Red Bull Alinghi America's cup

Context

To promote their sport and their participation to the America’s cup 2024 race, the renown “Red Bull Alinghi” speed- sailing team wanted to create an engaging gaming experience for all audiences.

Speed-sailing is not exactly a world-famous sport, so we tried to approach the mission with a mind free of any preconceived mechanics to create a fun & unique gameplay.

Velocity Made Good

The impact of the wind on a speedboat’s sails is quite an odd concept for a non sailor.

Without getting into much details, just know that a boat can actually gain speed even if it’s sailing against the wind… all it needs to do is to catch the wind in a very specific angle and some magic happens that makes it move very fast.

Skilled sailors are thus always in search of that sweet spot, that angle at which the boat will navigate towards the finish line at full speed. This is what seasoned sailors call “Velocity Made Good” or VMG.

You guessed it: we couldn’t possibly create a game that didn’t make sense to pro sailors. And that’s how VMG became a key part of the game: keeping an eye on the compass to spot the VMG marker at all times.

Making speed-sailing understandable

Ok maybe we’re exaggerating , but one of the game’s ambition is to bring much more awareness to the sport among non-fans. Meaning we had to find a way to onboard as easily as possible players that know close to nothing about sailing.

A well-crafted onboarding and a crystal-clear animated in-game tutorial were definitely needed to quickly explain how to play even to the most averse players.

Power Group, Driving Group

A little more about the real sport: There is no engine nor propeller on these boats, not even oars to help!

What you can find on the boat though are huge sails and a team of 8 magnificent athletes distributed into 2 groups:

The driving group who orients the sails,
The power group who generates power by pedaling to help the driving group smoothly rotate the boat according to the wind.

These concepts needed to be translated into gaming mechanism to mimic real-life into the gameplay.

We went for an almighty player, switching from the power group to the driving group during key moments of the race:

At times, the player’s most important task will be that of the driving group: stirring the boat in the right direction, trying to stick to the VMG marker as much as possible;
At other times, he will be focused on the power group, tapping as quickly as possible on the spacebar (with his finger, in case you were wondering) to provide the necessary power for the boat to make a fast turn in the right direction;

Realism in the browser

Red Bull sports teams don’t settle for games that are too far from the reality of their discipline. When creating games for them, we are always asked to stay close to reality.

Wether it is to remodel a boat, to recreate a sports arena, or to gamify sports mechanics, we strive for a high level of fidelity as much as we can: real shapes, precise measurements and real sports rules.

Same goes for the gaming environment: it must look very polished… and that’s sometimes proves to be tricky in a web browser.

Thanks to three.js and our extensive experience in WebGL, we are able to render all kinds of things in a realistic way.

For this game, we spent quite some time finetuning the lightning, the sky and its reflections on the water. We also modeled the boat in a way that provided an output close to the real thing without compromising the performances of the browser.

Back to work

Next project

Ice Cubes