Bullrun

A fantasy football inspired card game designed to emulate crypto trading with real-world market data in an accessible and low-risk way.

Overview

During a period when the crypto zeitgeist was focused on on-chain gaming, we designed and built a fantasy football style crypto game to draw viral social media attention to the Infinex platform, as well as to encourage returning daily activity during an otherwise quiet period in the crypto market.

Process

The lowest fidelity prototypes

In the initial ideating stages of Bullrun, we had an idea for how the mechanics could work, but needed to test whether they actually translated into a fun game. We testing the mechanics by building out the most basic form of the game in a spreadsheet and playing it internally within the team. This validated very early on that the core of the game was appealing, giving us confidence going into the more complete design and build process.

An evolution of the Infinex Brand

The new bullrun sub-brand needed to feel both a part of the Infinex identity, but also more like a game than the functional screens and brand materials that composed the existing app. As part of this branding effort I took inspiration from sports games and trading cards, bringing together Infinex's modern, techy identity with the trading card theme of the game itself.

Designing for web constraints

It was essential that the design, dev, and release cycle for the first version of Bullrun was fast (only a month and a half!) to capture the fleeting attention cycle that was focused on crypto gaming. To enable this we built the game on traditional web technology, leveraging infinex's existing tech stack, rather than in a game engine, which gave us less flexibility in both the functionality and visual effects. Despite this, we managed to create a game-like feel through a carefully considered information architecture, brand, and animation.

Outcome

The release of bullrun was a success, bringing the Infinex app to the forefront of user's minds during a quiet period in the crypto market. At it's peak, the game reached 15,000 daily active players, representing the largest spike in the Infinex's user and activity growth that had been seen thus far in the project's lifetime. The game continued to be updated for several months after it's release with new additions to the mechanics, keeping it a fresh play experience.