Next Studio : The Adventures of Freddo

The Adventures of Freddo: The Mystery of Slater Island

The Brief

The Adventures of Freddo: The Mystery of Slater Island followed the successful first online adventure of Freddo the Frog. Enhancements such as advanced customisation of their avatars and tree houses, a simple friend network allowing kids to befriend each other and the introduction of tribes brought a greater sense of community to the site.

Tech Stuff

Building on the success of the first project, Freddo's second adventure saw a greater range of features the kids could use to customise their experience. The kids could now build 'treehouses', and customise the inside and outside by 'buying' items using points they'd already been accumulating by playing games during the first adventure. Kids were divided into 4 different 'tribes', and could not only 'befriend' each other but also received friendship requests from key characters from the stories.

Next Studio's development processes meant that the site could be updated with minimal disruption to users. Old 'avatars' were upgraded to use the new system including the ability to buy/sell items for the kids' person or treehouse, and the site was switched over to a more comprehensive system.

The Adventures of Freddo: Freddo and the Golden Keys

The Brief

The Adventures of Freddo: Freddo and the Golden Keys is an immersive site for kids to watch animated episodes, play (educational) games and interact with some of Cadbury's characters, including the Australian icon, Freddo.

Cadbury were very keen to produce to be seen as 'giving something back' to the community and as such the site had no product placement and instead featured a huge amount of fun content and activities for children released routinely throughout school holidays. Parents were able to exercise restraint over their child's usage of and privacy within the site through a control panel.

Next Studio was responsible for the 'back end' and communications layer of the site, including the parental controls, user registration and management, usage statistics, high score tables and maintaining each user's information and progress between sessions. Next Studio provided a gateway API in ActionScript 3 to authenticate with the site and send/recieve complex data from the server.

When the site was inundated with over a hundred-thousand children, anxious to watch and play the latest Freddo content, the clients' own hosting, usually responsible for brand sites with limited interactivity, was overwhelmed.

Next Studio was tasked with coordinating suitable hosting. We called on our friends at Conexim in Sydney and the site was reconfigured to run on load balanced web servers to handle the application logic, and Akamai caching for the volume of Flash content and sounds.