these games proved the power of leaderboards for customer retention, but also data collection.

On the retention front, having the game offer a real life benefit (sneakers or a car) obviously did some heavy lifting at keeping players engaged, but the leaderboard helped incentivise continual play as you could get a clear idea of how you were ranking. If you weren’t leading, you weren’t winning, and having that information meant you were in more control of your entry by continuing to play.

On the data front, we know that people are reluctant to join mailing lists and share personal details, but most gamers are used to the idea of filling in some of their details so they can have official ranks in games. Entering your details so you can appear on the leaderboard is a softer entry point into a database, especially if there is a real prize at stake. In the back-end we used Google Firebase to keep people’s data safe and secure for peace of mind.‍

Keeping things simple‍

The tricky part of creating any game is the game design side of things. Having ideas is the easy part… having truly great ideas which prove to have enjoyable mechanics, that’s the hard part.

When it comes to creating a game for a specific campaign, clients don’t usually have the budget to experiment with iterating on prototypes until eventually arriving on a final execution.

Our easy way of circumventing this issue is by adapting an existing game with proven mechanics so that we don’t have to invent something new from scratch. We can alter some mechanics and add new elements, but if the core remains the same, this speeds up production time and means we can offer clients an affordable solution to their gamification needs.

Jelly Jump was inspired by the tried and tested Doodle Jump. We changed up controls and gave it a complete visual overhaul so that the look and feel were in line with the sneaker and associated brands.

Our Chery racer was inspired by Nintendo classics like Road Fighter and Turbo Racer. We kept the pixel-art feel and main mechanics of those two games, but added in our billboard quiz mechanic to drive home the USPs.‍

Live support‍

If you’ve ever run an event before you know that it’s always best to prepare for the worst and hope for the best. It doesn’t take much to throw an event off course, especially when there are many moving parts.

The logistics of the Jelly launch meant that there needed to be a specific moment when the game was accessible for users, and there needed to be a hard cut-off time for the leaderboard. Instead of pre-programming these events beforehand, we realised it would be best to toggle the game and leaderboard on and off manually on the day, so that if timings did need to shift for some reason, Shelflife wouldn’t be left without an easy way to adapt.

For each launch, a senior Studio Bo employee was on standby to make these changes, troubleshoot any issues players were having, and keep the events team updated with how well players were doing. We were also able to help the events team validate final data to make sure that the rewards went to the correct people.

Fortunately rigorous QA before the day meant there weren’t any issues and all events went super smoothly.‍

The benefits of WebGL‍

Building a mobile app for a campaign or event isn’t usually feasible for once-off occasions. The multitude of devices available makes testing specific app builds for specific devices a time-consuming endeavour. Also, consumers don’t particularly like the extra step of downloading an app - if you aren’t able to give them instant gratification, you might lose them before they make it to the app store.

WebGL’s enable you to build a game that can play in a browser. If your audience has a smart phone with a popular browser, then they can play straight away without needing to download anything.

WebGL’s can sit inside an iframe on most sites, so they’re easy to deploy to a brand’s existing site, or - as we did for both Shelflife & Chery - they’re easy to put onto a branded mini-site.


If you’re working on a campaign or launch that could do with some gamification, get in touch - we’d love to help.