Ærthlings social campaign
Indie Gaming Studio Modern Games is doing a Kickstarter for an expansion to their new game ÆRTHLINGS. To finish out the campaign the company is looking to do a social campaign revealing 10 new characters set to be released in the new “Ascension Series”
Parameters:
Keep it between under 20 seconds
Create a template that can be used for all 10 characters
Create short pithy character bios.
User original music
Do something special for the last character
Drive people to the Kickstarter
Challenge
my role
Art Director
Designer
Animator
Copy writer
Audio production
This campaign was originally briefed as a social carousel consisting of 3 frames, the first frame being a character reveal that was teased from the day before, the second frame was to be a mystery character in shadow and the last frame a CTA prompting viewers to come back tomorrow to see the reveal.
This approach did not make sense to me because in my experience social media users and algorithms are not so linear. You cannot expect a viewer to see your content from one day to the next, every view must be optimized for conversion in that single moment and in my view we should be driving people to the kickstarter.
So I suggested that we rethink the approach by opening with a mystery character in shadow followed up by the character reveal and finishing off with a CTA to to the Kickstarter to see the rest of the characters.
ideation
We wanted to A+B test the carousel against a video version, so I reformatted the background image from a 1:1 to a 9:16, animated the falling snow and rising sparks to reinforce the “Fire and Ice” theme and create visual interest, created the camera and scene transitions and composited the character animation after coordinating with the character animator to get some idle animations for each character that i’d be able to loop for the reveal.
After Day 1 it was clear that video was performing better so we went forward producing videos for the remaining 9 characters. For the audio I had the idea to take the native musical compositions used in-game and remix them into poppy little tunes adding drums, bass, and additional keys.
In addition to the animation and audio production I wrote the copy for the little character bio by reading the details of the special attacks each character had and the lore that was written by the head writer of story and then condensing the relevant information into pithy little poems.
production
The results were great and Modern Games exceeded their Kickstarter goal raising $122,983. This campaign filled the lull of the well known mid campaign blues where activity dies down and its imperative to maintain whatever momentum you can in order to get to the last 2 days where you push the last chance message and activity picks back up for the final sprint.
Results
