Con Art!

Wait so, if I'm making art for cons, does that make me a con artist?

Yes?

Thanks. I had hoped so.

Anyway, Austin Game Conference and the Boston Festival of Indie Games are fast approaching, and that means that we need a lot of stuff designed that's not going into the game. Decor for our booths, t-shirts, business cards, all that fun stuff. And I've been peeling off into the world of CMYK for a while to get a lot of that done.

First, if we want to be rollin' up lookin' fly at the conferences, we need a big color-y thing to serve as a visual anchor for our booths. That thing turned out to be a large printed background banner:

Fun fact: I've been working is Photoshop for just about 20 years now, and working on that banner was the first time I got the error message, "Cannot save file because file is too large."

We also got some business cards! The back of the card is an illustration, and then on the front, each team member got a customized hero next to their info:

This is how I want you to remember me, internet.

The banner art and business card art will also be good to have for other marketing purposes. Our current blog banner with the cliff & heroes has done its share of heavy lifting, and soon we'll be able to use more finished pieces of art in place of it.

Every legit company's gotta have a t-shirt too:

I was all set to just stick the logo on a black shirt and be done with it in five minutes, but Nate was all, "We can do better." And I'm like, "Really? 'Cause... I could just, you know, be done in five minutes." And he's like, "I believe in you." And now we have a better shirt than we would have otherwise!

Then to fill out the booth, Nate's making a couple of kiosks out of wood, on top of which we'll have laptops to demo the game (the kiosks will look sweet, we'll photograph them when they're done), AND we sprang for a big old gorgon cut out of foam-board to keep us company:

Cheaper than you might think for a 6-foot tall Gorgon.

She/he/it will just be joining us in Austin, since there's not really a good way to get a large-but-kinda-fragile cutout halfway across the country overnight. The booth banner and kiosks should actually be pretty portable though. We'll be scrambling to get straight from AGC to BFIG the next day, but at least it's a "Oh man this is going to suck" scramble and not a "We literally have no idea how we're going to pull this off" scramble.

It feels weird to be working on this stuff instead of the actual game, but a lot of it we'll be able to use at future conferences as we get closer to launch. And having a cool game doesn't mean a lot if no one knows it exists, so marketing and getting the game "out there" is a necessary part of this whole process.