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[Stegersaurus]

Ahh... the lost art of box art. Or at least, it's lost to me! I'm working on this XBLIG game and I've been struggling all day with the layout of the box. How the camera should be, how text should be/how big text is, what kind of enemies (if any) the box should include and where. It's been driving me up the wall . I haven't drawn anything in final, just prototyped different boxes using Blender and some high-res game art. Any opinions or advice would be quite welcomed, or if you just have a favorite to help me narrow down my choices that's dandy as well.



Thanks for any feedback/opinions!

[Jrsquee]

there are a lot of colors, and no significant theme or composition.  you need to have a unifying design idea, some sort of emotion or mechanic or essential (the pure essence of your game) thing.  look at good boxes and see why they work.  color choice, composition, subject, titling, &c &c.

[tim-bo-jay]

Hey mate, gotta say I can't wait to see this on the XBLIG Market Place :D

As for the box art I must admit all 3 designs have one major issue, their cluttered. Keep in mind the box art you get to view on the Xbox Market Place isn't very big, personally I'd recommend picking maybe a signature monster and focusing on that or just having the main character on the front. You'll be selling your games mayhem and madness on the 4 screen shots Microsoft give you, the box art should just tempt people to have a look and I personally thing you need something simple and eye catching for that over hectic and messy.

As for the name it's a big long and thus seems to dominate the box art, it may be worth shortening it down to "M5" or something for the box art, keep in mind Microsoft puts the name of the game next to the box art so having the full name on there isn't key.

I hope this has been some kind of help and a free copy of the game in return is all the thanks I expect <_< *ahem* what? worth a try! lol

[aeiowu]

it's cluttered, lacks hierarchy, needs a lot of work on the typography as well as the overall composition.

i took a bit of a break and popped this out:



It's roughly the same layout and the text isn't much better but the idea here is that simplicity and using as few elements as possible will be much clearer than trying to do everything all at once. maybe if you gave us some high-res character assets and etc. (like your avatar) and gave us a few sentences about the game then i might give it another shot in earnest, i dig the character design enough that i already have a couple ideas for something cool.

[Robotwo]

that's one Mighty 'M'

[kyn]

You should probably take advantage of the fact that your characters look like little squares and henceforth perfectly fitting the box' dimensions, like so:



Just turn the box cover into a face itself.

[Stegersaurus]

Wow! I didn't expect such a response! Thanks everybody!

Jrsquee: My goal was "tension in combat", but I can see how that can easily be lost. A lot of bright, happy colors get in the way and since I didn't do any lighting in the scene setups, the feel can easily get lost.

tim-bo-jay: Cluttered seems to be a common response, and my long name doesn't help. One thing to note about the name M5 is that for a name like that, it actually has to work the opposite way. The XBox marketplace gives us a limit of 30 characters for game names, and MMMMM has about 37 characters. So that means I'd have to submit the game under a shorter name like MMMMM if I used that name, or remove one of the long words like Monster, Medieval, or Madness which all use up 7 or more characters each.

aeiowu: I like the feel of your design, save for two issues (one being major). First is that giant M is really hard to make out as an M. The other issue is the maze. I have "mazes" as the title suggests, but the game is more of a maze like how Diablo has a maze. It's more about exploration than "solving" a linear path. I find placemat-style mazes dull gameplay wise, and I've never downloaded a video game that had a placemat-style maze as the driving component of its box art. Even so, I've made a sheet of a few of my high res sprites (just a small subset, not all of them).
http://www.stegersaurus.com/MMMMM/images/highresenemysheet.png

kYn: Wow, I did NOT think of that at all, but I find it ever so clever! The upressing style you did works a lot better with Bones' sprites than my own, but I do like using the face as box art, and I've whipped something together using my own art which I think works well.


I think for the kind of boxes I make, a shortening of the name may be in order. I've made 2 new boxes, one before I saw kYn's post and one after.... I'll let you figure out which is which

[gimymblert]

I really love the art style and i think those Two last boxarts really do credit to it! 

