Connect Four gamification template: Four-step creation guide

Resources

This article is your practical, no-nonsense advice for building your own Connect Four gamification experiences using Drimify’s Connect Four template.

What is Connect Four and why is it a good mechanic for gamification?

Even if you haven’t touched a set in years, you’ve either played this game during a rainy lunchtime in primary school, played at a relative’s house, or been cajoled into a game in a cafe or a pub by an overly competitive friend.

It’s simple enough that anyone can learn the rules and give you a game, but sophisticated enough that it never gets old.

This makes it a great game mechanic for gamification – which is to say we can use a customised game of online Connect Four to further communications goals.

Their focus on the game can be redirected to branded messaging, whether that’s through additional content within the game, or from a call to action button (CTA) on the end screen to strategic web pages.

Think marketing, think branding, think loyalty, think employee experience games (EX). There’s almost no business objective that can’t be delivered upon more efficiently through more effective audience engagement, so the power of play can become a powerful weapon in the communications professional’s toolbox.

Benefits of using Drimify’s Connect Four maker

Drimify is an enterprise-grade gamification platform that comes with possibly the broadest variety of game mechanics in one place for you to customise to your brand and your project.

You can deploy your Drimify-built Connect Four game through its direct link URL, a QR code, embed it on web pages, integrate it within apps, or use it as a component of a larger, multi-step (or multi-level) gamification experience. This means it can easily be shared across social media or used as a major aspect of in-person and online events.

This is a no-code solution to building your branded Connect Four game, where you simply apply your copy and visual assets to the game template, and it just works – ready to deploy and deliver a host of useful key performance indicators (KPIs) so you can assess and improve your gamified campaigns easily over time.

Four steps to creating your Connect Four game

Equally, as easy and intuitive as the game template interface is on our Connect Four maker, we’ve broken the process down into four easy steps, so you can have your game up and running to a professional standard in a matter of hours.

This is purely the nuts and bolts of crossing the Ts and dotting the Is – this isn’t a guide to designing your game to maximise potential KPIs. This how to use the platform to build your first draft of the game.

Please note: This customised Connect Four game is being used as a “casual game” – you can’t increase the difficulty. Average players will beat the computer most of the time, and it will pose little difficulty to relative grand masters who are familiar with advanced Connect Four strategy – but remember that with gamification you’re typically trying to appeal to the most users possible.

Step one: Select the Connect Four app and optimise your branding

Within your Drimify account, click on the “new app” button and select Connect Four from the “games” section.

Then you’re going to want to go into the branding creation step and essentially set out the foundation of your online Connect Four experience.

Here you can add and define:

• Your theme: Which is either light or dark, and will determine a number of global features throughout the experience.
• Your logo: You can upload your brand’s logo, adjust its width, and add a URL to it so if people click on it, they arrive at your website (or the site you want to send them to).
• Your background: This can be a colour you define by hex code, an image, or even a video.

Additionally, you can enable the advanced graphic customisation. This lets you customise things like headline text, body text, the shape and the colour of the buttons throughout the experience, and the background opacity of your data collection form.

What you define here is global throughout your experience, so it really is the bedrock upon which you’ll build your online Connect Four game.

Step two: Define your game chips and your game grid

Under the game configuration creation step, you can control the elements of gameplay.

You can upload images for the player counter and computer counter, and define the grid colour and the user arrow colour. The user arrow colour is essentially a cursor that shows players where they’re dropping their playing chip.

Remember, Connect Four is what we’d call a casual game – it’s fun and addictive, and very visual, so the key is to reflect your brand and your campaign in the colours you choose.

If you don’t upload any images and don’t define a grid colour, they’ll default to yellow and red counters in a blue grid.

Step three: Sort out your start screen, end screen, and intermediate screens

This is really the gamification aspect of things, as without the additional screens, it’s just online Connect Four for the love of the game. And while we do love Connect Four, we’re creating these games to achieve our business goals. It’s not entertainment for entertainment’s sake.

Here’s the cheat sheet for setting up these screens:

Start screen

This is where you can introduce your experience or campaign with text, include an image or a video, and also customise your start button text (think if your brand uses any proprietary language, for example). The start screen section is also where you dictate your social media sharing settings, your age-gating (if applicable), and your terms and conditions.

Under “start screen settings” you can even opt to disable your start screen entirely, so participants are just straight into the action (ideal if Connect Four is forming a step in a larger gamification journey).

Intermediate screens

The gameplay of Connect Four is the function room that brings people to the party, but the intermediate screens are the major real estate for executing on your objectives – to stretch the metaphor they’re the front desk where people pay their entrance fee, or the paid bar.

With Drimify’s Connect Four template, you can place intermediate screens before and/ or after the game of Connect Four, and you have multiple screen types to choose from:

• Data collection form screen: This can be fully customised to gather demographic data and user preferences by selecting and customising the available fields. Ideal for data collection and enrichment projects.
• Content screen: This is similar to your start screen but additional – this is where you promote a product and include a hero piece video, for example.
• Social media page links screen: If the aim of your game is boosting your social media followers and subscribers, you can link to all of your sites here, include a message in your title, and place it before or after Connect Four.
• Leaderboard display screen: This isn’t player-versus-player Connect Four where it’s W or L, this is player-versus-machine, and a point score is calculated based on how effectively players can win the game (or how close they make the loss), As such, you can include a leaderboard.

End screen

The end screen can include text and an image or video, as well as call to action buttons (CTAs). You can include as many CTAs as you need, where you can hyperlink to your strategic web pages.

For example, you might hyperlink to a product page following a game of Connect Four coded to the colours and style of said product, and an intermediate content screen with a video promoting said product.

Step four: Test, test, then test some more

You can click on the preview button to test your game at any time. This is a great way to see how your Connect Four experience is shaping up to identify edits, or parts of the experience where things could be tightened up.

This helps from a design perspective, and allows you to improve the flow of the user journey.

It’s also a great opportunity to practice your Connect Four skills and improve your strategies!

Key takeaway

With Drimify’s Connect Four builder, you’re really assembling your experience across four easy steps. Start with your branding, define your gameplay, use start, end, and intermediate screens to tell your branded story in a way that most appropriately moves the needle for your project.

Between this guide, and the tutorial assistant pop-ups on the Connect Four game maker template, it’s never been easier or faster to take your gamification experience from concept to launch.

Want to know more?