TAP THE TAP: an advergame to promote a Brazilian brewhouse

This site is a platform to discuss gaming concept ideas, but it’s also a place where I can show a little bit of my game designing work. In this post, I want to present a game that I developed for Let’s Beer – a Brazilian brewhouse located in São Paulo.

TAP THE TAP is an advergame; in other words: a game to promote a brand, a product or a service. A ludic project with advertising purposes. TAP THE TAP is a hyper-casual game with simple mechanics where you must tap the beer taps to match the same order from the clients at the bar. As the game advances, you must be faster to deliver the beers or you can lose a life. Let’s Beer brewhouse used the game to give its customers discounts based on points, engaging them to a branding experience and promoting a new bitter ale produced by the company. Click here to play the game.

TAP THE TAP is a very fast experience created with HTML 5 programming. The game does not require any plugins and players can open it directly on the browser (desktop or mobile). The game is an attempt to promote de brewhouse and to establish a new dialogue with customers that can share the game with friends in a viral way.



One more produced. One more to use as an example in classes and for the portfolio.

#GoGamers

Crossy Road: using a game to promote other games

Crossy Road (2014) is a casual mobile game created by Hipster Whale Studio. It’s a tribute to the classic game Frogger (Atari, 1981), this time constructed in an isometric perspective, full of new possibilities. Check the comparison below:





You start the game with a chicken trying to cross the cars, rivers and other dangerous obstacles but, by earning some special points it’s possible to acquire new characters like the duck, the goat, the zombie, the mage, the monster of Frankenstein and many others (even the internet meme DOGE gained its digital version in this game). There’s a clever business model inside the interface and players are able to buy (with real money) new characters or watch advertising videos to earn new points, at anytime.



There’s another smart point inside the game: sometimes the system gives out some special characters to play. These characters are from other games and an invite to download a new experience appears on the screen. In the example below, the player earned the main character from the game named Epoch; few seconds after receiving the prize, an ad with the message “EPOCH – download at App Store” appears to the player. There are many characters to achieve in Crossy Road, lots of them from other games.



This kind of communication structure refers to Davis’s ideas about promotional culture; this author (2013, p.191) says, “Promotional culture has become a more central, influential part of communication and social relations, just as financialization, globalization and new communication technologies have”. In the contemporary times, a good mediatic product never comes without a promotional strategy embedded inside its essence.

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Reference:

DAVIS, A. Promotional culture: the rise and spread of advertising, public relations, marketing and branding. Bristol, UK: Polity, 2013.

Geo-locating for mobile games

A few years ago, we had a boom of mobile games with geo-locating features. The idea of using this feature to put some “real world” component inside the gameplay is good but, sometimes, bureaucratic for some players. It’s cool to imagine a game that the player needs to reach real locations to achieve some prize, but, on the other hand, it’s a little bit limiting for lots of people.



Whether it be good or bad, we will discuss three interesting cases in this post.

The first one is “Jetset: a game for airports”. The game has a tapping gameplay and the player must prevent certain passengers from entering the flight with prohibited products. The game could be played anytime/anywhere but has a special function: if you play Jetset inside an airport you gain new stages, levels and powers.



The second one is “Zombies, run!”. This is funny but complex for most off players. In this game you need to run (for real) from imaginary zombies. The interface is created with audio features and puts the player to run through real locations to discover special items and, sure enough, avoid zombies. Check the video case below:



Today's third and last example is “Shadow cities”. This one is very curious because it takes the player’s location (with the maps function) and creates a medieval scenario to play fantasy battles.



Despite all the difficulties involved, I still see the geo-location feature as a good opportunity for strategies with mobile entertainment. Let’s think more about this subject.

About Super Hexagon

By Vince (@vincevader)

Super Hexagon is a minimal action game for iPhone and iPad created by game designer Terry Cavanagh, with soundtrack by Chipzel (a Northern Irish chip-musician).

It's a game in which you have to pay attention and enjoy the very creative gameplay. With very simple graphics, your goal is to escape from a weird maze with concentric walls while a repetitive music gives rythm to the movements.

Each game takes less than a minute to finish and the simple (and intuitive) interface makes you play more and more. Check the gameplay below:



Super hexagon is very successful among gamers and I think there are some reasons for this:

1) The game has the idea of "keep it simple".
2) The game has good content, intuitive mechanics and well defined interface.
3) Super Hexagon is elegant and can be considered a modern "Pong".
4) It is mobile, fast and can be played in any tedious moment.
5) It only costs one dollar.

Have you ever played Super Hexagon? Download it now and have a good experience. Enjoy!

Keep it simple

By Vince

This post is a kind of an advice for new game designers and game developing enthusiast.

Nowadays, we have a broad market for many categories of games and this is very good because we can target different kinds of players. Every game designer one day, possibly, dreamed about the chance of developing a complex console/PC game for a very specific type of player: the heavy user gamer.

But, don’t forget that a wide part of gaming consumption comes from casual gamers. The high numbers of casual/simple game downloads from platforms like App Store (Apple) and Play Store (Google) give us a clue of the enormous potential in this area.

More than 200 million people worldwide play casual games via Internet, and it’s impossible to forget the high numbers of casual gamers in mobile devices too.

The essence of the success in this area is the mantra: keep it simple. But “simple” (or casual) is not a synonymous of “poor”, and creating good simple/casual games is a great challenge for game designers. The “Angry Birds”, “Temple Run” and “Draw Something” are good proofs of this idea.



Keep the casual player on your mind all the time and don’t forget that a casual game requires good content, intuitive mechanics and well defined interface. It must be wonderful to create the new “Battlefield” complex FPS game, but it must be wonderful to create the new “Angry Birds” casual game too.

To finish this post I have a good hint for you: visit the site of the “Casual Games Association” (LINK HERE) to get more information about this growing entertainment market.

And I want to share this excellent presentation from Newzoo: the “Trend Report: Casual Social Games - February 2012”

View more presentations from Newzoo

Go (casual) gamers!