Playdom/Disney Interactive: Gnome Town
Led Art/UI/UX Design Team of Playdom's Facebook game Gnome Town. The only original Playdom IP to carry the Disney brand name/logo. I established exec pitch documents, the style guide and art direction of the game using personas, which are visual design tools (fictional characters) created to represent the target audience of the game. We created a series of sketches, made iteration refinements, and then ran character art tests with the target audience of the game. The characters and art style that resonated best with the target audience are the ones that are in the game today.
One year later it is still one of Playdom's top games
I ran the character test with fivesecondtest.com I ran the test on the intended target platform and with users that matched our personas and target demographic. The test measured the number of clicks each character received and was displayed in heat map. I ran several variations of the test with the same characters in randomized orders to keep the tests fair and balanced.
These were the winning test characters. This was the first pass at color. Since this game was on a tight schedule it was decided that the characters should be simple in design to facilitate rapid creation of assets. A basic color palette was created to describe basic highlights, shadows and depth.
Next came scale (and a large debate) I wanted the Gnomes to be a little over 6" for our game - including hats. I wanted both Gnome and NPC supporting characters to be delightfully cute. The visual elements of the game should give a sense of magic, escapist fantasy and capitalize on the psychology of cute. I even wanted the Game mechanics to reflect that, I wanted the Gnomes to chop dandelions instead of trees (girls pick flowers, they don't chop trees) and for the fruits and veggies to follow real super market trends (ex: baby carrots) and be "chubby" in appearance, using vivid happy colors, and look like they might actually burst.
UI Elements - Game Canvas size: 760 x 620 px was my recommendation for our Facebook game canvas dimensions (including friend ladder) this was based on our player's display resolution limitations. The second largest group of Facebook users (22%) were still on 1024 x 768 display resolution. I personally expect this number to grow as it's the native screen resolution of the iPad. See full Flash Game Canvas spec
All GnomeTown artwork is Copyright © 2008-2013 Playdom, Inc., ©Disney Interactive. All rights reserved.
