Kidnapping

Promotional web-based minigames for a family movie premiere

Brief

  • Games made in Unity for an advertising campaign for Regner Grasten film, collectively viewed over 80.000 times.

  • Seven mini-games built in a short time frame, featuring in-movie characters, locations, and scenes all playable in the browser.

  • Responsible for ideation, concepts, testing, and 3D voxel art.

Challenge

My team and I at Artifact were asked to create several different web-based mini-games for an advertising campaign for the upcoming movie Kidnapping. Kidnapping is a family movie based on Bjarne Reuters’ book of the same name and produced by Regner Grasten Film. The movie premiered on July 13th, 2017 in cinemas all over Denmark. The games would feature in-movie characters and playable scenes from the movie. The campaign would feature the main cast of the movie playing our games imitating a Twitch.tv-like streaming scenario. We had to deliver seven games in a timeframe of only a few weeks for the ad campaign to feature and later make available to play.

Approach

We created simple games based on movie locations, scenes, and characters. All games were built in Unity to make them directly playable in the browser. On two games we collaborated with A. Film providing visuals for the in-movie original superhero character 'Iron Mask’. The gameplay was inspired by popular games such as Pac-Man and Flappy Bird. While some of the games were 2D, some of them were made in voxel-style 3D. This trans-medial partnership came to fruition through our partnership with FilmFyn. The games were fully voiced by the cast.

Solution

One game was inspired by a scene in the movie, with the crew driving a limousine car to a costume party. In the game you control this limousine, avoiding other cars and picking up costumes for the party along the way. Another game featured a paintball shoot-out in a hotel, in a race against time to find and shoot the evil butler. A third game was a hacking simulation experience and the fourth was about stealing lunch boxes. Two of the games featured in-movie original superhero ‘Iron Mask’ as 2D games. The first, is a frustratingly challenging game in the style of Flappy Bird, the other in the style of Pac-Man, but in reverse, confronting criminals as the hero. The video campaign ran as advertisements on YouTube and Facebook in the weeks up to the premiere and has gathered over 80.000 views.

Responsibility

I was mainly responsible for ideation, concepts, and 3D art. Due to the extreme limitations of the time frame, all 3D assets were built using a voxel engine - a way to 3D pixel art. I worked in tight collaboration with two software engineers in order to test and constantly optimize games for the limitations of running them in the browser using OpenGL.