mbe's Forum Posts

  • Hey Guys,

    Here's a simple little car chase game I created for LEGO to promote their City Police range in Australia and New Zealand:

    https://creative.mobileembrace.com/lego/citypolice/au?source=scirra

    It was designed for mobile, but should work on desktop if you make your browser window roughly landscape mobile aspect ratio. Unusually for a mobile "gamified" ad unit, the campaign was running exclusively on a certain enraged avian physics game, so it was built purely to be played in landscape. Research seems to suggest that people strongly dislike having to change the orientation of their phones for ads!

    The client was unable to source images of the featured cars from the top down angle used in the game, so I had to create all of the in game graphics in Photoshop, the obstacles were created in Cinema 4D.

    The target audience was fairly young so the game is pretty easy and doesn't have a lot of replay value, but the whole thing was created in about 4 days and the campaign performed well so the client was happy which was the main thing!

    I also used C2 to produce a couple of other creatives for LEGO as part of the wider campaign, one for Friends:

    https://creative.mobileembrace.com/lego/friendsmatch/au?source=scirra

    And one for Nexo Knights:

    https://creative.mobileembrace.com/lego/nexoknightscombos/?source=scirra

    They're a bit less game-y than the Police Chase one, but using C2 allowed me to quickly add a lot of pizzazz with things like particle effects and interesting tweens, all running at 60fps which would not be possible with the industry standard mobile rich media ad building tools ( Ashley & Tom creative agencies will love C3 with a slightly tweaked export option).

  • guimaraf The campaign is live now so I probably won't be making any changes to this game, I will use it as a starting point for any future similar games though.

    Ragevortex Thanks! R0J0hound should probably take a lot of the credit though!

    Artpunk I'm actually using suntemple plugin for Google Analytics now instead of my JavaScript hack: https://www.scirra.com/forum/plugin-google-analytics_t110497

    I try to track as much as it makes sense to, e.g. score at the end of the game, how many replays and any external links. I also fire a time stamp every few seconds during game play so I record something for people who leave the game before finishing. Unfortunately a lot of ad-blockers also block Google Analytics which is understandable from a privacy point of view, but annoying when you're trying to get user feed back to build better games!

  • Thanks guimaraf there's always a balancing act of not making it too hard vs making it boring, hopefully most people will be able to have some fun with it.

    That's one of the better scores, highest I've seen was in the 49,000's so you're not far off. I'll have to check the Google Analytics to see if anyone's beaten that (assuming they're not using an ad blocker!).

  • Thanks — !

  • Try Construct 3

    Develop games in your browser. Powerful, performant & highly capable.

    Try Now Construct 3 users don't see these ads

  • Hey Guys,

    I've just created a game for Advil to promote their Liquid Capsule pain killers here in Australia. The game was inspired by their TV commercial and makes extensive use of the Mode7 effect by R0J0hound (many thanks!). I was quite please with the 3D effect I got on the obstacles and bonuses by offsetting a few component pieces along the z-axis .

    The game was designed for mobile, but works on desktop too. I managed to do this with one build that redirects to an iFramed version of itself if you're not on a mobile device, I've yet to work out a more elegant solution to cover all users.

    You can play the game here, enjoy:

    https://creative.mobileembrace.com/advil/liquidcapsulesracing/?utm_source=scirra_forums

  • Apfelguts Thanks! Glad you got excited, that's why we built it - hope the motion sickness didn't ruin your pizza!

    jogosgratispro Thanks, I tried various effects and plugins to try and add some depth but none of them really worked for my use case, then I realised I could fake it!

    JPatchZ Thanks! I didn't get many assets from the studio, so I had to painstakingly build the character animation from poster artwork and screen captures of the trailer. Spent a lot of hours in Photoshop and After Effects just to make Raphael, didn't have time to build the other three!

  • Marius87 Thanks!

    — The sides of the buildings in the foreground are sprites I created in Photoshop with the origins on the edges, then every tick I change their width depending on their X position so the leading side gets narrower and the trailing edge gets wider.

    i.e.:

    SideWall_Front.X => Set Width 64 * (SideWall_Front.X / LayoutWidth)

SideWall_Back => Set Width 64 * (1 - (SideWall_Back.X / LayoutWidth))
[/code:ke40qc5e]

It's kind of a fake 3D effect, but it got the job done and stopped everything looking so flat!

  • I'm not sure if I'd call it "The Official Game", but it was paid for and signed off by the studio to promote the release of the film in New Zealand as part of a wider marketing campaign, so it's official in that sense.

  • I don't have any secrets to share on landing the job I'm afraid, I work for a company who has relationships with advertising agencies, I don't get involved with that side of the business!

