Once, we created the ultimate space adventure crew for Meta
Years ago, Meta bet big on augmented reality with Meta Spark, and at SweetRush we worked on a project that included e-learning courses, explainer videos and interactive games starring a space crew sailing through the universe in search of adventure and scientific discoveries.
Sketching our way to the crew
Every character starts on paper. Well, on my iPad screen, using Procreate. We were asked for diverse, positive and imaginative characters.
These are the sketches that made it through the filter, out of the dozens we produced. At this stage, variety was what mattered. A crew this diverse needs strong silhouettes so you can tell who is who at a glance, even at a small size inside a game interface. As in every project, the characters changed quite a lot once we landed them in Illustrator.
From Procreate pencil to Illustrator vector
The sketches were a hit with the Meta team, and at first many of the vector illustrations looked a lot like them. But then many characters changed in size, gender and ethnicity.
All of them wear the Meta Spark badge, united by a common space mission. The color palette may look limited, but by combining it with whites, blacks and greys we made it feel much richer.
Why character design matters in games
In this interactive experience, the characters told the story before a single line of dialogue appeared.
A good cast does more than carry the company’s message: it builds the brand, conveys the company’s personality, creates a more relaxed learning environment and makes the message easier to digest and more memorable for the audience.
If you’re looking for character design for a game, an app or a brand, send us an email with a few lines about your project. We’d be more than happy to chat and make great things together.
Illustration and character design by Alejandro Milà.