Semester Two started off with a lecture about branding from Derek Yates, a course leader at Ravensborurne University. This was to give us a crash course in the concepts of branding since we need to have a wide enough knowledge of it to successfully market and brand our games before the final degree show.
we then went on to create a 'what? How? Why?' for our game, this would help build the structure and story that we want to tell with our game and what we need to expand on to express that effectively.
The first draft was:
What is your game proposition? (description)
Wayfinder is a single player experience about being a guide for your fellow robots in your community, giving them a safe passage in their pilgrimage through the harsh environments.
How do we play it? (emotional)
You will awaken the deactivated robots around the environment, the player is tasked with protecting the robots on a journey while at the same time feeling responsible for them.
Why does the game exist?
you will have an emotional connection to these robots so if they get destroyed, this will invoke an emotional reaction such as empathy with the player. But this will not reset the game and you will have to live with the consequences you have made.
Feedback:
This was well received but extremely 'wordy' Derek elaborated that the usually you need get everything across in 40 seconds since studies show on social media that is the average level of attention people are willing to give new things. but overall it got a strong message across
“Work with the empathy for cold hard steel” -Derek Yates
This contrast of the warmth of empathy against the coldness of a robot is powerful so use it, so in this essence we need to isolate those emotions and experiences into a shorter statement.
Logos & Names:
As well as work on the brand in general he covered some points on logos that will help inspire a direction for me when making logos. in terms of how it connects to the brand and how story can be built into the logo.
the images above expand upon this showing how a rusted and worn down sign help give you an interpretation that this is a small medium to low end gun store and they may be antique guns these are all things you can assume due to the aesthetics of the sign.
so during a group discussions with Derek about our games brand we showed him an early rendition of our logo for the game, this lead to a us reexamining the game we were making and there brand we wanted to produce.
After looking into what our game is, we decided that we needed to change the name to 'The Wayfinder' adding 'the' really brings more attention to the protagonist and how the game focuses on the responsibility of this individual.
The progression of the logo for our game will be continued in a following blog post click here to read more about it.
Conclusion of this workshop:
This was a powerful workshop to understand the importance of a symbol or title being the sole resemblance of your identity. This means that I want to have more iterations of my logo to make sure that the correct connotations are made from the logo and therefore the game is represented correctly by the title I make.