Build gameplay all the way out to custom physical controllers.

Challenge

Teach electric mobility to a crowd that came for a race.

Enel X wanted branding, audience engagement and data capture at Formula E and MotoE events — and it wanted to explain electric mobility while doing it. A leaflet does not survive that environment.

Solution

Four minigames, two versions, custom joypads.

A tailor-made multiplayer game in the spirit of a party game, built around four minigames. Car and bike versions were produced and customised for each individual race.

GiacApp designed and developed the game, and then kept going: the branded Enel X wireless joypads and the gaming stations themselves were built for this activation. That is the part most software suppliers stop before.

The game runs on Unity. The joypads are Arduino based, with their firmware written in C and a C# layer bridging them into the game, so the controller behaves like a first-class input rather than an emulated keyboard. A separate Angular application let the hostesses register participants on site. The installation travelled to many race stops, in Italy, elsewhere in Europe and in the United States.

Why it matters

Software that ends at the screen is only half the system.

When the controller in someone’s hands is also yours, latency, pairing, battery life and physical durability become software problems too. That is the integration work agencies find hardest to buy.