Arimac success story of “Dialog Mega Run” The most successful mobile games in Sri Lanka with over 2 million downloads,The simple idea that turned a prize promotion to the most engaging game!

Turning a prize promotion to a game that allows users of all ages to play with ease by using Dialog services and keep the users engaged in the success story of Arimac. Collaboratively, Dialog and Arimac decided to use gameplay that users are familiar with; the game features a runner (with an endless path), which includes Dialog digital gifts as rewards and for obstacles, Dialog services can be used to revive and continue playing for a higher score!

The architecture

To obtain access to users to distribute digital services, Team Arimac developed an extremely lightweight backend service. This backend service connects the Dialog services and validates the users, keeps track of user gameplays, saves high scores and leaderboards, offers daily challenges, manages a prize pool to distribute prizes intelligently, and also obtains “MEGA WASANA” numbers to use within the game.
Arimac Studio built all the assets used in the game in house from scratch.

The game caters to local environments and therefore we chose popular places around Sri Lanka to depict the surroundings, such as Colombo, Sigiriya, Polonnaruwa, Kandy, and Jaffna.

This showcases that the player is running throughout the country collecting coins and gifts. Skyboxes have used to display the environment and the 3D environment assets include local elements such as tuk-tuks, tractors, elephants and villages, etc.

Locally influenced 3D characters!

Arimac designed locally influenced 3D characters such as Mega Boy, Mega Girl and incorporated Sri Lankan celebrities through Dialog’s guidelines such as Dinesh Chandimal and Dinakshi Priyasad as they are brand ambassadors of “Dialog Mega Wasana”. The UI design comprised of colorful elements including the character selection screen, store, profile, leaderboard as well as the “Dialog Mega Wasana” promotion board.

Augmented Reality in gameplay! With the idea of adding an engaging immersive element, we included Augmented Reality gameplay to the game. If a player wants to play with the AR mode in the game, they need to purchase a Dialog data Top-up card and scan it through the camera within the game.

One of the most engaging features of the game is the automatic prize distribution. The prizes mainly include digital rewards such as free data packages. The backend service holds a pool of data every day and is randomly distributed amongst the players. The game front end includes a “Mega Wheel” to rotate and randomly distribute digital and in-game rewards within the gameplay.
The random distribution of the prizes is based on several factors. Smaller prizes are distributed more frequently than larger prizes. Furthermore, the backend service intelligently picks the users based on their playing patterns. If a user was detected playing for the first time, they have higher prize redemption chances. Recurring users to the game are more likely to get a digital reward. People who compete for high scores are given higher chances as well.

Results

The game currently has over 2 million users across the country. The high user engagement is achieved via a high-performance client application as well as an exceedingly lightweight but high-performance server in the backend. The game runs in the lowest android smartphone with around 30+ FPS. This was achieved using the industry-standard performance enhancement methods such as object pooling, texture packing, mesh backing, and unlit light effects.
The server manages around 300 TPS in peak hours catering for all 2 million users and has over 300 million records running without a single service breakdown for over two years.

Overall, this was deemed an exceedingly successful campaign that increased user engagement via an interactive medium thereby increasing Dialogs revenue stream.

This content has been produced within the framework of the EU-Sri Lanka Trade Related Assurance Project, funded by the European Union and implemented by ITC and UNIDO in partnership with the Government of Sri Lanka.