For Halloween, I helped wonga.com reskin an old app they had originally developed with a third-party agency. The app used Adobe Flash as the main user interface, with a PHP / MySQL backend. The app is a game that allows users to find treats hidden in a halloween themed photo.
Hidden in the photo were thousands of “treats” in the form of Amazon.co.uk vouchers and promotional codes (for use at wonga.com). Users receive three tries per day to discover a treat, and one additional try by inviting a friend to the app. In total, the photo has 101,400 pixel, which the users could click on to uncover a trick or treat.
In order to get the app re-skinned, I first had to get the app up and running again using the original app files. The original app was broken at first, but with a few backend PHP changes, I was able to get the app running again. With the help of a designer, we were able to reskin the original app into something halloween themed.
I’m not a Flash developer, but I had to fix a few issues with the Flash code to get the app working too. This involved changing the API end-point URLs used by the Flash component, since we would be hosting the app on a different server, and fixing a few bugs that caused the app to crash in certain situations.
We were able to get the original app re-skinned and up and running within a few weeks. The completed app was launched on October 17th 2012, and at time of writing (October 31st 2012, 12:35pm GMT) the app has over 9,400 users playing the game, with over 71,000 of the 101,400 pixels already claimed.
