Lunar New Year LINE Marketing: Build a Pinball Game with a Plain LINE Chatbot!

Happy New Year, everyone! If you haven't tried playing pinball with a LINE chatbot yet, add the OakMega Official Account here and give it a spin!

Holidays bring a festive mood, and most companies plan seasonal marketing campaigns around them. During Lunar New Year, the most common campaigns on LINE are prize draws and interactive mini-games. When it comes to mini-games on LINE, people tend to think of HTML5 web-based sweepstakes or the personality quizzes that have been trending lately. There are also off-the-shelf sweepstakes modules you can configure and launch in no time, such as OakMega's Playground, Lucky Draw, and Scratch & Win bundle, which let you build your own branded prize games.

But budgets are limited, and not everyone can buy or customize these games. So today's challenge is to build a pinball mini-game with nothing but a basic LINE chatbot, without any modules! After all, building the most fun game from the most basic features is where real skill shows. Let's get started!

Breaking Down the Pinball Interface

First, let's break down how a pinball machine is laid out. It splits into two parts: the top is where the ball bounces around and lands in the winning slots, and the bottom holds the ready button and the launch handle. Since the ready button and handle stay in fixed positions, they fit neatly into a rich menu, while the machine itself at the top can be handled with a full-width rich message.

Here's what the very first draft looked like!

We dropped it into a LINE Official Account for a quick look. Yep, that's pretty much the vibe!

Only after putting it on LINE did we notice rich messages are slightly inset, so watch out for that

Working Out the Game Rules

With the interface sorted, let's recall how pinball works. Step one is loading a ball. Then you press the ready button on the left, and red lights show which lanes are winners and what multiplier each pays. All that's left is to shoot the ball and see whether it lands in a winning lane.

To suit how LINE chatbots work, we simplified the rules a bit. We dropped the "load a ball" step and kept three: tap the ready button → shoot the ball → check whether you won. That keeps the game lean, fun, and quick to finish.

For a sketch, it's... pretty carefully made, right? XD

‍

Finally, we scripted the pinball game in the chatbot (yes, it's all predetermined) to decide whether a friend walks away with a pile of balls and wins a plushie, or runs out and has to try again next time.

To see our full script, go play it on the OakMega Official Account. No spoilers here! Brands can, of course, write their own script around their campaign goals. Just keep the flow from getting too complicated.

Final UI Theme Polish

Think we're done? Not yet! As a design-driven software company, OakMega had to dress the pinball machine up in festive New Year colors! To spare our designers from working overtime during the holiday (✗) and to make it something everyday marketers can learn from (✓), we simulated the ball's movement with a trajectory line. It loses a bit of the thrill of watching the ball drop, but the overall game experience holds up. And if you can make animations, a short clip will make the whole game look even more lively!

Doesn't it look festive?

‍

That's the whole process behind OakMega's Lunar New Year LINE campaign: a pinball game built with a LINE chatbot. From idea to finished game took less than a day, so it's a quick win. Feel free to borrow the idea!

To wrap up, here are three tips for holiday LINE marketing mini-games:

• Keep the rules dead simple and easy to pick up
• Keep it to five steps or fewer so the game stays lean
• Make the game easy to share so it can go viral

Wishing everyone a prosperous start to the Year of the Rabbit!