This is our first blog post! This was long overdue and of course it should be about our first project: Red Bull Paper Wings.
Red Bull asked us to come up with a concept around their Paper Wings international contest, which takes place every three years and engages fans around the world through qualifiers often organized at universities. We had to keep one strict requirement in mind: the game must be built on HTML5 so that it can be played on any platform instantaneously and minimize friction (no app download or plugin like Flash or Unity).
DanLab being one the most talented developers I know, I asked him if he wanted to give it a try and within a week he had built a demo of a paper plane that you could flick to the side and it would start flying. If you got lucky, you would catch a boost that would speed up the plane. That was all this demo did at the time but that showed two things:
– An HTML5 game could be very fluid and feel like a native game
– With a few tricks, it could also graphically look like a native game
Bear in mind, that was Dan’s first time really trying to make an HTML5 game!
Walk the talk
We actually did things a little backwards by building a demo before a real pitch but that actually shows that we focus on taking action rather than talking about what we “could” do.
Once the pitch and budget were approved, we set out to build the full game.
Just like in the real life competition, there are 3 modes in the game, which was a soft requirement from Red Bull: distance, airtime and aerobatics. Distance and airtime were no brainers but required clear design choices when it came to which mode would use a boost.
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We decided to feature the boost in the distance mode and the way you collect boost fuel is by catching Red Bull cans.
Yes, the cans have wings. Red Bull gives you wings, right?
This sounds corny but we thought it was fun and Red Bull went for it. This does not mean that every branded game should use the product or brand it’s trying to promote so prominently but we thought it made sense in this case and I have yet to see a new player not smile the first time they see this. After all, that’s what we’re going for, right? Delight.
So anyway, the boost was set in the distance mode, giving it a Jetpack Joyride feel but keeping in mind we were using a paper plane. Dan got this idea of also setting up the cans and stars in a hilly pattern, giving it a Tiny Wings feel. The further you go, the more unpredictable the placement of the can (i.e. it won’t be sitting on the line of stars anymore so you’ll need to use the boost to adjust your trajectory).
Flappy times.
So then we had to make the airtime mode. It quickly became obvious that the airtime mode should be a one touch experience. 2014 was the year of Flappy Bird, so it was only natural that we gave this mode a “flappy feel”.
It’s really simple: tap the screen to make the plane go up, release your finger to make it go down. Hit a scaffolding or a box and the plane will fall to the ground.
There’s a twist: if you manage to make your plane fly into a chronometer-shaped boost, you’ll get an extra 30 seconds added to your score.
Aerobatics.
There’s an aerobatics mode in the real-life contest and it was a little more of a challenge to make it fit inside the game than the other two disciplines. In the end, we went for another simple one tap control system where the plane goes in circle and you keep the plane in the air by tapping the screen.
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Results.
So now we have a game playable anywhere, we’re happy with the visuals, people will just play it, right?
As usual, once you have launched, you’d better analyze and optimize. What have we learned so far?
1. People don’t read.
I did an internship at a sports startup 10 years ago and my boss, talking about our sign up process, told me: “People don’t read, they just don’t.” It’s still true today. In the distance mode, a message at the bottom of the screen says “Touch the screen to use the boost”. And it stays on until you actually touch the screen. However, 90% of the people I watch playing the game for the first time don’t touch the screen. So that’s one improvement that we had to make and analyze: make the text bigger and in the middle of the screen. Basically, put it in people’s face if you want them to read these 7 words.
2. Clear, incremental goals do work.
Around 60% of the people who started the game completed the first goal: fly for 5 meters. Sure, this could be improved to maybe 70 or 75% but there will always be a group of players who decide this game isn’t for them or they like another mode better. What’s more interesting is that out of this group of players who completed the first task, 89% went on to complete another task (fly 10 meters).
3. A branded game is cost efficient (ours, at least)
Since launch, the game generated over 450 thousand minutes of engagement. We can’t share details about the budget but the cost per engagement (CPE) is definitely lower than what you would find on many advertising platforms (http://www.emarketer.com/Article/How-Promoted-Tweets-Do-During-H1-2014/1011103). Now of course, Red Bull also invested in the competition itself by organizing qualifying events across the globe, which has is costly. But we’re talking about a whole minute of engagement here. Nothing guarantees that you will get that much attention out of a single engagement on Twitter of Facebook.
So the players played the game, for over 7 minutes per session on average but what really happened during those sessions?
We defined a “game start” event in the game that gets tracked in the analytics tool we use. This event has been registered over 500,000 times since January 1st. Since every Game Start results in at least one plane thrown, that’s more that 1/2 million digital planes thrown in the game!
This means that once people start playing the game, they enjoy it and keep playing, several times in fact, and that’s exactly what you want to happen in a branded game.
Conclusion.
We’ll call this project “mission complete” but we definitely want to break new grounds in true cross platform gaming. That’s why we’ve been working on a new WebGL racing game, called “Formula Fever”. We’ll keep you posted on our progress.
