The Brief

Candy Unwrapped is King’s annual in-game celebration of each player’s Candy Crush year — a personalised look back at their highlights, stats, and achievements, delivered directly within the game. For 2025, King asked us to evolve the experience significantly from the previous year, making it more immediate, more immersive, and available to every player regardless of platform. 

Two ambitions defined the brief. First, to remove the friction of the previous year’s journey — where players were taken out of the game and into a separate web experience — and deliver everything seamlessly within the game itself. Second, to extend the social sharing feature to Android for the first time, having previously been limited to iOS only.

The Experience

The 2025 Unwrapped experience is built around a continuous, scroll-driven journey through each player’s year. Rather than a series of static screens, players move through an animated sequence of ten personalised achievement moments — each one visually distinct, each one theirs alone. 

The intro sets the tone immediately on launch, drawing players in before transitioning into their personal story. The scrolling journey that follows is designed to feel cinematic and fluid, with each achievement revealed through animation as the player progresses. At any point, players can capture and share a custom image of their stats to their preferred social channels directly from within the game — on both iOS and Android.

A Step Forward Every Year

Building on each year’s learnings is central to how we approach Candy Unwrapped. For 2025, the most significant change was moving the entire experience inside the game — eliminating the redirect that previously took players to an externally hosted site. The result is an experience that feels instant and fully part of Candy Crush, with no interruption to the player’s journey. 

Extending sharing to Android was the other major leap. We worked closely with King’s internal development team to find a solution that worked within the constraints of the game environment on Android — a genuine technical challenge that opened the celebration up to the full player base for the first time.

Animation & Performance

The visual ambition of Unwrapped ‘25 is high — rich animation, immersive scenes, and a polished feel throughout. Delivering that within the constraints of an in-game environment, across a wide range of devices, required careful thinking about performance from day one. 

We built the experience to run entirely from the device’s own cache, with no external asset loads during playback. This means the experience opens instantly, works offline, and performs consistently whether a player is on a recent flagship or a older device. For players whose hardware couldn’t support the full animated experience, a fallback version ensures they can still relive their year and share their achievements — nothing is lost, just adapted.

Sharing

Sharing has always been central to Unwrapped — it’s how players celebrate with friends and how the campaign travels beyond the game. For 2025, custom share images are generated on-device using each player’s own data, rendered into a designed template and passed straight to the device’s native sharing panel. Players can post to any app on their phone without leaving the Candy Crush environment. 

The images themselves are designed as part of the experience — visually cohesive, on-brand, and worth sharing. Getting this working on Android, where the game environment presents additional constraints not present on iOS, required close collaboration with King’s team and was one of the most satisfying technical problems we solved on the project.

Localisation