Game design
When does a game make sense for your brand?
How to connect a playable idea to your brand story, a launch or a customer’s next step.
A branded game gives someone a role in an experience: a challenge to complete, a place to explore or a score to improve. The useful question is what that participation helps communicate about your business.
Our perspective
Choose one audience, one enjoyable action and one business goal. Make the game worth playing before adding more features.
Give the game a reason to belong to your brand
Start with the thing you want a player to remember. An outdoor business could explore a trail-finding challenge. A food brand could use a quick ingredient-matching game. An event could invite visitors to discover places on an illustrated map. These are possible concepts, not campaigns we have delivered.
The connection should appear in the action, artwork and tone. Adding a logo to an unrelated game may be enough for a light promotional moment, but it gives you less room to tell a distinctive story. Ask whether someone could describe the connection after playing.
Choose the smallest format that carries the idea
A mini game can center on one familiar action, such as matching, timing or collecting. An original game gives more room for custom mechanics and visual storytelling. A game with a launch page adds context around the experience and a next step, such as learning about a product or joining an email list.
Google’s Champion Island Doodle is a public example of a themed world built around sports mini games and illustrated characters. It is inspiration for connecting play and storytelling, not an Arc Labs project or a benchmark for the scope a small business needs.
Explore the original game and its creative background. Google Doodles: Champion Island Games
Decide how people will reach it
Building the game does not create an audience by itself. Put distribution in the brief: an event QR code, a website link, an email to existing customers or a paid promotion managed by your team. Think about whether the player is standing in a queue, browsing on a phone or sitting at a computer.
A browser game can be shared by link without an app-store installation. It still needs suitable hosting, tested controls and a reasonable load time on the devices your audience uses. Keep instructions short and let someone begin without completing a form unless the experience truly requires one.
Define success beyond total plays
Choose measurements that match the purpose. Starts and completions can reveal whether people understand the game. Replays can help you assess its appeal. Clicks from the end screen to a product page or completed signups tell you about the next step. These measures answer different questions.
Longer play time alone does not establish brand recall or sales impact. To evaluate recall, you would need a suitable audience study; to assess sales contribution, you need an attribution approach and enough evidence. A first project can focus on a simpler, observable goal such as completing the experience and visiting the launch page.
- Name the audience and where they will find the game.
- Describe the main action and how a round ends.
- Choose the next step and the events you want to measure.
- Agree on hosting, source files and support after launch.
Put this into practice
Let’s talk about your business.
Have a brand story, promotion or event in mind? We can help turn it into a playable brief.
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