A Holiday Game for Wall Street

Tradeweb Markets, the New York-based international financial services company, is the world’s largest electronic fixed income and derivatives marketplace. They launched their first online marketplace for U.S. Treasuries in 1998 and since then have built a global web-based electronic network of thousands of the largest banks, asset managers, central banks, pension funds, and insurance companies that trade $300B every day.

For a few years now, Tradeweb has made video games a part of their annual Holiday tradition. We had the pleasure of partnering up with them this year to develop a new Holiday game.

Gameplay

Titled ‘Polar Run’, Tradeweb’s 2016 Holiday game is an endless runner type of game where the character you control (you can choose between a Polar Bear or a Penguin) dashes through the city street, and encounters dangerous obstacles along the way.

Avoid angry bulls and other obstacles

The obstacles include vehicles, ice puddles, cones, roadblocks, and even an angry-looking bull (an allusion to bullish markets). The ice puddles are particularly nasty, since they make the player lose control of where the character is going.

A player is given 3 lives at the start of the game. Hitting an obstacle (except ice puddles), takes 1 life, and the game is over when you use up all lives.

Collect Tradeweb branded gifts

The controls are fairly simple. If you’re playing on a computer, the left, right, up, and down arrows are, respectively, for moving left, moving right, jumping up, and sliding under.

On touchscreen devices, you flick the screen in the respective directions to control movement.

Along the way, players can collect gifts and Tradeweb icons. Gifts are the currency used for buying upgrades from the Shop.

The icons on the other hand, are used to activate the snowmobile, which renders you invincible for a period of time. You need to collect 10 icons for the snowmobile to appear.

Get 10 Tradeweb icons in a run to earn the invincible snowmobile

In the Shop, there are 3 objects that can be bought: Skis (add 1 extra life), Snowboard (slows down running speed), and Rocket (takes 2 less icons to earn the snowmobile).

After a run, the player has the option to enter their name, which will appear in the Scoreboard together with their score if they make it to the top 5. There is also an option to share the results via Facebook and Twitter.

Rebranding / Reskinning

The game was built using the core mechanics of one of our pre-existing games called Giant Hamster Run. By leveraging existing game mechanics, this lessened the turnaround time and development cost.

Game was rebranded to incorporate elements unique to the client’s company

Rebranding involved changing the graphics, sounds, and other aspects of the game, to incorporate elements that are unique to the company. In the case of Polar Run, these included the Tradeweb logo and colour scheme, in addition to the Holiday theme.

HTML5 Game Engine

Our team used the HTML5 game engine to build this game. Rebranding is done more easily using this technology, which allowed us to meet the time and budget requirements of our client.

Additionally, HTML5 games can be played on any device or computer that has a browser, removing the need for installing Flash or downloading the game from an App Store. This allows for a more hassle-free and seamless experience for players, and makes sharing of the game as easy as forwarding a URL via email, instant messaging or social media.

Summary

We have helped Tradeweb Markets, the billion dollar international trading marketplace, to develop their annual Holiday game. This is a testament to the increasing trend of employing the HTML5 engine in creating beautifully-designed, cross-platform compatible games for corporate use.

If you wish to develop your own branded game, we’re here to help. Please send us a message via our contact page.