The first seems to convey more what the game is about, while the second have a very strong feeling attach to it. But as a gamer i prefer the second one but the first one would intrigue me more to play because i can frame the kind of game it is.

good work 

[Damian]

That second one is win! so is KYN's. They both make me go all teary eye like.

[aeiowu]

second one! second one! 

[Inanimate]

DO THE SECOND ONE.

[Lurk]

Your title is a bit busy, and clear on clear is not very good for readability on a game box.



You should try to think of your title more as a symbol/brand. Your first drafts were interesting- they really conveyed what your game was supposed to be about, which the big face alone doesn't. Also, whenever you have characters on the box, it's a good idea to have them either look at the potential customer, or use their stares to direct the eyes toward important points in the composition (action scene, object etc).

[michael]

 


the enemies should now be surrounding these two from the shadows

[kyn]

Your first drafts were interesting- they really conveyed what your game was supposed to be about, which the big face alone doesn't.

That's the whole paradigm of box art designs, a push back and forth between trying to make it visually interesting and/or trying to appeal to a more broad audience. And most of the time both aspects collide. (See Ico US and J box art. Or the Final Fantasy US and J).

In the end I think it's a business/marketing decision against an aesthetic decision. There's no right answer I guess, unless you can balance both aspects correctly, of course.



And I'm glad you liked the idea Stegersaurus

[Renton]

My question is:
Do you have to use the Indiana Jones font?

[Stegersaurus]

My head splode!  

I don't think I could do Lurk's concept justice in my own clunsy style. I agree, it's hard to find that balance between conveying the gameplay versus more symbolic appeal. I really do still like the "cleverness" of the symbolic approach with just the face. Lurk's proposed box is beautiful, but also reminds me a lot of other games, and could end up having less impact due to its common themes.

If I remember correctly, some things that differ between JP and US markets is how happy or angry characters on the box are. In the US characters often don't smile, but scowl instead... even if they are Kirby. I guess I should be happy my characters lack mouths!

[michael]

i think a mosaic of all the square faces could be very interesting. different sizes all fitting together like a wall with the heros face prominent in the bottom middle

[Lurk]

Kyn- You still have some technical elements that won't change, regardless of what you wish to express:
-Light colored text on light color is hard to read and a bit messy.
-composition has to be thought out, not just throwing things around(like the first examples. You have to build up shapes in pleasant arrangements to keep it readable.

In the examples you linked to, the american boxes were pretty horrible(as they usually are whenever they port a japanese game, it's tradition ) in composition. The Ico box is a particular offender: it has a central character, but it throws everything else on there, with no regard for contrasts or shapes. Add to that the abusive overuse of the outer glow layer on mostly everything, and you got yourself a winner box.

[kyn]

In the examples you linked to, the american boxes were pretty horrible(as they usually are whenever they port a japanese game, it's tradition ) in composition. The Ico box is a particular offender: it has a central character, but it throws everything else on there, with no regard for contrasts or shapes. Add to that the abusive overuse of the outer glow layer on mostly everything, and you got yourself a winner box.

Haha yes. My point with those covers was that an extreme approach to either the aesthetic approach or the marketing approach usually goes wrong.

Regarding Ico and representing the marketing box art, if a parent sees the US box art he probably goes like "shit yes, an angry guy with a club, my kid will love this", but it's fucking atrocious, no one should have that in the cover, it looks horrible.
While representing the aesthetic covers, the Japanese cover, as beautiful as it looks, a parent probably will never think of buying that to his kid: "what's this? a game where you play as De Chirico? my son doesn't want this!". And this probably would kill the sales, at least in western countries.

[tim-bo-jay]

One thing I just wanna throw out there, I know people are saying to consider different things and different types of appeal and so on, but this game has been at the top of the download chart and only just got knocked off the top of the popularity chart on the XBLIG Market Place since it was released:



So yeah...>_>