Kokoromi Collective

Cum on feel the game

June 16th, 2008 by fish

Steve Swink (of IGF and dinosaurs fame) is gentleman and a scholar. As evidenced by the impending dropping of his first book, Game Feel: A Game Designer’s Guide To Virtual Sensations. The book is available for pre-order at Amazon.

But wait a minute… what does this have to do with kokoromi you ask? Not Much. Except i designed the freakin cover, that’s what.

Now that the cat’s out of the bag, i can share with you the joys and pains of game design textbook cover design. Me and Steve agreed that id crank out a few quick mock-ups to figure out what kind of direction we should go in. What follows is said mock-ups. In chronological order, no less.

But First, behold: the original cover, submitted to Steve by his publisher. GASP!

Im not even gonna make a joke here. It would be like making fun of a child who was born just a torso. You know what? Fuck you Torso Kid, you’re an abomination and an eye-sore. there.

Alright, on the the mocking-up then.

The first mock-up i sent to Steve was this trippy little number. He liked the idea of the hand from the rejected cover, and he showed me a couple of his own sketches, all involving hands. Feeling hands. And so i figured: let’s go with the hand. Steve’s first comment was that you couldn’t read shit. I disagreed. You just have to squint. But Steve wasnt for squinting, infact, he was down right against it.

Next up was a slight variation on the same theme of hands that feel. Here i went for a bit of Virtual Boy on drugs look. But Steve thought it just didn’t look gamey enough. The only game-like element was the polygonal look of the hand, which was a result of me just quickly free-handing the shape with the polygonal lasso. But he liked that, so much infact that when you buy your copy of the book, you’ll get to enjoy all the polygonal goodness that survived to the final version.

Then came along the first version of what would essentially make it to the printer. A hand that feels RAINBOWS.Because rainbows are gamey, right? The very first version featured flat, straight lines, to which i added weird ethereal non-drop shadows, and 45° angles, because as we know, 45° angles are synonymous with the future. Ive always associated rainbow-like arrays of colors with personal computers and the game i played on them. Remember back in the days when to be a real software company all you needed was to have some kind prism-like display of colors in your logo? I do. Every time it rains on a sunny day, i look up and see a Commodore 64 logo. Steve liked this version and encouraged me to keep going in that direction.

First little tweak was getting rid of the weird shadows and replacing them with a much more tactile layered-look. I thought the fact the rainbow seemed carved into the background would help communicate the idea of game feel, of the tactile and sensual feel of virtual objects. I also decided to try a more organic hand. I thought an organic hand touching a digital world would make more sense.

By then i had been starring at the same stupid hand and rainbow for about a month and was due for a completely different kind of hand and rainbow. A circular one! Allow me to explain the concept of this design. Videogame Information is represented by raibow. Player sees the rainbow, which enters his head, there, the information is analyzed and understood as something way sensual, which is then felt by the MIND HAND, which is also, the hand in the game. In any case, its not your real hand that feels, its your MIND HAND. I really fucking love this one. Its in rought mock-up shape here, but still, look at it!

A round that time, Steve had conducted a little poll to find out which cover his developer and academic friends preferred between the original abortion and the original rainbow hand. Rainbow hand closed into a rainbow fist and beat the shit out of the other one. The idea here was to gather enough data suggesting that the old cover sucks and the new is awesome to convince the publisher to let Steve sub-contract me. They only ended up agreeing something like 2 weeks ago.

So when the results came back, they did with a bit of feedback. The main issue was still that the graphic didn’t seem gamey enough, that the cover simply didnt suggest a videogame design book, despite having in it the word GAME twice.
Gamey Game Game Game: Let’s Make A Game! was suggested and promptly shot down. Another concern was that with its desaturated colors and beige background, the cover simply looked too retro. Which is bullshit. Retro is awesome.

And so then i told Steve, i told him: Listen, Steve! If it aint gonna be beige, it’s either gona be white or grey. In an attempt de de-retro-ize (modernize?) the design, the colors we’re replaced by a much more high-tech and current array of CMYGB, and AvantGarde was replaced by a standard 5×3 pixel font. Because you know… games, pixels. At the point i realized right-heavy layout and grey background somewhat reminded me of a NES cartridge, with its label on the side. A white hand option was also introduced, just because it worked well on the white BG. Oh and the text was moved out of the hand for absolutely no reason at all.

We were getting close! Steve ended up asking me to go with a grey background, and to go back to Avantgarde. And so i started work on the first non-mock-up, print-ready version to submit to the publisher.

Almost there now! The near-final version featured black hand, grey background and a much richer texture inside the rainbow. I ended up using a mix of the weird shadow and “slices” styles. The text was reverted to AvantGarde, and the word game was outlined. For some reason, i found outlined AvantGarde bold to be extremely gamey. I have no idea why.

And finally, the publisher disagreed with me on the subject of the gameyness of outlined AvantGarde bold, and switched it back to solid back and the hand was turned white (racial commentary?). Steve ended up tweaking the hand’s pose to make EVEN MORE FEELIER. And there you have it. The final cover. I personally prefer the retro color scheme (obviously i have a thing for retro graphic design), but that’s how things work when you for others, which im not all the used to. So hey! Learning experience yay!

Sadly, i don’t have a better resolution than this (that’s the amazon file) because when publishers make change to your work, they dont bother sending you back shit.

And THAT’s how you design a cover for Steve Swink’s GAME FEEL: A GAME DESIGNER’S GAME TO VIRTUAL SENSATION!!!

This entry was posted on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 2:11 am and is filed under Others, Announcements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.