Fumbers is something I've been working on for quite some time now. It's a game that lives in the village of Casualgames and should provide a fun time for anyone who can count to nine and have an index-finger. I've really tried hard to make a game that transcends any age- or gender-barriers, but I'll leave it up to you to decide if I've succeeded or not. The game features a straightforward gaming-mechanic based on memory/reaction and some really colorful graphics. I'm actually planning to use this thread as sort of a retrospective making-of in case you would like to catch a glimpse of the creative process behind the title. Oh, and the game will eventually sell for $ 1.99.
screenshots OK, before starting on the "how I got there" story, I figured it made sense to show a few screenshots of the final game. 1. Regular game screen - 2. Additional score between levels - 3. Bonus Level In the next post I will share some details regarding the creation of the different backgrounds. Edit: The Fumbers site is now up and running: www.fumbers.com.
Background Trying something different Normally I'm the kind of guy that adheres to the "less is more" mantra. I love clean lines, minimal excess clutter both in physical products I use and in user-interfaces. Despite all this I decided to take the visuals for Fumbers in the exact opposite direction. Why? Well, as I really wanted to make a game that even my parents could play it should be as friendly as possible. To me home-made equals friendly and my initial idea was to make something that could almost be from a scrapbook. No, I don't particularly like scrapbooks myself as they are too cluttered for my liking, and let's face it, I'm a guy*... Nevertheless, this was the direction I wanted to take the project. I quickly decided on pastel-crayons for the backgrounds. My first mockup was based on a picture taken in Valsøyfjord, Norway. This is the place my wife grew up, the scenery is beautiful and I actually had a picture on my iPhone suitable for background work. This is what I came up with: Now, this actually worked out very well, and while I wasn't 100% sure I would use this particular background the concept seemed sound. All in all things seemed to be running very smoothly with the project. Unfortunately it wouldn't continue that way... * No offense to anyone, but all the scrappers I know are women.
Numbers Schmumbers! OK, so I already had a well defined style and workflow ready for creating the backgrounds, now it was on to the number-pieces. These are the heart of the game and I wanted them to have something of a "physical" appearance, like board game pieces. My first idea was to make them into this gold/metalic numbers that I felt would give a cool look. I chose the font Engravers MT as this is inspired by a physically created typeface. Then it was on to Photoshop to cook things up a bit: Now, when I had finished the initial numbers I felt they were rather nice, but when I tried to combine them with the background it felt... ...bland. I also figured that from what I could see they wouldn't work particularly well if the background was busier, and I had a few motives that might not gel well with my metal-numbers at all. So, it was back to the drawing-board. Now, I love fonts, I can spend hours in MyFonts.com and Fonts.com to find new and exciting fonts for future use. One of the fonts that had caught my eye was a quirky little thing called Charming Charlie PB. This was a really fun font, and I figured it could be just the thing to further "friendlylize" my app. I went for a bright green color this time round and did all the "fancy" stuff through the blend-modes in Photoshop: The method, for those of you curious: Gradient Overlay + Bevel and Emboss (with both contour and texture) I was actually rather pleased with this result and left it like this for quite some time before revisiting the number-pieces. I would eventually decide that it was simply too quirky, but that's for another post...
From Schmumbers to Fumbers While I actually liked those green numbers a lot I did after some time start to think that they might actually be too quirky. Also, from a design point I had removed myself from the idea of physical-pieces. I figured it was time to rethink the design. I went back to my original idea of board-game pieces and followed this through to a much more logical conclusion. I started of with an actual circle, now round playing-pieces, what a revolution! Those of you really paying attention might also notice that I went back to the Engravers MT font. It made perfect sense as I essentially engraved the number into the circle. I then created different textures and colors for the pieces through filtering and some brush-work in Photoshop. Finally the blending-modes took care of the rest. The finished article(s) both looked and felt right and are identical to the one in the Fumbers soon to be released.
Thanks Icekilla nice to see someone's actually reading this thread! I hope to have some video-stuff up soon, should be easier to get the jest of it then.
Charlie was just too charming In the meanwhile however, you'll have to settle for these posts... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- While I was very pleased with how the numbers turned out I couldn't quite let Charming Charlie go. Actually I liked it so much that I decided to use it for the title(s). As I wanted a hand-made look my first idea was to use the old trick of hand-tracing the font. Unfortunately I felt that it became just too rough and decided against it. After all, there was no one breathing down my neck telling me what to do, so I decided to make a fancier version with some of the normal Photoshop tricks: Now I gave myself a good pat on the back, cause I figured it was well deserved. I had found my font, or so I thought, and the following look was the very last thing to be changed: As you can see I've even used Charming Charlie for some of the other text on the title-screen. Looking at it now it does strike me as something of an odd choice but at the time it felt right. I still think the font works fine for the headlines on purely visual terms. The main reason I changed it in the end was more of a contextual decision (the hand-crafted look).
