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Web App
Game Development
Platform Integration

Hewlett Packard

Amazing Race

Solution

Build engaging educational games into the virtual conference experience—intermittent reprieves for the participants.

Insight

To combat the attention-sapping fatigue of endless virtual meetings, attendees have to participate and interact—and moreover, they need breaks.

Challenge

Help Infinity Marketing Team create a more engaging virtual sales and training conference for HP.

My Role

The task of spicing up an online training conference with minigames fell squarely into a passion area for me: game design. I was heavily involved in researching and conceptualizing all manner of mobile and casual game mechanics and visual styles to find the right balance of addictive gameplay, shallow learning curve, and an ability to incorporate the core messaging of the event. In the end some of the games were admittedly a compromise, but a couple of them were truly enjoyable and deceptively complex. After the handful of concepts were chosen and refined, as the most experienced Unity developer in the office I was responsible for the building of several of the them, many of which became the focus of several headed competitions inside the office, especially during the QA phase.

Reception

The Amazing Race experience integrated seamlessly into IMT’s platform and added a new dimension to an otherwise straightforward virtual conference. With highly entertaining gameplay, animated content, and playful audio, the gamified training sessions allowed users to channel their inner-child and have some fun while getting the job done.

Development

The first challenge was to determine what types of games would work best with the theme. Luckily the our team was composed of lifelong gamers so after much exploration, emulating the style of popular mobile games proved to be particularly intriguing. The combination of a low learning curve along with the ability to weave conference content into the gameplay made these casual games the perfect fit. We developed 4 different games which were skinned with custom content and able to provide up to 15 unique versions during the course of the conference. The experience also aggregated cumulative scores for leaderboards to add extra incentive for players.

Background

Nothing says Zoom fatigue like sitting through a three day virtual training seminar. Infinity Marketing Team had built a robust communications platform that would support over a thousand participants, delivering live keynotes, videos, and downloadable content, but they needed to give users an incentive to stick with it. So they came up with a concept that turned the conference into a virtual race around the world and enlisted us to bring it to life.

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