Arnotts Shapes Flavour Battle

The Arnott’s Shapes Flavour Battle was an arcade inspired, 2D, interactive animation. In this pixelated spectacle, two customizable characters would battle it out, upon giant Arnott’s Shapes of varying flavours.

For this project AWF developed innovative techniques to produce two pixel art characters battling it out for the ultimate prize, proving which is the greatest Arnott’s Shapes flavour to ever exist.

In order to save on file size, characters were first animated using a distinct colour for each element of the character’s design before then being mapped to grayscale. Only once the user inputted the desired characteristics for their fighter were the colours remapped dynamically to meet the chosen hair colour, skin tone, costume colour and accessories.

We also provided the developers the code for up-scaling artwork so they could be transferred at the un-enlarged pixel level (for file size optimisation), and only within the web game did the chunky pixelation up-scaling occur. This allowed for images to be upscaled from the smallest of images to larger ones without them becoming blurry.

As for the animations of the characters, we provided the developers with multiple alternate movements for each; from attacks to defending movements.


In order to streamline the “colourisation” process between the creative agency and the developers, we created a custom scripting functionality on the Google Sheet document that was shared across the production team; this enabled the creative team to easily make changes that would then generate the colour configuration code required by the developers. This was considered a godsend for the creative agency as there were over 120 different colour configurations across the flavour variants of the two characters – including skin tones, hair style, hair & clothing colour and not to mention the optional props and embellishment that were only visible on some of the flavour variants.

The net result of these optimisation and bespoke code developments was a huge array of animation clips for the character at the mind bogglingly small file size of only 104kB.

The background shared the chunky pixel aesthetic and reflected the thematic traits of the respective flavour of each of the Arnott’s Shape variants, ranging from an oriental themed chicken temple to an Aussie BBQ backyard.

In addition to producing an overwhelming positive response from the client, this project took out the Digital Innovation Award at the Diemen Awards.


The Arnott’s Shapes Flavour Battle project encapsulates the fusion of technical ingenuity and aesthetic craft that AWF brings to every project.

With over 20 years experience creating compelling and engaging interactive animated media, AWF has the experience and technical ability to help you develop your next animated project. If you have a project in need of animation and visual effects, get in touch with us today by heading over to our Contact Page!