Brit Chicks
Brit Chicks launched in October 09: within the first 2 weeks the players have completed 120,000 quests, picked up over 200,000 collectables, talked to NPC's over 250,000 times, and taken over 150,000 photos! Watch the TV commercial.
Quests 19 times more popular and £25,000 cheaper than Flash Mini Games
Brand Champs came to Dubit with a simple challenge; build a virtual world for their virtual girl band, The Brit Chicks, within 3 months, and live for the Christmas season.
What's the challenge?
The success of a virtual world depends on engaging an audience, but most virtual worlds follow the same formula: customizable avatars, chat rooms, and Flash mini-games.
The problem with this formula are the 1000's of other websites with 1,000,000's of existing Flash mini games! Worse still, mini games break the player's engagement with the brand by taking the gaming experience out of the world.
What's the solution?
The casual virtual world's big brother, MMORPGs, engage their players with quests and games that all take place in the world. It's rare they take their players out of the world and into a mini game.
Drawing on the lessons from MMORPG's, Dubit have developed a simple to write scripting language for creating quests, games, and other content in casual virtual worlds. We call this technology GAML - Game Application Markup Language.
GAML is designed for people who have never programmed before; a tool for creatives to build narratives and games into virtual worlds.
GAML has transformed Brit Chicks from one of the many websites with Flash mini games into one of the few places where girls can explore, chat, and go on virtual adventures with their friends.
How did we do it?
Brand Champs' team of talented creatives had a strong vision for their world and its narrative. But with only a 3 month build time, and their team already at capacity creating the artwork, rooms, and avatars they needed help writing the virtual adventures.
So we brought in James, an avid gamer, but not a programmer. In less than a week James, who had never wrote any programming code before, was able to create rooms, quest, collectables, and games using only GAML.
In only two months James:
- Setup up 20 parallax scrolling chat rooms,
- Created 40+ quests and adventures,
- Scripting conversations with 20 non-player characters, and
- Added over 400 items into the 4 virtual shops
What did the players think?
In the first three weeks Brit Chicks has attracted over 50,000 players who have completed over 160,000 quests! On average, all players have:
- Talked to 7 non player characters,
- Picked up 6 different artifacts,
- Taken 5 photo graphs,
- Completed 3 quests,
- But played only 1 mini game.
Questing content is 19 times more popular than Flash mini-games!
What about the bottom line?
When Brand Champs came to Dubit they planned to launch with 5 Flash mini-games. Each mini game can take anywhere from 7 to 30 days for a team of professional programmers and creatives. These 5 simple games we're planned to take 60 days at a cost of £42,000.
Whereas, a simple GAML quest took James less than 2 hours, the most complex taking no more than 2 days.
By launching with only 2 mini games and a massive 44 quests, Brand Champs saved over £25,000 and gave their players a better experience!
The savings continue every month. Brand Champs can keep their world fresh with hours of GAML adventures every month for less than the cost of a simple Flash mini game.