26 games adapted for a mobile gaming app

The brief

Z League runs a mobile gaming app. Instead of building every game from scratch, it licenses ready-made HTML5 games from third-party vendors and needs each one reshaped to fit the app: the same rules for rewarded ads, lives, levels and results in every game, and a clean hand-off between the game and the app. We were the studio that did that work, game after game.

What we did to each game

Every game came with a short written brief, and most followed the same pattern:

Connect it to the app. Each game sends the app its score, when a level starts and ends, and the final result, and answers the app's messages: start, pause, resume, sound on or off, and the screen edges of the phone.
Add rewarded-ad moments. A button or prompt that offers something in return for watching an ad: a hint, a bomb, extra lives, an extra parking spot, an extra guess. The game asks the app for the ad and gives the reward only when the app confirms it was watched.
Make levels and results work for the app. Games with levels start on the player's current level and report progress, with a fixed number of levels instead of repeating forever. Win-or-lose games report a clear result.
Remove what does not belong. Home buttons, coins, diamonds, settings and menus that duplicate the app, tutorial pop-ups for features the client had removed.
Reshape the screen for phones. Layouts, buttons and text adjusted to sit correctly under the notch and above the bottom edge, and new button art for each reward.

Light edits and full rebuilds

Most games needed careful edits. Five needed much more: we replaced a large part of their objects, screens and logic, and in some cases re-themed the game (a deep-sea jumper became a scuba-diver game, a watermelon merge game became a fruit merge). Those were rebuilt in Construct 3 so that they behave like the rest of the library.

The games

The 26 delivered games fall into a few families: merge puzzles, level-based puzzle games (parking, painting, word search, pipes, cats, hexagons), word and card games, one-tap arcade games, and sports and physics games. Among them are Traffic Escape, Screw Spin, Bus Frenzy, Brush Master, Card War, Cut & Dunk and Mini Golf. Twenty-four are Construct 3 projects and two are HTML5 games written with CreateJS and Babylon.js.

How we worked

Quick turnaround. Most games came back within a day or two of receiving them, then went through rounds of testing and fixes in the client's own test environment and in the app.
Real device testing. We found and worked around differences between iPhone and Android, and a game that stopped loading after an ad.
Version control by hand. Each game kept numbered versions, so any build can be traced back or restored. Some games went through a dozen builds.

Want to see how it works?

We keep the working demo private, because the games belong to the client and their vendors. Tell us what you need and we will walk you through it.

Talk to us about adapting your games for an app →