ICON : Fashion Avatar Universe
The Ready Games asked me to become the Creative Lead for their avatar mobile tech project. ICON was a fashion mobile game app that served as proof of concept for the avatar customization tech developed for The Ready Games Network. I was tasked with designing the look and feel of the avatars as well as the overall art direction for the game (UI, 3D assets, animations, sound and music). The art design of the app went through several iterations as the product design had to undergo several changes as well.
Competitive research
+ Initial sketches
The product design of ICON was initially social-focussed, as it was conceived at first as a mobile random communications app similar to Chatroulette but with avatars and voxbox system. First step was to research what’s already out there and where we want the design to land relative to our competition. We initially settled on a Disney-esque art style that would cater to our core demographic of Millenials and Gen-Z users.
Initial art design
The brief was simple: create a dreamlike universe where users can become anyone or anything they want and travel around different dream-like worlds to interact with strangers. This initial design was inspired by the children’s book The Little Prince, where the main character in the book travels around tiny planets and meets all kinds of characters in his journey. Similar to The Little Prince, avatars in ICON would live on tiny customizable biospheres, allowing users to be creative and stand out among others.
Initial UI+UX Design
Since the product was fairly simple in terms of functionality, UI was kept fairly minimal as it allowed the world and avatars to become the focal point. A public message feed would appear as stars/planets in the skies to serve as a player counter and to give life to the community.
Back to the drawing board.
After some initial testing, it came to the game designer’s realization that a Chatroulette-style app held little potential for monetization in the long term and wanted to explore the potential of user-generated customizations for avatars. In order to have such a system in place, the avatar system needed to be simplified and optimized for users to easily design their own creations. A simpler design was adopted, and the face was replaced by a flat object dedicated for a 2D texture placement in order to facilitate user-generated face designs.
Fashion focussed.
At this point, ICON had changed into a more fun and colourful fashion-focussed mobile game. The intent was now to further improve the avatar technology and optimize it for user-generated digital goods. The ICON platform was used as a proof of concept for other game developers to potentially integrate this system within their games through The Ready Games Network.
Final Avatar & UI/UX design
In order to complement the more fashion-forward ICON design, the UI & UX was reworked into a more traditional mobile social network app layout. Chatrooms, player feeds and a Store were added to the game.
Final design.
The app was released on the App Store and Play Store in October 2021. Along with it, I had created a video demonstrating all the mechanics and technology behind the ICON avatar system with the intent of showing potential developers and publishers to implement the system within their games.
