Nissin Platformer

Nissin wanted to reach gamers. A group that's notoriously good at ignoring ads. The idea we landed on was to stop fighting for attention next to a game and make the ad a game instead. I'm not going to pretend this is the same quality or experience as something like Elden Ring, but it might be just about novel enough that it would capture the attention of someone.

The game is a small 2D platformer that runs inside a normal display ad. It's built purely with js, html, and css directly within the DOM not a canvas. That's not really how you're meant to build a game, but it kept the weight down and let it run in the locked-down ad environments that won't load much else. I wrote the game engine myself and it includes the physics, gameplay loop and score/win/lose states. You play as a Nissin cup noodle, working through a level to find a missing ingredient.

Underneath it is a level editor and tile-set I put together so I wasn't hand-building anything. The editor is a simple string, where each character represents a tile from the tile-set, with all its associated values. Laying out a level or tweaking it took seconds. We only shipped a single level for the campaign, but it was built to take as many as we wanted.

This one was mostly all me: the game design, the code, the level, and the campaign creative around it. Nissin gave me the brand assets and I did the rest.

It ran across Belgium and the Netherlands through 2024 and pulled in around 5.3 million impressions. Unfortunately we didn't do a brand study for this one, so I don't have great numbers for how it affected brand awareness. But the numbers from our side tell me that we had an interaction rate of 0.15%. Which is quite a bit above benchmark, even with the smaller formats which tend to perform worse for anything interactive.