If you’re a fan of rugby, you’ve probably heard of the RBS 6 Nations Rugby Championship Tournament. It’s an annual rugby tournament involving six European sides: England, France, Ireland, Italy, Scotland and Wales.

In conjunction with his event, we developed a game for Tissot, a proud partner and sponsor. Tissot is a global luxury watch brand, and also happens to be a subsidiary of The Swatch Group, the global luxury and lifestyle company.

The game’s premise is simple. The user plays one of the 7 stars in the game:

• Brian Moore (England)
• Alan Quinland (Ireland)
• Andy Nicol (Scotland)
• Carlo Festuccia (Italy)
• Gareth Thomas (Wales)
• Kyran Bracken (England)
• Serge Betsen (France)

The objective is to score as many touchdowns as possible, without getting tackled. As the hero, you have to use your fast reflexes to swoop in between enemy players.

Video demo

The game in action

Avoid getting tackled by the big hunky guys

Example of the select player screen

A neat feature we added into the game, is a matrix-like ‘slow motion’ mode. Upon lifting the user’s mouse or finger, the game goes into slow-motion. Besides being really cool, this allows users to figure out their next move. It helps them navigate out of tricky situations.

Matrix mode

For social media exposure, we added Facebook and Twitter share functions.

Facebook share dialog

Twitter share dialog

Saving time via reskinning

To save development time, we utilized the core mechanic from our game, Touchdown Pro. This way, we didn’t have to rebuild the game from scratch. We worked with the client to rebrand the mechanic in a very deep way. That freed up more time to focus on the game replayability and really think through what makes the rugby game tick.

The customizations we did included rebranding the look & feel with Tissot and RBS assets, changing the shop mechanics, changing the players, the rugby pitch, the user interface, the matrix mode, as well as adding Facebook and Twitter functionality.

Why HTML5?

Being cross platform is a strong prerequisite for this project. The only technology robust enough to handle this project on a cost and deadline basis, is HTML5. One build was good enough, to function well across multiple platforms and devices.

On the other hand, sharing links for this game on social media, has been extremely easy. There are no app downloads, no redirection to the App Store or Google play. The users get instant gratification. All they have to do, is to tap on a link, load the game, and start running on the rugby pitch.

It’s a no brainer that HTML5 web based games are the future for agencies and brands.

Summary

We had an absolute blast developing this game. This project is very strong proof that responsive, cross platform games built with HTML5 are here to stay.

Click here to play the game on Tissot’s official website.

If you’re interested to hire us, please contact us.