PROBLEM STATEMENT
Austin Eastciders is a hard cider beverage company in Austin, TX.
They wanted to produce something simple but fun that would be interactive on a mobile device to centerpiece a social media campaign and promote four new flavors of cider they were introducing.
APPROACH
Assessing The Context of the Project
Assessing The Market Audience & Brand Feel
Story Planning
Game Concepting
Screen Level Design Ideation
Wireframes & Prototyping
Marketing / Social Covers
To Code
Previous Work & Project Context
A REPEAT CLIENT
The context to this project is that the agency I was working at, Barrel NY, had designed their online store and website.
I had worked on the wireframes of their website, Austineastciders.com, so when it came time to design and produce a marketing campaign for their new cider they came back and re-engaged the agency.
Assessing The Market Audience
& Brand Feel
MEETING AUDIENCE WHERE THEY ARE
The marketing of Austin Eastciders is built around conveying a fun, social, summertime feeling.
We were very familiar with the brand after designing their website and online store, but when thinking about what kind of campaign we could run we began with re-examining the audience we would be targeting.
It was by kicking around ideas of what would appeal to the audience that we landed on the idea to produce a simple, interactive mobile game that could be easily promoted through a social media campaign.
Game Concepting
FLOW DIAGRAM & NARRATIVE MAPPING
With the general idea of the game in place that the user would need to interact with the ingredients to help ‘create’ the new ciders, the next stage was to figure out the mechanisms of how users would actually create the cider, and the challenges that would confront them.
We sketched different ideas and landed on an idea where the ingredients would float around the screen and the user would need to ‘tap’ on them to crush them into cider.
This fit multiple levels of what we were trying to accomplish – a coherant storyline, the depth of commitment by a user would not be too high, and the gameplay difficulty could be adjusted based on the speed of the ingredients floating around the screen that the user would need to tap.
Screen Level Design Ideation
SCREEN CONCEPTS
Now with the concept more defined, we began designing loose screen level concepts to fill in how the game might look.
We wire framed the screens between the levels, and worked out how to feature all the four new flavors in a sequence of levels that would increase in difficulty.
Prototyping
PROTOTYPING THE HAPPY-PATH
From the wireframes, we worked with the visual designer and the existing Austin Eastciders brand elements to develop a simple prototype of how the game would look, function, and behave.
The prototype was built quickly and only designed around a single happy-path.
The purpose of prototyping this was was to make sure we captured key elements of the game narrative, got the behaviors of the interactive elements right, and also were able to discuss and get good feedback from all project stakeholders.
Handoff &
Marketing / Social Covers
TEASING INTEREST IN THE GAME
After designing the game flow and screens, we handed the designs to an external developer, and consulted when needed as they built it out.
While the game was being developed, we also worked on a series of social posts for Austin Eastciders to get the word out, reach their audience, and promote the final product.
To Code
WORKING
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