Integration Scenarios
Due to the very native nature of Plakc In Game Ads, its integration can often depend on how the game is designed. In this document we discuss some of these scenarios and share tips to introduce native ads to your game that truly blend with the environment.
It is required that you be familiar with the Plakc SDK before diving into this tutorial.
Try downloading the Plakc Sample Game and running it in Unity in case you haven't.
The Plakc SDK works by downloading brand creatives and replacing in game texture with them.
For illustrative purposes we consider a sample brand creative shown below :
A sample brand ad texture
If we were to mark some primitive 3D Unity shapes as Plakc Ad Displays, this is how the ads will be displayed. The brand creative is displayed all over the shape.
Consider a cricket game with the following mesh and texture for the player model. A developer may want to show ads on the player jersey and mark it as a Plakc Ad Display.
*Texture for the cricker
*Cricketer with texture
However, the SDK (currently) doesn't support partial replacement of textures. So when used as a Plakc Ad Display, the cricketer texture will be fully replaced instead of showing on a part of the texture, resulting in the model looking like below:
Given the fully texture replacing nature of the SDK, other placement ideas can be pursued. For example marking a plane as a Plakc Ad Display and hovering it just over the stadium like this:
*This looks fine, but a little artificial due to its opacity
*Changing the shader to Transparent>Diffuse and reducing the opacity makes it look like the ad is painted on the grass
Consider a racing game where billboards have been placed on the sides of the tracks for cross promoting games within the publishers portfolio.
*Billboard where commonly cross promotion creatives or developer logos are found.
*The above billboard's texture made as per the UV mapping of the mesh.
Note that the billboard mesh cannot be used as a Plakc Ad Display. It will end up looking like this because of full texture replacement:
The solution is to place a plane marked as Plakc Ad Display such that it covers only the cross promotional content. See below:
Next, go to the inspector of this plane set select "Hide if no ad available" to true.
Doing so will make the plane invisible until a brand creative is available when the game is running. So, if the user is offline or the SDK is still in the process of downloading ad images, the cross promotion will be visible. If the user is online and a brand creative is downloaded, the cross promotional display will be obstructed by the plane once it becomes visible.
By using the "Hide if no ad available" feature and translucency of Plakc Ad Display's renderers, in-game ads can be better blended into the game world. We'll be adding more scenarios to this document over time.
*Screenshots, models and textures from Firexit Software