Mammoth Game Design: A Creative Assignment to Break the Ice

Early April saw the launch of a series of mini-games created in the Mammoth studio. As the retained creative agency for Greenhat People, an international gaming and onboarding company, we spend a lot of time in game design mode. Building games provides an ideal platform to combine our skills as graphic designers, copywriters, and branding specialists, and the role has enabled us to work with some of the world’s biggest brands, including Porsche, STADA, Kraft Heinz, SentinelOne, and Matillion.

Game design is the part of our business that I’m asked about the most, but it also tends to be the most difficult to describe and share. So we decided to take you behind the scenes at the Mammoth studio for a glimpse at the creative process behind our recent mini-games series. Come on the journey with us, from brief to launch, and take an early look at some of the final products!

Brief

• Create a series of 10-minute online games designed to help teams kickstart their next meeting by breaking the ice, building relationships, and fostering collaboration.
• Strike the right balance between fun and corporate.
• Be as concise and direct as possible to adapt to such a shortened timeframe.
• Appeal to a wide international audience, and to the varied characters and skillsets found within most corporate teams.
• Sell to our target buyer – corporate team leaders, particularly remote and hybrid teams.

Research and Planning

All of our projects begin with a significant and pivotal research and planning phase. We usually begin by defining our research questions, in this case:

1. What already exists in this space? A. – surprisingly little.
2. Who are our main competitors? A. – confidential!
3. How can we stand out and engage our target buyer? A. – by achieving the following game design objectives:

Immediacy – make it instantly fun and humorous. We need to make an impression with 10 minutes, leaving our user feeling energized and positive.

Simplicity – For a 10-minute game, simpler is always better (several awesome ideas were sacrificed for this consideration, including an innovative QR code puzzle, after testing revealed some teams would struggle to locate a QR reader quickly enough to complete the challenge).

Design – create outstanding game visuals to build an engaging virtual world for the user.

Script writing – refine the script and the messaging to the point of a spear to foster energy and dynamism, and to pack in as much action into the 10 minutes as possible!

Collaboration – we need to encourage collaboration and communication among teams to achieve the main objective of an icebreaker. Additional context: these games will be played by corporate teams at the start of meetings or during networking, onboarding, and teambuilding sessions. Achieve collaboration by making the challenges as varied as possible, requiring teams to draw from different skillsets within their group. Include mini discussions and reflection points to provide moments for colleagues to connect in meaningful ways.

Brand Building as Game Designers

Crafting games for Greenhat People follows a similar process to our branding projects. We essentially create a mini brand for each game, designing a logo and considering colours, fonts, styles, and tone of voice.

For this mini-game project we began by planning the series as a whole, working out how the different concepts might fit together. In order to provide the buyer with choice, variety was the order of the day – a wide range of mini-games to suit different needs and tastes. We grouped our concepts by genre, and began selecting our favourite combinations. The winner was the following: mystery, trivia, adventure, and icebreaker party games.

Working within these genres, our game concepts began to take shape…

Explorers

We started with the most challenging brief – the adventure game. How could we create a sense of adventure for a corporate team playing online for just 10 minutes?

• Make them explorers, and lead them on a journey to an unknown island!
• What does every unknown island need for an adventure? A map! Take it away, Stewart…
• Let them choose their own path, full of surprising encounters, funny interactions, and varied puzzles and challenges.
• Use bold bright colours to convey energy and provide a vivid playing experience.
• Finally, gather teams around a campfire to share proverbs together, providing a slower-paced moment to connect and reflect.

Enigma

Having created a trivia-based game and an icebreaker party game to add to the series, our final concept began with Chris’s film noir inspired designs.

The idea was to challenge teams to become detectives, and to solve a mystery through a sequence of challenges. The script developed along these lines:

A criminal gang has stolen an invaluable artwork, and a top-secret security agency needs your team's help with the investigation.

Although this case is unsolved, the perpetrators have left a trail of clues behind. Your team will help investigate the evidence, piecing together the clues to help track down the criminals and locate the stolen artwork.

Having set the scene, the various stages of the game provided opportunities to challenge teams in different ways. We needed variety: numbers, word puzzles, memory games, observational skills, strategic thinking, general knowledge and trivia – something to spark every skillset. Such variety would demand skillset diversity, encouraging collaboration.

Using our scripts and visual designs, we built the games on Greenhat People’s proprietary software platform.

The result?

Take a look here!