Vodafone Sailing Game

Project Description

This project was a 2.5D promotional HTML5 game for mobile, driven by real-world wind conditions on Auckland's Hauraki Gulf. It was released in conjunction with Vodafone NZ and Samsung to promote the latest GALAXY Note smartphone.

I developed a custom HTML5 / JavaScript game engine for this project with the goal for it to run on most medium-high end smartphones released at the time. I lead a small team of 1 frontend developer, a contract 3D artist and an illustrator on this campaign, working in conjunction with our project manager and was the key technical contact in our interactions with a partner advertising agency and Vodafone NZ.

A big challenge we had during development was assessing the correct engine to use. Our initial tests revealed that WebGL at the time was not widely available or performant on iOS devices, so we went low-fi with a Mode-7 style HTML5 canvas renderer which divided the canvas into scanlines. We chose a very stylised art direction which enabled us to squeeze every drop of performance by using static colors for a large portion of the background layer, combined with parallaxing backgrounds and 2D sprites to create the illusion of travel through 3D space. I also developed a dynamic media campaign that ran targeted programmatic HTML5 banner ads on Google Display Network that reacted to the live wind conditions.

A critical component to the success of this game were robust anti-cheat measures I implemented on the server-side to detect tampering of the game client or falsification of scores. The submitted time and actions the players took was compared against a source of truth for validity and any false submissions were black-boxed so they didn't appear on the leaderboard.

The campaign was very successful, and due to intelligent server architectural choices, was able to serve up to 2000 concurrent users at peak times, with 44,107 virtual yacht races and a coveted leaderboard of the top 10 players, with the winner taking out the grand prize of challenging the infamous America's Cup champion Jimmy Spithill to race a final time trial using the full-size Team Vodafone trimaran yacht from a helicopter. Around 62% of players crossed the finish line after starting a game, showing strong engagement. I implemented a sharing mechanic which rewarded players with a slight boost to their yacht's speed and handling if they posted about the game to social media. By the end of the campaign social media had accounted for almost 10% of site visits, as well as other organic engagement on Vodafone NZ's social media channels.