This is one of our indie studio's small-scale contracts for a big name brand.

Our initial brief asked us to to drag a bunch of objects into something. It would be an instant game, online and playable.

Players scored by bagging as many gifts as possible before time ran out. They would then be able to submit their score and PAK'nSAVE was to announce top-scorers each week with prize vouchers. Here's our initial prototype while the brief was still being discussed:

For a 3 week project, we had to assume the client wanted fast results with an efficient feedback and response loop. We assumed we weren't going to have fancy animations or effects. Especially as the 3 of us all have different full-time day jobs.

I was able to send the above feature-pitch to our client. They got back to us the next morning saying that they've decided it will be food, and it will be stacked on to shelves in a fridge. At this point they sent us a more complete brief.

There were a few new challenges to this, despite it being an incredibly simple project, it had to run on the web. As we work with Unity, that's no problem... BUT... it has to work on the web... "on mobile". At the time, mobile WebGL performance was terrible, at the time of writing, it still is. They even say so themselves.

We couldn't use our usual weapon of choice. We went with Construct 2 which really felt like it was for kids. It got this project done though! And performed really well online on a mobile device.

My honest evaluation? Construct2 is not bad... I mean I hated working with it and found it extremely limiting and having to learn it made me take 3 weeks to do what I would have done in a day in Unity... but ultimately, it did what we needed and the web performance on mobile was PRIMO! So it really saved our hides.

All that, being said, I actually reached the following within a day of learning C2.

So we had gameplay, and we had mobile web performance, It was now a matter of implementing art assets and storing user results online for the voucher awards.

So before long we had a working database, and with the addition of art assets provided by our client and a little UX love, we ended up with the following.