Smarter Communities, an Australian property management company, launched an online game to engage its residents stuck at home during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The game, Sky’s The Limit was structured as a competition where winners are given cash prizes every 2 weeks, for staying in the Top 10 Leaderboards.

Objectives

Our goals for this project are the following:

• Create an addictive game to engage users during the COVID-19 pandemic
• Use an existing game engine from MarketJS to reduce the cost of development
• Integrate a simple registration and leaderboard system in order to gamify the experience
• Give access to our client to pick a winner, and reset the leaderboards every 2 weeks

Lead Generation Games Solution

Sky’s the Limit was developed to support three aspects of the marketing campaign: its dedicated microsite, the branded game, and the real-time leaderboard system.

1. Microsite

In addition to the game, we also built the microsite to host Sky’s the Limit, and display the leaderboard.

Features:

• fully functional web page with links to the different brands of Smarter Communities
• brand logos and information appear on the web page
• background music is being played while viewers are accessing the web page

2. Branded Game

Sky’s the Limit was developed using our Game Reskin technique.

Original Game: Magnificent Tower

Gameplay: Reflex stacking game, players stack moving castle parts on top of each other to build a tower as high as possible

Additional Customization:

• modified visual parts of the game to feature brand logo and graphic styles
• added registration/signup forms at the start of the game (for first-time players)
• added login system for signed up players (for repeat gameplay)
• deployed as a section of the microsite, available for site viewers anytime

Here’s a demo video of the reskinned game.

3. Leaderboard

A leaderboard was added to rank the top scorers of the game.

Features:

• Real-time scoring updates
• All-time score ladder that ranks players since the release of the game
• Prize Draws Every Fortnight

Competition Details

During the promotion period, all players must remain registered and agree to receive online communications, such as newsletters and brochures, from the promoter. This condition allows the company to continually engage its audience for a significant amount of time.

Prizes:

1. One lucky winner: $200 gift voucher is given every fortnight (7 fortnights in total). To join this fortnight prize draw, a player must secure a top 10 spot within the given fortnight period.

2. One grand prize winner: $3000 gift voucher on the final fortnight period. All registered players are qualified to join the grand raffle draw.

Screenshots

A few screenshots of email campaigns used to engage users. Example techniques include:

Example 1: Grand prize results

Example 2: fortnight winner announcement

Creative emails were also used to get better engagement rates.

Email to announce the grand prize winners
Example subject line: 🎉Woohoo! We’ve given away $4,400 in prizes! 🏆🎁

Weekly emails to build up momentum and buzz leading up to the grand prize winner Example subject line: Tick-Tock… 🕚 9 days left till our Grand Prize Draw! 💰

Conclusion

There so many effective ways to engage your audience with games. This project is a concrete example of how to run a game campaign to keep users motivated during difficult times.