The Toughest Journey Game
A retro arcade-style GAA game built for AIB, where players progress from club to county level across kicking games and mini-games, culminating at Croke Park.
Tech Stack
Overview
The Toughest Journey Game was built for AIB, tied to their GAA sponsorship campaign of the same name. The brief was to turn the TV ad’s concept — a player’s journey from club football up through to Croke Park — into a playable arcade game.
The game is built with Angular and PixiJS, which handles all the canvas rendering. Players pick their county at the start, and that choice sets their character’s jersey for the entire game — 34 counties, men’s and women’s teams, 68 variations in total. From there, they work through a series of kicking games and mini-games that increase in difficulty as the stakes rise. Wind picks up. Birds and drones appear. The path to Croke Park is not straightforward.
The trickiest part was the asset management. Each county jersey variant needed its own sprite sheet, and each sprite sheet was 12 frames. That adds up fast. We tackled it with asset packing and lazy loading so the game stayed performant without requiring everything to be in memory upfront.
Multiplayer was handled through Colyseus, a Node.js framework built for real-time multiplayer games, which manages the WebSocket connections and keeps game state in sync between players.
Screenshots
Key Features
- 1 Three kicking games and two mini-games with escalating difficulty — wind, birds, and drones become obstacles as players advance.
- 2 68 county jersey variations covering all 34 men's and women's GAA teams, dynamically applied to the player character.
- 3 Multiplayer support via Colyseus and WebSockets.
- 4 Progressive difficulty scaling across scenes from club through to Croke Park.
Technical Challenges
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Managing 68 base character assets (34 counties × men's and women's teams), each requiring 12 images per sprite animation, resulted in a significant asset load. Asset packing and lazy loading kept performance in check.