The Afternoon Tea of Afternoon Teas Game

Haagen-Dazs WebAR

Cake Stacking!

In 2023, luxury ice-cream connoisseurs Häagen-Dazs launched a new limited edition collection of ice creams inspired by the delicate delights of afternoon tea. Refreshingly fruity Orange and Pomegranate Tart and Blooming Blueberry Tart evoked the bright colours of spring and summer – and Häagen-Dazs wanted to celebrate the launch with an equally vibrant campaign via their agency, Shutterstock.

As part of the campaign, they were after a fun interactive experience to intrigue customers and boost brand engagement. So we teamed up with Shutterstock to create a short, addictive WebAR game that adds an extra scoopful of fun to the new ice-cream flavours.

Inspired by the elegant tradition of afternoon tea, we dreamt up a game concept that gets players stacking plates of cakes to get the highest score, with a look and feel that aligns with the colour palette of the overall campaign. Players accessed the game from a QR code on the packaging – launching a bright and colourful animated afternoon tea scene for users to explore by moving their device, before the game begins.

The aim was to create a short, fast-paced game that hooks players in, testing their timing, speed and skill. The experience would launch in countries all over the world, so it had to be easy to grasp, whatever language the player speaks. Gameplay saw plates appearing in the scene, hovering and weaving over the top of a plate on the table below. The player taps the screen to land the plate and build a tower of cakes, much like a traditional cake stand, before the next flies in – getting faster and faster as the game progresses. The more aligned the plates, the higher the score.

I built the AR project using Zappar's Zapworks Studio tool, leveraging JavaScript to code the mechanics of the game, including a 3 level of tolerations system for stacking the plates, Perfect, Good and Okay challenging the users to score more points if they can stack the cakes perfectly each time, with a add perfect score multiplier for the more cakes they stack perfectly in sequence giving variety to scores which the user can attain. The size of the plates would reduce each time the user did not stack the cakes perfectly, good would reduce the size by 1 and receiving okay would reduce the size by 2 and once they are down to the plate with 1 cake if they don't score perfect the game is over, meaning user would create a cake stack differing in visual look depending on their performance. At the end the user is provided the option to share their score on social media or download the image to their device.