drama call

I pitched them with a working store instead of a deck. It is now their real site.

client

Drama Call, Manchester

what I did

Design, build, game, ongoing dev

built with

Shopify, Liquid, three.js

live at

dramacall.com

the pitch

Drama Call is a Manchester streetwear brand with a shop on Tib Street, collaborations with adidas and Manchester United, and a tracksuit they call the heaviest in the game. Their website was not keeping up with any of that.

Instead of sending a proposal, I built the whole thing. A complete, working Shopify store with their real products in it, designed around their own brand rather than mine. Then I sent them the link. They liked it enough to publish it as their actual site.

a shopify theme written from scratch

There is no starting template under this. Every file is written for them: Courier typewriter type in capitals, 1px borders, and buttons that invert on hover. Their four-point star is hand-traced as an SVG and used everywhere, including as the mouse cursor, which flips between black and white depending on what it is over.

The checkout flow is built for speed. Size pills on hover, a cart drawer that slides in without a page reload, and sold-out pieces greyed with a badge so nobody clicks through to disappointment. Moving between pages, the logo morphs from its position on one page to its position on the next.

movies and the flagship store

Drama Call make proper short films, so they got a proper place to watch them. The movies page is a black room with a screen in it. When nothing is playing, a DRAMA DVD logo bounces around the screen and changes colour every time it hits a wall. Below it is a tracklist of every film.

The background films were the fiddly part. Embedded YouTube players flash their own play button and title over everything. I rebuilt their films as compressed, self-hosted video so no player ever appears, with a fallback for phones in low power mode that refuse to autoplay.

trackeh run: a playable 3D game, hidden in the site

There is a small star in the corner of the landing page. Click it and you are skating through Manchester. Trackeh Run is a fully playable 3D skating game I built in three.js, with a PS1 look: rendered at low resolution and scaled up, the way the consoles did it.

• It knows what time it is - the game checks the real Manchester clock for day or night, then rolls different weather on every run
• It is their city - the walls are flyposted with their real campaign posters, and their actual Tib Street shopfront rolls past, neon window and pigeons on the ledge included
• It pays out - score 1200 and it hands you a working discount code, applied at checkout
• It has a leaderboard - public high scores with name entry, a profanity filter and rate limiting, running on a Cloudflare Worker I deployed, plus personal bests saved per player

Their owner asked to rename the death screen. I shipped it.

on a phone

Most of their customers arrive from Instagram on a phone, so that is where it was tested hardest. The game plays with swipes and taps.

after launch

The build was the start. Since then I have been their developer in practice, usually over WhatsApp, usually the same day:

• Built a size filter into their old theme in the middle of a sale
• Fixed collection ordering and product gallery speed from staff messages
• Added a free-delivery progress line to the cart to cut abandoned baskets
• Made them a Mortal-Kombat-style promo reel in the same 3D engine as the game, exported to video for their socials

what this shows

A template would have been quicker. It also would have looked like every other store on Shopify. Drama Call now have a site that could only be theirs, and the thing people talk about is a game that gives them a reason to come back. That is the difference between a website and a custom Shopify build.