Wawa’s mascot, Wally Goose, was a nice fit when the popular convenience store started selling kid’s meals in August 2020, but he needed a digital presence, writes Michael Butler for technical.ly.

So Wawa tapped dev agency NeoPangea to create an augmented reality game so kids could interact with Wally.

NeoPangea builds interactive experiences, games and digital content and its clients include Disney, Nickelodeon, ViacomCBS, Warner Brothers and National Geographic.

The “Wally’s Adventure Game” tech stack has HTML, JavaScript, CSS and third-party libraries, according to  NeoPangea founder Brett Bagentose.

Wawa had been talking collaboration with NeoPangea out of Reading for about two years.

Wawa collaborated with 2SP Brewing in Aston to roll out new holiday beers in November. Check out the video here.

It took five months to develop the game.

The goal was to make the game as easy to use as possible. It can be played live on a website and doesn’t require anything to be installed.

“We needed to ensure the game was easy to play for early readers, so we tested it without any instructions and integrated simple tutorial screens,” Bagenstose said. “Kids are often using older, hand-me-down devices so ensuring smooth performance on a variety of phones and tablets was critical,”

Read more about Wawa’s new AR game at technical.ly.