I want to preface this by saying that I have loved to play games all my life. As a kid, I remember having long day dreams about the different games that I would love to make and how extremely cool they would be. I thought that those who were the fortunate few to work for game companies must have the best jobs in the world! They must have a life of ease and enjoyment, cause that’s what making games is all about, right?

While working for Broken Bulb, I have gained a newfound respect for those who endeavour to make great games. Don’t get me wrong though. Working for Broken Bulb Studios is fun and rewarding (as you’ll see later in this post) but also requires a lot of, well …work! We have a small team of around 20 here at BBS which is amazing to me considering what we accomplish each day. Everyday, I come into the office and I’m instantly greeted by the programmers, typing code at a flurrious pace. The artists are sketching away on various projects, so that they can get them finished by their due dates. Everyone here works exceptionally hard to bring new games and content to our amazing players. We do have a lot of fun however.

There’s an abundant amount of camaraderie here at Broken Bulb. Just the other day we had an amazing potluck! Not only do BBS employes have mad gaming development skillz, but we also rock the culinary ones. We also have frequent matches of ping pong and foosball here in the office. One tradition (I’ve luckily avoided so far) is that of the “watering”. Pretty much, if you get utterly destroyed in a foosball or ping pong match, the victor has the right to drench you publicly with a glass of water!

Watering from Broken Bulb Game Studios on Vimeo.

I’ve really enjoyed my time so far here at BBS. There are some of the smartest, most creative minds in the gaming industry. So, what is it like working at Broken Bulb Studios? In an word, prodigious.

If you have seen any of my work, you might have guessed that I love to draw characters. What you might not know is that in addition to character design, I equally love logo design. When a project comes along where I get to incorporate both, needless to say, I’m stoked! Now if someone were to tell me I would get to design a logo with characters, and those characters happen to be superheroes…well, that’s what I’d refer to as a dream job!

For a while I’ve wanted to blog about how I go about designing a logo. I had so much fun with this one in particular (despite one major speed bump) that I had to share the process. So here’s a little insight into how I created the logo for Broken Bulb Game Studio’s newest social game, Hero Conquest.  You can find the link to the game here: heroconquest.com. Play it – it’s awesome!

First off, a little disclaimer: This is an abridged version of how I approach a logo design. I’ll try to cover the basic steps, but won’t go too deep into particular techniques of the software I use, Adobe Illustrator. There are plenty of tutorials on the interwebs on that subject. Of course, this is my way of designing a logo. It may not be the best way, but it has worked for me in the past.

I always start in Adobe Illustrator by typing the name or the product or service which will be represented on the logo. Then I ask myself, “What is the feeling I want this logo to evoke?” This logo is for a superhero game so I want to express the feeling of action and adventure, something bold and powerful. I then go through my list of fonts and pick out a few that sum up the emotion I want to convey. There is a very cool free software program called Font Viewer that I use to organize all my fonts into categories so I can weed out the fonts that won’t work for a particular style. You can download Font Viewer here: http://www.ampsoft.net/utilities/FontViewer.php/

After I quickly jot down the names of the fonts I like, I assign them to the logotype in Illustrator. Here are some of my selections…

So I’ve picked out a bunch of cool fonts, but in most cases I prefer not to use a stock font. Instead, I usually try and modify it a bit by making a copy and converting it to artwork by selecting: type/convert to outline. This will give you the ability to modify the type as you would any vector shape in Illustrator. You won’t be able to change the font or characters once converted to outline, so be sure to make a copy because you may need it. You can see how I modified the original font (indicated in blue) by using a combination of the shear tool, pathfinder tool, shape tool, and pen tool.

With this logo, I wanted to try and incorporate the characters from the game. I thought it would be cool to use silhouettes of the heroes in strong action poses. I usually shy away from using clip art, but after doing an image search for iconic super hero poses, I found this awesome clip art set: http://bit.ly/OApDC7. At this point I am still doing mock ups, so it makes sense for me to save time by using the clip art poses with a few alterations. Then if the design is approved I can go back and design some original poses. It did take a few minutes to change some of the clip art to look more like the characters in the game using the same techniques I did in the last step with the typography.

Now that I have some type and a few character silhouettes, I mess around with their placement a bit. At this point I may design a few extra elements that I can work into the logo as well. This stage usually takes some time – just me moving things around until I’m happy with the layout, which never seems to come easy.

When I do finally end up with a design I like, I start the whole process over again and create about five or six different logos to choose from. At this point I’m not too concerned about color. I don’t want to influence the art director’s decision in case a particular color looks better. I only want to focus on the design. Here’s what I came up with…

After reviewing the designs, Broken Bulb’s art director picked the design she felt would best fit the game. We had to make some changes, and unfortunately one major change was eliminating most of the hero silhouettes for the logo. The reasoning was that most of the ads for social games are very small, and the characters weren’t easy to distinguish at the smaller size. In addition, the decision was made to give an italicized look to the logo so it could be better integrated into the game’s user interface, which is skewed at an angle. So, the necessary changes were made, color was added, and we ended up with something like this…

At this point everything seemed to be copacetic. We had the logo complete and started to integrate it into the game and marketing materials. However, what we didn’t foresee was that we would have to revisit the design yet again after we decided to rename the game “Hero” Conquest instead of “SuperHero” Conquest… Back to the drawing board.

Changing the name posed a bit of a problem with the redesign of the logo. The words Superhero and Conquest stacked so nicely on top of each other, and when the name was shortened it didn’t seem to look right. Up to this point everyone was really happy with the design, and even though I didn’t want to start over from scratch, I decided to look back at some of my earlier designs for inspiration and found the solution in one of the abandoned designs. I borrowed an artistic element I created earlier in the form of an atom with a few spinning particles. (I think. I was never much good a science, but I know it looked cool.) I combined the old design with the new, made a few more changes to the typography for good measure, and there you have it… the completed logo.

Oh, one last thing. In the beginning of this post I mentioned how cool it was to work on a logo featuring superheroes, and I know the final version of the logo didn’t end up featuring heroes of any sort, so I’m ecstatic to inform you that I am currently working on new graphics for all the heroes and villains in the game, Most of them are already finished and will pop up and help you from time to time. I will be doing a live steam tutorial featuring my process for creating one of these heroes this Friday 8/31/12 11:00 Arizona time. Until then, here is a rough sketch of the logo featuring the Super Six to tide you over.

I usually try and share a lot of what I’m working on at Broken Bulb and with my personal work. If you’re interested you can visit my website at http://www.serkworks.com/ or follow me on facebook http://www.facebook.com/serkworks

See you on the interwebs!

More to come VERY soon, so stay in touch!