The situation
The client, a UK healthcare organisation, wanted a branded digital experience for the Christmas 2025 festive season. Something fun and shareable that employees and customers could play on any device. A competitive leaderboard to keep people coming back. Professional quality, hosted on the client's own domain. And no ongoing SaaS licensing fees eating into the budget year after year.
The agency quotes came in at £20,000 to £40,000 with delivery timelines of 8 to 16 weeks. That would have missed Christmas entirely. And it would have locked the client into a maintenance contract for a seasonal asset they might only use a few times a year.
The brief was clear. Build it fast, build it properly, own it outright.
Generic gamification platforms exist in the employee engagement space, but they produce cookie-cutter experiences with someone else's branding engine. The client wanted something that felt like theirs. A custom character. Their logo. Their domain. Not a white-label template with their colours swapped in.
What we built
Two complete browser games with a shared backend, both playable on desktop, iPhone, and Android without installing anything.
The flagship game features a custom branded mascot character with a jetpack, delivering parcels to houses below. The world speeds up as you score more deliveries. Balloon elves appear at speed milestones. The houses are procedurally drawn in eight different designs so no two runs feel the same. A second game, Sleigh Slider, adds a different mechanic with lateral movement and obstacle avoidance.
Both games feed into a persistent global leaderboard. Players enter their name after each round, see where they rank, and get motivational messages designed to drive one more attempt. Score deduplication prevents spam. An admin panel (hidden from public view) lets the client manage scores and monitor engagement.
The whole platform runs on AWS with zero server maintenance. A global CDN delivers the games instantly from the nearest edge location. The leaderboard API runs on serverless functions that cost nothing when nobody's playing.
Mobile compatibility took real work. iOS Safari doesn't support the standard fullscreen API, so a custom workaround was built. Touch events needed careful handling to avoid double-firing. Canvas rendering was optimised for smooth 60fps on phones. These aren't the kind of problems that show up in a desktop demo. They only surface when someone picks up their iPhone and taps play.
Google Analytics tracks engagement across both games, giving the client real data on play sessions, return visits, and leaderboard activity.
The entire infrastructure is defined as code in CloudFormation templates. Deployments are automated through GitHub Actions. Push to the main branch and the platform updates itself. No manual steps. No FTP. No calling someone to upload files.
The numbers
| Traditional agency | Tyree Digital | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | £20,000 to £40,000 | £3,500 |
| Timeline | 8 to 16 weeks | 70 days (hit the Christmas window) |
| Ongoing licensing | Maintenance contract | £0 |
| Saving | £16,500 to £36,500 (83% to 91%) |
The seasonal timing matters. A game that launches in January is worthless for a Christmas campaign. The traditional agency timeline would have missed the window entirely, wasting the entire investment. This platform launched on time and captured the full festive engagement period.
Over three years, a comparable SaaS engagement platform would cost £15,000 to £45,000 in licensing. This platform cost £3,500 once and runs for pennies.
What the client owns
The full source code, the custom mascot character artwork, the AWS infrastructure stack, all leaderboard data, and the automated deployment pipeline. No agency relationship needed to keep it running. No vendor who can raise prices.
The architecture is deliberately simple. Two HTML files, a serverless API, and a database. No framework dependencies to go stale. No build tools to maintain. Adding a third game means creating one new HTML file and two new API endpoints. The platform is designed to grow with every new campaign.
The custom mascot character is a genuine brand asset. It was designed specifically for the client and exists nowhere else. That kind of brand IP would normally sit in an agency's portfolio. Here it belongs to the client outright.
What happens next
A monthly subscription covers hosting and maintenance. The platform earns its keep every Christmas, but it doesn't have to sit idle between seasons. The same infrastructure supports any branded game or interactive campaign throughout the year. New games build on the existing leaderboard system, analytics, and deployment pipeline without starting from scratch.