Red Zone Run

The Brief

State Farm was closing out one of their biggest NFL seasons and they weren't going out quietly. They came to us with a Red Zone campaign and a clear vision: bottle the energy of game day and hand it to fans on their phones. No stadium ticket required.

The Red Zone is the most electric thirty yards in American football. Every play matters. Every second is borrowed. That tension was the brief. We had to make people feel it through a phone screen.

My Role

I led the development on Red Zone Run, an AR mini-game built entirely around that feeling. Four lanes. Waves of incoming defenders. Head tilts to dodge. Survive long enough and the speed compounds, every second demanding more from your reflexes. Three strikes and you're done. A mechanical jumbotron overhead tracks every point in real time, making each run feel like it belongs inside an actual stadium. Simple concept. Genuinely terrifying in practice.

The 3D assets were built in collaboration with another Spark creator. The game and logic was my contribution.

The Stakes

Head tracking sounds simple until you're the one building the collision logic behind it with no native support of rigid bodies. The game had to feel natural for someone playing AR for the first time, while still being sharp enough for someone genuinely competitive. Getting that balance right took real work.

Meta's AR effects have a 4MB limit. Real performance needs under 2MB. This effect had physics, a leaderboard, progressive difficulty and a real-time scoreboard inside that budget.

Red Zone Run was also one of the first effects to fully leverage Meta Spark's Persistence Module, their most requested new feature at the time. Players could save high scores, compare with friends, and return for rematches. The leaderboard wasn't a gimmick. It kept people coming back.

The Results

The campaign ran with celebrity backing, heavy ad spend, and reached massive impression numbers across Instagram and Facebook. It was one of the more visible AR activations of that NFL season.

Red Zone Run taught me how to compress stadium-level energy into a play loop that people choose to repeat. Control and chaos living in the same interaction. The joy of a clean dodge. The panic of a lane closing in.

Toolkit

Meta Spark Studio · JavaScript · Blender · Meta Persistence Module · Substance Painter

Team

• Development: Sparsh Chaudhary
• 3D Assets: Grant Tucker
• Meta’s AR Partnerships: Alina Savu, Lindsay Gash, Thomas Bourret
• Creative Agency: Haley Ayres, Joe Russel (QuickFrame)