Kingdom Conquest: Dark Empire Website

Join players online in the land of Magna, and beat them to discover what secrets lie beyond the Ascension Towers. Collect and enhance a devastating monster army, drawing from hundreds of unique monsters and their commanders. Join and make new friends to forge an alliance, then use your armies to defeat other players in this dark and unforgiving realm.

Kingdom Conquest: Dark Empire is a mobile game which was in development when I started working at SEGA HARDlight. One of my first projects was to design and manage the build of the games website. Its style is very different to anything I had worked with before so this posed a fun challenge. 

The initial purpose of the website was to raise awareness of the game during the soft launch period, and have download links available for those who were in the soft launch territories. As development ramped up to hard launch I readied the full website for release. The functionality of the full website then switched to give players an overview of what the game was about. We wanted to show off a range of the art assets made by our very talented in-house artists, as well as live stats of the game to pull people into it. Below is a video which was handed to the company who constructed the website from my design, they recreated the animation within the site to a very high standard. Each visual was connected to a live stat from the game which counted up when you reached this part of the website, showing off our game tech.

As well as animation, parallax scroll was heavily used on the website. This created visual impact, drew people down the one scrolling page and told stories as it went, drawing people's attention to where we wanted it. Below you will see a previs which was made for the website developer for how we wanted the assets in the game section to behave in the parallax scrolling. The beauty of this scrolling being that the animation doesn't just 'play' forwards but would 'undo' itself when you scrolled back up the page.

Unfortunately the game was pulled just before going into hard launch and the full website never made it live, even though it was ready to go and translated into Japanese. Designing the website from inside the studio was hugely beneficial as I was able to easily request assets from the game artists, and ensure I was staying true to the game by checking it over with the developers. It also gave me a great opportunity to build a strong working relationship with a fantastic external company who built the website for us.