Luna Labs has announced its official launch. The company develops tools to enable games studios to create high-quality HTML5 content from their games. The Luna toolkit allows developers building in Unity to streamline the development process, and easily create lightweight experiences for HTML5 game platforms and the next generation of playable ad creation.

“Luna was born in a gaming studio, where we saw first hand that there was an increasing need for HTML5 content, but inefficiencies in the processes used to create it,” said Luna Labs CEO and co-founder, Steven Chard. “This gap is especially prominent in the playable ad market, where the work is often outsourced. This takes time, and ultimately results in creatives that don’t look or feel like the game and are misleading for the user. We believe we can solve both of these problems by focusing on a toolchain which allows the creation of these ads directly from the game.”

Luna says it addresses the prevalent need for game developers to efficiently and accurately create mobile advertising that reflects actual gameplay, and that playable ads are the natural successor to rewarded video which has dominated ad spend in recent years. The Luna toolkit has been available to select partners in the last year, among them Kwalee and Voodoo, which has more than 1.5bn annual downloads, and publishes a third of the top 10 games in the App Store.

Thibault LeDuc, head of user acquisition and monetisation at Voodoo said: “When we first heard about the Luna technology we thought there must be a catch. Their team and technology has consistently wowed us and we’ve now embedded Luna into our concept testing and playable ad production. Luna makes it simple to produce lightweight high fidelity ads straight from the source.”

Key investors in Luna include Ben Holmes, formerly of Index Ventures and early investor in social mobile game giants King and Playfish, and Chris Lee, who has backed prominent game makers Space Ape and Hello Games.