Scratch Carnival

As Art Director for the Incubation Department at VGW, I was a central team member in leading the discussions around new product development. During the 3rd quarter of 2019, my team engaged in a 5 day design sprint to help resolve a particular business question for the company. The outcome of the 5 day sprint and the subsequent months of development and concept testing was the production of the casual scratch card game ‘Scratch Carnival’.

It was my role as Art Director to oversee the development of the app UI, Game content and Characters, as well as early-stage marketing material. I was supported by a great small team of UI and 2D artists, and established relationships with companies in Ukraine, Russia and Mexico to assist in the large amount of game concepts we were needing to execute.

It was also my role as a core creative member on the team to concept new games themes and gameplay. Working closely with the development team, we played with concepts that would capture the anticipation, discovery, and reward that traditional scratch cards offered, and looked to leverage the technology available to us to push the experience and create fun for our players.

The project was a great wealth of experience, pushing my function beyond just pure art direction into areas of game design and production management really uncovered a wealth of knowledge for me. We leveraged creative practices such as divergent and convergent thinking in conjunction with focused mood boards and theming mind maps and tables to create some unique game experiences with in our product.

The first creative decision I was quite proud of was the idea to move the artwork direction away from traditional scratch cards (often kept simple and limited in fidelity), and to use the style of high end cartoon art being utilised in social games such as Matching-ton Mansion and Homescapes. The decision allowed us to move toward creating a robust social game that felt like it belonged in the google play store and apple store, and helped us focus on an aesthetic that resonated with our key target demographic.

The other achievement I am quite proud of, was the development of the scratch card word game theme in bubble bounty. We had a game mechanic developed by one of our talented devs, where the player would search for words within a grid of letters and identify them by drawing a line over the word with their finger. The mechanic was a take on the classic crossword scratch card. One of the theme concepts I devised was a bubble underwater concept where the words were in bubbles that would pop when the finger drew across them. The experience was a solid one, coupled with haptic feedback and delightful sound effects we sourced.