DEESIGNING
and developing

mobile apps or web apps is, every time, an exciting challenge. It allows us to test ourselves with both new projects and the latest technologies we bring to bear to build them.

Whether it's native apps or cross-platform, for iOS or Android, our method is craft-driven and innovative.

We love sculpting solutions from scratch and shaping projects step by step, side by side with the client, guiding and stimulating them through the breadth of our experience and the tools we choose to use.

Working with us doesn't just mean watching the brief come to life. It often means going beyond the initial idea and weaving a shared canvas, staying true to the design and enhancing it with the most advanced technologies, often unknown to the clients.

Creating 3D games, educational apps, IoT solutions or entertainment projects with augmented reality and facial recognition requires an organised flow of technical and creative professionals passing the baton.

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That's why working with us on app design is exciting: you follow development live and progress in full respect of the established timelines. Because, as we always say at NeedNap, "deadlines are sacred". 

The becoming that takes shape creates a constructive dialogue with the client at every stage of the project.

That's exactly what happened with Sammontana and the 3D game we conceived and developed for them.

Sammontana represents 70 years of quality and Italian ice-cream flavour. A story of passion that intertwined with ours when the company decided to create an app to let consumers play, immersing them in the typical Sammontana summer setting: a beach.

After studying
the bbrief

with our creatives, the designers at Alternamente and Giacomo Masoni at Less, we got to work and brought to life LE MERABIGLIE SAMMONTANA: a mobile 3D advergame developed entirely in Unity 3D.

This development environment, known for designing video games and other interactive content, allowed us to create scenarios that simulated the experience of a real marble game.

For Sammontana, in collaboration with Alternamente and Mondorama Studios, we also built THE GREEDY SAMMONTANA, a survival game in which the main character — the Sammi fridge — faced enemies with the help of 25 special characters: the Sammontana ice creams.

Thinking through the characterisation of each character — how it could move and fire — with a view to encouraging completion of the entire collection, was certainly challenging.

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From a technical standpoint, we had to devise chase strategies that allowed Sammi's two assistants to be constantly and simultaneously present without penalising the main character's gameplay.

Building the radar that suggested the direction and intensity of possible attacks was no joke either: the solution implemented involved many mathematical and trigonometric calculations.

REEALITY
and digital

have also been at the heart of a series of apps we developed for digital natives.

SOUND FROM THE WORLD helped the youngest children discover the world through sounds: the bustle of the city, the cheerfulness of a band or the rural atmosphere of a farm with its animals.

VEGGYBEE SEASONS was an educational app designed to teach children and parents the importance of a healthy diet through the actions of the main character: the VeggyBee bee.

And VEGGYBEE COLORS, with its educational and game modes, taught children to learn the colour of fruit and vegetables and associate it with their properties. From the ideas sparked by this last app, KidzInMind created a physical event in which the youngest children, mirroring the game's dynamic, deposited fruit and vegetables into baskets of the same colour. A wonderful initiative that brought online and offline together.

The ddigital
is a space without boundaries

increasingly open to the sharing of information, ideas and work insights. From this emerged COLLABOARD, a collaborative whiteboard that enables remote work organisation by combining the "anytime, anywhere" philosophy with the highest security standards. An innovative collaboration tool that offers users a rich range of graphic tools to customise their activity.

For Collaboard we built a multiplatform drawing system (web, native iOS and Windows) capable of delivering the same graphic output on all devices. We handled the different graphic strokes designed for the app — both vector-based, for pen, highlighter and fountain pen, and bitmap-based, for pencil and brush.

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The greatest challenge was simulating the fountain pen stroke in terms of pressure (on devices that support this feature, such as the Apple Pencil) and stroke thickness, based on calculations performed on Bézier curves. Another technically relevant aspect was the pencil effect we achieved by creating a small bitmap, repeated with varying rotation during drawing. This required studying solutions to prevent excessive memory consumption, interfering with performance during the drawing phase.

The drawing functionality was in fact one of the features that allowed Collaboard to differentiate itself from competitors.

The main features that required the most effort were:

• Infinite canvas, with memory control and loading/unloading of visible objects.

• Support for multimedia objects, with the ability to move, resize, rotate and group with other objects.

• Custom touch management, to effectively recognise the area of intervention and available contextual actions.

• Creation of optimised collision masks to distinguish both the solid and empty parts of irregular objects (such as text, transparent images, connection lines between objects, and drawing parts created with the ink engine).

• Creation of connections between objects using different techniques based on the connection style used (Bézier curve, line, zigzag), with management of connections even to objects not visible in the canvas.

A meention
of note

goes to the apps we built with augmented reality, an increasingly interactive tool in companies' marketing strategies. Due to its characteristics, augmented reality has often proven to be a genuine accelerator of the purchase process, both in retail distribution and B2B.

SHOPPING APULIA is a promotional app we created to offer users information about shopping centres and places to visit in Apulia, along with a special AR-based contest area in which consumers uploaded a selfie with a 3D regional monument behind them. The main complexity of this project was recognising the augmented reality marker on a 3m × 2m walkable map in the lobby of participating shopping centres. To do this we had to section the image into a grid and, using complex calculations, identify the exact position of the 3D objects to superimpose in the AR view.

BARATTOLINO SAMMONTANA also confirmed the interest in augmented reality as a brand promotion tool and commissioned us to create an interactive app that would show consumers the many tasty recipes that could be made with the product.

While B2C retail has over the years proven to be most interested in augmented reality, B2B is also discovering its opportunities. As happened with DAB, who asked us to develop a 3D app to support installers in the configuration and maintenance of DAB Genix, presented at the MCE Milan 2016 trade fair. The AR experience was created using a dedicated marker positioned near the product, at the stand.