Pick a Patch is a customer engagement digital game that we created for Fletcher Living.

Fletcher Living’s digital marketing strategy is focused on harnessing the power of digital, data and their brand to nurture long term valuable relationships with customers and prospects. The customer engagement digital game plays a key role for brand new customer acquisition within this.

The brief called for a web-based digital game to enrich Fletcher Living’s database with data points that help indicate the player’s life stage and circle of influence. As well as this, it also needed to showcase the new kiwi dream Fletcher Living provide, and drive foot traffic to specific locations.

We had to come up with a series of questions and survey logic that guides users through a personalised journey and provides a final recommendation matching their responses. We also needed to give it a fun name and visual identity to engage with new customers in a clever, creative and interactive way – not a sales pitch.

So we created Pick a Patch, an 8-bit style cartoon inspired by spacies arcade games from the 1980s. The game uses a series of fun, lifestyle based questions to work out which of Fletcher Living’s many developments matches the player’s ideal neighbourhood vision. The questions have been written and ordered to extract key information while also keeping users engaged right through to the game’s endpoint.

The catchy name is fun and memorable yet informative, playing off the ‘Pick-a-path’ book series from decades gone by. We leaned into the nostalgia vibe even more with the retro game look, cashing in on the 80s and 90s resurgence happening across pop culture.

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To make the game fun and engaging, we’ve created a series of detailed 2D pixel art sprites and add-ons designed to help players envision their ideal living environment, selecting things such as:

  • Family members and pets: Players can customise their family from a range of character options, including pets like cats, dogs, and fish.

  • Regions and settings: Players select their preferred region, such as Auckland or Canterbury, and choose between urban and rural settings.

  • Lifestyle preferences: Activities like shopping, dining out, or exploring the outdoors can be prioritised.

As players make their selections throughout, the game assembles and animates their choices in real-time, creating an interactive, animated scene that reflects their ideal home and lifestyle. The game then matches this with the best-suited Fletcher Living subdivision.

Visual and animation details

  • Pixel art mastery: A total of 74 sprites were meticulously crafted using pixel art, with each graphic composed of individual pixels to achieve a true retro aesthetic.

  • Animation techniques: To bring the game to life, we’ve illustrated 176 individual animation frames. These frames were organised into sprite sheets (gridded collections of images) used to compile flipbook-style animations.

  • Regionally inspired backgrounds: Multiple backdrop options were created, showcasing the diverse charm of the Auckland and Canterbury regions, ranging from bustling urban streets to serene rural landscapes featuring cows.

This visually rich and interactive design allows players to personalise their gaming experience, blending creative storytelling with a vibrant, animated depiction of their dream home and lifestyle.

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We recommended an integrated approach for the game as this allows us to provide homebuyers with a more cohesive end-to-end experience and to leverage existing content structures. It also provided other benefits such as improved longevity, better end-to-end tracking and the opportunity for a more advanced UX and UI design.

Pick A Patch is a web-based game, accessible on both desktop and mobile devices. The audience is predominantly mobile based so the game has been designed with this in mind to ensure it’s optimised for fast loading times and a smooth user experience across devices. As we are capturing first party data throughout the game process, protecting user data is paramount, so additional security measures have also been implemented to protect user data.

About Fletcher Living

Fletcher Living’s architecturally designed homes are built to suit today’s modern lifestyles. More than this though, they actually create whole neighbourhoods in carefully selected locations, close to key amenities and services and in doing so develop a strong sense of community.

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