Making a logo can be one of the toughest parts of game development. Don’t believe me? Take a moment and think about all the places that the logo for a game shows up. When you are looking to buy a new video game what is the first thing you look at? Normally the first thing you see is a piece of what is called key art with the logo front and center. That logo is everywhere on nearly every piece of marketing. The style of it communicates what type of game it is, sharp and blood red(horror), gold and brown(cheerful farming), etcetera. When you boot up that game for the first time the first thing you see is the logo. It communicates so much about a game. Get it wrong and people will dislike your game not because it’s bad but because it isn’t what they are expecting.

Marketing art and logos is something that isn’t talked about much in indie game development circles but if you look at the successful games they all have a great logo. That is because people don’t buy your game based off of the game they buy it based on a few key pieces of art and reviews. It’s common for indie gamedevs to ignore the logo and key art development till the end. Sometimes they out source it.

This is a problem because there is a very specific unspoken code to how game logos should look for certain genres. It isn’t something you think of but you can recognize these styles if you look for them. Take three successful games in your games genre and compare the colors and styles of their logos. What do they have in common? Where can you see the individuality that distinguishes one from another?

My three for Bramblewood’s logo are Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, and Coral Island. All three of them are cheerful sim games. Their logos all use yellow gold and brown with a slight touch of other colors. The logos go along with art and games that are warm, cheerful, and cute.

Notice the warm tones, the rounded letters, the hint of green. I then took and put it over a screenshot/background from Bramblewood.

As you can see it fits that style but it’s still just a first version. Now when making a logo it is important to keep each element as a separate layer that way you can switch them out easily.

Once I had this first version I wanted to see what real people who might buy Bramblewood thought of it so I put it up on my Twitter page and asked people what they thought. This is a great way to both get valuable help and include your community in the game development. There were a couple things that kept getting repeated “The blue circles are distracting.” and “try making it into a sign.”

So first I tried making it into a sign, giving the letters a little bit of shading, and removing the outline. This was better but you can guess it “The blue circles are distracting.”

That lead me to this which is my current version. It still could use polishing but you can start to see a logo that says fun, cheerful. It’s a logo that is starting to promise the game that it is for. As I go through development I’m probably going to refine it several more times. The benefit though is that I can start using this on early marketing materials, on store pages, on my social media accounts. It’s starting to give an idea of what the game will be like even before the game is finished.

So what does your game’s logo look like and does it match your actual game in style? Let me know in the comments.

You can currently check out Bramblewood at https://gildedoctopusstudios.itch.io/bramblewood or follow my Twitter for regular updates.

This blog was originally published at www.gildedoctopusstudios.com

The post The Toughest Part of Game Development: Making a Logo! appeared first on Gilded Octopus .

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