Concept Exploration: Realm Games

Realm Games is a concept for an virtual tabletop gaming community. Recent years have brought to light what many people have experienced long before the ongoing pandemic, isolation. Digital spaces can make the inaccessible accessible, they can help promote equity, especially when paired with intention. Although gaming can be viewed as frivolous, it can also be a tool to build community, and in a digital space, community without geographical restriction. These ideas are what have spurred this project.

Realm games is host to digital table tops for people to gather and adventure together or compete against one another. Its a place to roll dice, take chances, and make friends.

Thank you for checking out this concept-in-development.

Branding Evolution:

I try to let myself dump out ideas, sketches, lock-ups, palettes, etc., and then cut away all of the stuff that isn't working for me.

Sometimes I can get a bit fixated and allow an idea to get overly complex, but I can usually see the error after putting it down for a bit and then doubling back.

I found a method of making through my painting process. I noticed that if I had one canvas that I was working on it would become an endless frustrating project, but if I had a number of canvases I could cycle through, I avoided all of the frustration. I could move on, make progress somewhere else, and with that shift of focus I could eventually work my way back to the first canvass and the solution would almost always reveal itself. The hardest part is letting go and not being precious.

I started building a logo in Illustrator using this image (left) as a reference. I was shooting for a D20 in the air above a gaming table, with the angular cast shadow below it. I like the concept but its too-involved and I had a hard time with the vertically oriented rectangle shape. I couldn't force it into a square and get the effect that I wanted.

I decided to move forward and play a bit with palette and type.

I knew from the beginning that I wanted part of this concept to give the user a light and dark mode, so I thought it would be helpful to see how these elements functioned on those representative backgrounds.

I really wasn't happy with how my logo looked, especially the dice, so I decided to go back and rework it. I tried to think a bit more deeply about how light plays on a D20 in three dimensions.

I had a bit of a breakthrough with the design on the upper-right.

After that it all just kind of fell into place

To get the ball (or dice) rolling I decided to build out a sign up user flow. I wanted to build both mobile and desktop breakpoints at the same time so that there wasn't any disconnect in continuity of patterns I was implementing. Because I had already made the decision to make a light and dark mode, I included both from the get-go as well.

At this point I connected up some of my UI elements for a prototype, with the plan of conducting some user testing.

Please feel free to check out the two prototype user-flows

by clicking the buttons below this caption, and come back soon to see the next iteration of this concept after I refine from the insights I'm discovering through ongoing research.

AND thanks again for stopping by!