Sardines promo banner

Blog posted by Ste Pickford on Thu, 03 Oct 2013
Subject: Magnetic Billiards: Sardines

Last night I finished this promotinal banner image for 'Sardines', the new version of Magnetic Billiards that we've been working on for iOS.

This is hot on the heels of the first blurred screenshot of the game we posted earlier in the week. I've spent a bit of time this morning updating bits of the website and Facebook page with this new teaser banner, but I was quite pleased with the image so thought I'd blog it here as well.

Despite being made up purely of actual assets from the game itself (I didn't draw anything specifically for this banner), it took me bloomin' ages to make this image. I'm so used to making video game graphics where there are such tight restrictions on the size of each element, and where every graphic is drawn separately, that I get a bit lost when I've just got complete freedom to make an image without any technical limitations. I must have spent hours moving and scaling and rotating each of the characters, then changing my mind and nudging them back a few pixels. I'll probably look at it tomorrow and decide they all need moving a little bit more all over again.

Although the game is a really, really pretty version of Magnetic Billiards, based around the Sardines mode, I've actually put the game itself right in the background of this banner. I don't think coloured balls alone make a very compelling stand alone image - even though they look beautiful moving in the game. The six characters are all 'helpers' that appear in the game and talk to the player and help and advise you in various ways. I thought they'd make more interesting as promotional imagery, so I stuck them right at the front.

My initial idea was to go for an ensemble-movie type poster, where you get a line of faces all poking out behind each other. Three of the 'helpers' came from the original unfinished and unreleased PC prototype of the game (with a lot of extra work animating them for this game). The other three are, following the tradition we started in Blueprint, the development team - myself, John Pickford and Bone. Well, very stylised versions of us anyway. My teeth are not that white!

(Click the image to see a bigger version.)

Tags: graphics, promo, banner, advert, character design, photoshop

Follow up post: Sardines Icon test

Predecessor post: Sardines coming into focus

View the softography page for Magnetic Billiards: Sardines »

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