How Blynk built a branded kiosk game for airports

Interactive projects are a core part of Blynk, a digital content agency with retail and event clients. 

With expertise in motion design and animation, interactive and immersive design, live video, and dynamic content, the team of nine delivers eye-catching brand experiences, digital merchandising, and display solutions seen by thousands of people across the UK. 

They sweat the details on every project, so their biggest challenge is ensuring their creative vision translates into the technical build and installation. To facilitate this, Creative Lead Andy Giff and Designer Dan Rowan-Smith are constantly on the lookout for new software that will streamline the process. Enter Rive. 

A campaign aimed at Gen Z

The brief to develop a game for travel retail company Avolta, the parent company of World Duty-Free, landed about the same time Andy and Dan started experimenting with Rive. 

As part of a twelve-week summer campaign aimed at Gen Z passengers on vacation, the game needed to be easy and fun enough to encourage dwell time and liquor sales. Blynk developed the concept alongside retail brand agency Big Bad Wolf (BBW), and with four liquor brands to promote, they had a loose idea for “Drinks Dragger,” a time-limited game to fill a suitcase with bottles. It was then left to Blynk to flesh out the look and feel and develop the gameplay interaction. 

Tapping into familiar airport imagery and experiences, Andy and Dan landed on a conveyor belt loaded with branded bottles. The object was to drag as many into a suitcase as possible in the time given. 

Fresh off a speculative project in which they used Rive to create UI, they were keen to see how the app would handle all the moving parts in Drinks Dragger. 

From conventional to transformational 

The initial plan was to develop the menus and UI in Rive and use Unity for the build, but a YouTube tutorial on making a drag-and-drop mechanic inspired them to keep pushing. From then on, Rive turned the conventional animation and interaction design workflow on its head, enabling the creative team to go far beyond motion design. “We just kept going,” says Andy. “From interactive animations to scorekeeping and timings, we built all the interactive game mechanics in Rive.”

A stress-free workflow 

Favorite features included Rive’s nested artboards, which took the stress out of managing logo and bottle changes.

 “We were surprised by how easy it was to animate and isolate elements in different artboards, even nesting layers within other artboards, to then cascade through the entire project. It meant we didn’t have to worry about how updates might change game mechanics, making it straightforward to export new files for the developers to replace in the package.” 

The level of control in the state machine was also a revelation. Dan had spent a lot of time with node-based systems previously and easily picked it up, but Andy was more focused on applying a motion design workflow. 

He recalls the moment it clicked for him about how much more he could do within Rive. “It hit me that the animations and assets I created in Rive were already in the game, cutting out the usual workflow of creating and exporting assets from other software, and dealing with the variables of transitioning from design into build. From that point on I just wanted to keep throwing things at it and keep building.”

Optimized for success

With a three-week turnaround from brief to delivery, the learning curve was steep, but Rive still sped up the process. Not only did it bridge the gap between their design vision and build constraints, notes Dan, another perk of using Rive was the small file size, which made it easier to get content on tablets and screens in airports with unreliable Internet service.

Drinks Dragger was launched in July 2024 in two UK airports, London Stansted and Manchester Airport, and was featured on Android tablets in specific entertainment booths in footfall hotspots. At the end of the twelve-week run, the game delivered 3,500 interactions, exceeding expectations and leading to conversations about a similar campaign next year. 

You can play the Drinks Dragger game to see how many bottles you can drag into a suitcase here.

Beyond motion design 

Off the back of that success, Rive is now a core application in Blynk’s toolbox, already facilitating other projects. More than streamlining their process, it has empowered the design team. With Rive they have confidence to go beyond UI, motion design and animation, taking on interaction, timings, scorekeeping and more. 

Says Andy, “As designers, Rive is a game changer, giving us the creative control to ensure the final product stays true to our vision, and, ultimately, the client’s expectations.”

Get started with Rive

Rive is the interactive design tool bridging the gap between designers and developers. Learn more about how it can benefit your company’s workflow at our pricing page.