Jagex OSRS Marketing Design
Old School RuneScape is Jagex’s community-led version of its long-running MMO. Between 2019 and 2020 I designed and built marketing creative for the game: HTML5 display campaigns, Google UAC mobile ads and Twitch Prime illustration.
The work ran from campaign layouts and character animation through to finished banner builds in every standard size, on campaigns including Here’s to the Year and Slayer Safari.
Wintertodt
Old School RuneScape closed 2019 with record yearly membership, and the mobile launch pushed concurrent players to new highs. Jagex’s brief for its “Here’s to the Year” campaign asked for display ads that celebrated the community and a positive outlook for 2020, and that avoided the usual montage of update footage.
I set the campaign at Wintertodt, the snowbound boss fight where dozens of players crowd round a single brazier, so the banners show the community doing what it does best: turning out together. The five HTML5 units below were animated in Adobe Animate, with a howling snowstorm sweeping across each one, and built to the ad networks’ polite-load and 30-second limits.
Here’s to the Year, Old School RuneScape, December 2019 – live HTML5 builds (Adobe Animate / CreateJS).
Slayer Safari
Every Old School RuneScape player knows the moment a Slayer Master hands out a new task, and the groan or grin that follows. Jagex wanted display banners that recreated it: a reel of Slayer monsters spinning past and stopping on one creature, the way a task is assigned in the game.
The brief split the monsters into “annoying” tasks (wyrms, steel dragons, kraken) and “profitable” ones that pay well or give good XP (cave horrors, gargoyles, trolls), and asked for three endings: one annoying, one profitable and one random. I owned the creative from layout to build, animating the monster reel as sprite sequences in Adobe Animate and delivering nine HTML5 sizes, each under the 2MB limit, inside a one-week turnaround.
Slayer Safari, Old School RuneScape, January 2020 – live HTML5 builds (Adobe Animate / CreateJS).
Social Media Videos
When Old School RuneScape Mobile was nominated for EE Mobile Game of the Year at the 2019 British Academy Games Awards, Jagex wanted its mobile user-acquisition video to say so, loud and clear. The brief: use the nomination as an endorsement of the game’s quality, and give UK players – targeted as lookalikes of the existing audience – a reason to try OSRS on the go.
The 30-second square cut for Facebook and Instagram feeds opens on the franchise claim, lands the BAFTA nomination, then cuts to real hands playing on a phone: bosses, skilling and the inventory, all in the palm of your hand. The BAFTA nominee lockup stays on screen throughout, and it ends on the logo with App Store and Google Play badges. The KPIs were new account creations and new memberships.
