This is the second post about life inside an indie game studio from Colombia. We talk about our challenges, our need to focus, all the hardships as well as all the good things that we go through as game developers.
Our experience as an inexperienced Game Studio
CHAPTER 2: DESIGNING THE LOGO
(I accidentally deleted this one, this is a repost)
So changes begin. First change, and the hardest of all, is to define what our business will be from now on. We decided that we would now focus all of our efforts into becoming a game studio working on our own IPs. Yep, another boldy move, but very satisfying. Working on your own stuff feels so much better, and somehow, it just brings a lot of morale to the team. Work for hire is also cool, but we will just hold it for a while.
With this new burst of energy within the team, we wanted to refresh the whole thing. So, in order to truly feel like new, a new name and image needed to be created. We wanted a name that can be easily pronounced in any language, one that would be short and also represent our hometown, Barranquilla. We are a Mobile game studio, and we are from Barranquilla, Colombia. So, we simply took both concepts and added them together: MObile (Games) from BAQ . Now, BAQ is our town’s airport code. Somehow, using airport codes is becoming a trend…sounds short and cool for some places, others just sound weird (Toronto: YYZ, Panama: PTY, still trying to decipher those two).
Next would be the Logo. Ok, this one was quite a bit harder. For those of you unfamiliar to our hometown, Barranquilla’s main touristic attraction is the Carnival (Carnaval de Barranquilla). The Carnaval is an explosion of colors and dances, and booze of course, and you´re all welcome to visit us during those times. We wanted to use some of that heritage and apply it to our new purpose. Exploring the traditional dance groups and their color schemes, we chose the “Danza del Torito” (The Little Bull’s Dance). The Torito uses primary colors, with a strong cultural reference to our country and our city’s flag colors: Yellow, Red, Blue, Green, as well as Black and a star.
Our first try-outs would include the shape of the bull, and Andres, our lead designer, experimented combining the colors and the shape of the bull into creating something original. However, none of the tests would satisfy us. They were too complex; they felt excessively “tropical”; and the bull is already being used by thousands of companies (Red, you know, is pretty common, hah).
After feeling disappointed, and almost ditching the idea entirely, Victor (me), came to the rescue, and said: “Well, why don’t we just take an element from it and use it. Let´s take the eye, and get rid of the rest”. Andres, who had already chosen the font, took the bull’s eye, and put inside the letter Q. It felt damn right!
Nevertheless, there was still something missing. There must me something else, something that gives it some more life, more “Tropic” (but not too much), and so far Yellow, Red and Black didn’t feel quite enough. Now Andres to the rescue! He changed the color of the letter Q from Black, to the Blue from El Torito. And that was it. We then sent samples to our WhatsApp contacts as a survey, and half an hour later, the winning design was chosen.
Do you like our stories? You can also follow us at: https://www.facebook.com/mobaqgames
www.mobaq.co
You May Also Like
