Spycase Swap is a game of chance and strategy combined that allows the player to make an educated guess about their statistical likelihood of picking an advantageous secret amount over another unknown initially awarded quantity. By opening cases and eliminating amounts, the user can determine their own chances of taking home the big prize. At it's core, Spycase Swap utilizes the same mathematics behind the Monte Hall problem.
We utilized it as the chance to make an ad-based game that doesn't require game updates and uses HTML, CSS and scripts to run.
Flows and Wireframes
After I created our initial flows and wireframes, our product manager and I created paper prototypes from them. Around this time, we had to shift to pandemic protocols and social distancing, so lacking access to wider populations, we ended up testing our paper prototypes on each other, roommates, and family members over Zoom and Google. This showed us where we had redundancies in our footprint, which information and labels were confusing, and which information needed to be given highest priority visually. Then I refined our wireframes one more time before handing them off to our coding developers.
Skinnable Components
While the base template utilized our Secret Spycases, we wanted to make it so that you could have tiers or holiday or game-theme skins. We launched with six different tiers, differentiated by colour, names, and reel symbology (7s, various fruit symbols). This enabled our Live Ops team to target different paying demographics, but also to upsell various iterations of Spycase Swap during Dynamic Currency campaigns. We could also offer the lowest tier as a "taste test".
The skinnable container object was able to accommodate three levels of results, to reflect the amounts you could win. We had also created PSD templates that would allow for even more differentiation among the cases, utilizing overlay patterns. Once the initial template was created, an artist could generate a new colour or pattern variant with all the components within half an hour.
Ad Comps Showing Full Sequence
Top Row (left to right): Primary point of Purchase, Information slide show panels (2 & 3), How To Play, Game Introduction
Bottom Row: Game in Progress (fewer than 8 cases open), Game with 8 Cases Open, Confirmation, Reward Sequence, Return Play Offer
Holiday Skins
After our first successful Spycase event, we entered the holiday season. I quickly skinned up a holiday theme around gifts. (Note: We try to keep the language as non-denominational or inclusive where possible.) I created tintable, patterned gifts and was able to create six color themes to match our original launch themes, plus four bonus tiers to be used as samplers. This was paired with a Dynamic Currency campaign to great effect.
Additional Art Credits
Purchase Plus Ad Comp Art: James Lingo
Product Manager: Keith Tallon