Mechanica: Behind the Scenes – Graphic Design

Spring Yu is a senior at Dartmouth College and worked on Mechanica’s graphic design and concept art

At the start of the year, most of my time was spent preparing for the Mechanica Kickstarter campaign. This was the first time I was involved in Kickstarting a game for Resonym, or anything really, so I was able to gain experience working on advertising focused and web materials. There were a lot of visual images that had to be created specifically for the Kickstarter launch, as well as during the campaign itself, including informational banners, an online version of the rulebook, and various promotional images.

The more interesting challenges I faced were related to converting print materials into formats that would go online. While physical rulebooks generally come with pages to flip, online, information is read while scrolling down a web page. Instead of rules being organized to fit into a square shaped booklet, online, images and text are vertically stacked and must be readable on computers, tablets, and smartphones. The difficulties of adapting the rulebook were mitigated by the fact that our assets and instructions were already finalized, and most work dealt with standardizing how things were laid out. Since the rulebook is mostly color coordinated, visually separating sections of the online version was also easier to do.

(print vs online)

Kickstarting Mechanica required a lot more continuous work than I had expected. Because a Kickstarted game has a more involved relationship between the design team and the public, even during the campaign, new images needed to be created based on how the backers responded to the game. Overall, working on the design side of Mechanica was very exciting, and allowed me to tackle new challenges almost every day.

 

Spring Yu