  • I've just created an auto-runner game to promote the release of the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film in New Zealand. The game works best on mobile, but also works on desktop, make your browser window narrower if you can't see the buildings though.

    The game doesn't have a lot of depth and I'd have liked to have refined the game play more, but I only had a few days to build it and the client mainly wants people to watch the trailer and go and see the film anyway. Enjoy!

    https://creative.mobileembrace.com/paramount/tmnt2nz/?utm_source=scirra_forums

  • Thank you for your kind words facecrime !

    I actually work for a mobile ad company so I produce HTML5 content for a wide range of different projects. I've been using Construct 2 for about two and a half years to build games, off the top of my head, I probably build 6 to 8 a year. I dabbled with some other HTML5 game frameworks, but haven't found anything else I that can get a game live with as quickly as Construct.

    Advertisers love "gamified" ad units as you can often get people engaging with brands for 2 or 3 minutes with a good game, where as you'd be lucky to get them spending 15 seconds on a standard ad unit. It's not right for every type of campaign, but does work well for some products. HTML5 games are also probably better than apps for small advertising games I build as people can go straight into the game from a link rather than being sent to an app store and being asked to install something.

  • Hi Guys,

    I don't usually get to show off the games I build, but my clients wanted people to share the last two I built, so I can post them here, hope you like them!

    The first one is for Caltex (an Australia chain of petrol stores) who wanted to feature the V8 racing cars they sponsor.

    The game uses R0J0hound 's excellent Mode7 effect along with lunarray 's LiteTween behavior on the UI and suntemple 's Google Analytics plugin to track usage.

    The game only works on mobile devices (desktops redirect to a static page):

    https://creative.mobileembrace.com/caltex/vortexchallenge_share/

    The second one is for the new Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell film "Daddy's Home".

    This was my first attempt at creating enemy AI, albeit very simple! I would have liked to have spent more time balancing the game and to have had rounds like Street Fighter, but I generally get about a week to build everything and spent most of the time on the character animation.

    This one just uses suntemple 's Google Analytics plugin on top of whats included with Construct 2. It was designed for mobile, but it will redirect to a desktop version if you're on desktop:

    https://creative.mobileembrace.com/paramount/daddyshome_share

    Any feedback welcome, one top tip I'll share for people exporting to HTML5 is to run your exported PNGs through Kraken ( https://kraken.io/web-interface ), they'll end up about a third of the size as it can convert to 8-bit colour with an 8-bit alpha channel and will usually be virtually indistinguishable from the original 24-bit colour ones.

  • Only just found out about Q3D but very excited, bought the plugin straight away!

    Looking forward to seeing how it progresses (and the documentation - when it's ready!) but it looks like there's plenty to play around with in the mean time.

    Great work QuaziGNRLnose !

  • I'm excited to see the new file chooser plugin in r174 as it could be used for something I've wanted to do for a while, even though it doesn't appear to work on mobile at the moment (I may be wrong but you don't currently seem to be able to tap the file chooser button on Android or iPhone).

    What I would really like to be able to do is build a mobile game where the user can take a picture of themselves and have their face on the in game player, similar to JibJab's various dancing cards but in a game rather than a video:

    http://www.jibjab.com/ecards/dances

    The problem is that most phone cameras take pictures that are somewhere between 2 and 12 mega-pixels which would be far too big, especially when it would be being used at a tiny fraction of it's original size in game.

    From the research I previously did while contemplating an attempt to write a plugin to do this, I thought that the resizing may be possible by loading the image into a canvas of the desired size and then generating a data URI to load into a sprite. This may already be possible in C2, but I haven't been able to find a way, the User Media SnapshotURL looked promising but only appears to work on webcams.

    In an ideal world I would like the user to be able take a picture and then have them line up the picture with an oval shape overlay using pinch to zoom, rotate etc. and then put the image in a clipped circle before generating the URI so you end up with a head shaped sprite that could be pinned to the rest of the in game character's sprites in game.

    I pretty sure this is all possible in the mobile browser, a simlar thing was done on this promotion for Coke, although it ended by loading the image to a server ready to be shared rather than loading it into another canvas:

    http://cdn.mobileembrace.com/uploads/mobileembrace.com/coke/summer/

    That example also used a PNG overlay rather that a clipped image, but I know that it is possible to put an image in a circle in a canvas:

    http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4276048/html5-canvas-fill-circle-with-image

    Anyway if anyone has any insights into how this may be possible, I would be very interested to hear them, otherwise I guess this is more of a feature request for something to be added to a future version of C2!

  • I found putting the tracking code inside a module and renaming the Google Analytics function worked:

    https://www.scirra.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=103498