Videogame Concept, “Type Tiff” and Character Design
One of my college projects challenged us to design a video game from head-to-toe: characters, controls, product design, marketing, and more! Within 5 weeks I came up with Type Tiff - a beat ‘em up fighting game where personifications of well-known fonts would fight to see who would be the strongest, and Player 1’s favorite go-to typeface.
In order to have the largest number of possible moves I chose to use the PlayStation 4 and Xbox 1 consoles. At the time I didn’t know that one game disc couldn’t run on both, but it was still fun to see how I could mash both properties for the product design.
The concept as a whole revolves around well-know, everyday typefaces breaking out of their confined alphabet-boxes and out to the real world. I thought an “in your face” geurilla approach would have the biggest impact: larger-than-life murals would be plastered around cities where these designers and computer wiz’s would live; and the characters’ game stats would prompt interest in how they, along with the font name and colorful character, would all connect.
For the poster advertising I utilized the recognizability of an open window you’d have on a computer desktop. By using it as a shape the characters came out of it subtly showed the meta dynamic of the game while also introducing possible players to the stylized world with recognizable pieces of everyday interfaces.
Along with fun puns and information about the typefaces, I used elements from the history of each to inform design choices about the character. Everything from the meme-tastic to the intellectual was used to create a fun, diverse, and unique look to the base group as a whole.
I would love to one day explore more characters and interesting facts about the fonts we use everyday. Personifying them was such a blast, and having the easter egg of using a font I designed myself felt like it brought the entire project full-circle.
