Inside Star Citizen: Expanding Branding

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:01

   one of the major mandates of our Evergreen programming is to highlight and explore the works of as many teams contributing to the creation of our universe is possible and on this continuing road to Alpha 323 4.0 and Beyond we periodically detour onto the proverbial side streets if you would and dedicate some time to those aspects you might not discover following the development of any other game so on this week's show I'm proud to highlight a team dedicated to bringing a creative flourish visual consistency and contextual meaning to the various companies factions and societies of the persistent Universe The Branding team from cig Montreal hell yeah let's go all right um where to

2. 00:00:55

   start I joined the team in January about 2 years ago at was I was coming in from an experience at another company where I had set up the first branding team for a video game which was a really interesting experience so when I heard about the uh the opportunity to do it for Star Citizen and build a branding team for a project like that was something that is you know you don't want to pass up on when I stepped into the first first few months doing you know a bit of a due diligence looking at the state of um what we have in the game already in terms of branding logos the different manufacturers and all the Brands the factions 10 years worth of material being put into the game often being done by you know different artists or different parties and for different reasons also you know there was just a a a wide variety of styles there would be

3. 00:01:43

   a lot of like different interpretations for a single brand and that was something that I noticed right away and I wanted to tackle as soon as I joined the team is to try and bring some a unifying Vision a bit more consistency to you know just help support the Star Citizen narrative also to augment greatly uh in terms of immersions and that was something that I noticed right away and I wanted to tackle as soon as I joined the [Music] team in-game branding is not only about defining like creating logos and nice

4. 00:02:31

   posters and cute little signs we get involved with character design uh ships you know creating the manufacturers for the ships we touch marketing We Touch web it's just such a wide range of different applications and topics that we that we go through I think it's uh it's as important as any other parts of the uh of the game it creates a brand cohesion and a really good uh immersion for the player if it comes to yeah obviously like Brands and logos you know if it's a ship you know make it look real professional like it's a you know like in real life like a fancy car company or something like that you know well branding is an important part of the the environment development you know developing the locations I think it

5. 00:03:19

   helps a lot with immersion one of the things that we've tackled uh recently is some navigational signage for for the landing zone so you know putting up maps putting up signage different assets that we add to the game to help the player understand his environment understand the gameplay understand the locations story The Narrative it adds a visual component to the narrative uh to create a more impactful story so you have uh the brand like the The Narrative that people know but then with the visuals we can add an extra layer to it in start citizen especially for the manufacturers you know everything revolves around ships and the manufacturers are very important and their core to uh the gam playay and the identity of the game and I noticed that you know a lot of these very important Brands didn't have that

6. 00:04:08

   unifying Vision that we were looking for so Mari was a new brand that we created which was um basically a performance division of of MK so when you look at marai we start off with a brand in positioning um the brand bio so a history of the brand basically a little bit what they're about uh a tagline so this is where you know we're collaborating with the narrative team to to come up with these uh information for this and then that is the first the starting point that's all part of the uh the brand style guide a style guide is for everyone to really get to understand the company and we you try to keep it simple but you put all the elements you need like the logos the colors you're allowed to use the

7. 00:04:58

   typography that goes with that company even shapes every company has colors if the primary color is blue let's say you can you can't go out and do like branding for that company or make it like red you know so we're all trying to like tie everything together to make sure everybody's on the same page what's interesting about Drake is is one of the first brands that I had to interact with when I joined the company first thing I did was research a little bit about the brand and noticed that there was a lot of multiple versions and interpretations of the brand that was the first one that we had to make a hard call on you know what this brand is and how how do we Define it so Drake we wanted to bring it in a little bit closer to the essence of the brand it's more uh not the black sheep but the

8. 00:05:48

   outcast if you will in the manufacturers so it's always tried to get in with the big boys at Fleet week but it's never managed hence why they have their defense con um a little bit on the side um so we wanted to tie into that and wanted to have that not that evil vibe to it but that you know the outcast Vibe a little bit rebellious um so the black and red was an obvious choice and it's something that we had already in the game for defense con and I thought that worked better than anything else that we had um previously produced same thing we're looking at uh Crusader we noticed that ships are using uh red and gray branding on the ships for Crusader um if you visit Horizon there's a a a showroom that they have there that's completely all black and white if you walk around the halls on aizon you notice there's uh some

9. 00:06:36

   branding for crusador that is blue and white so we had again multiple interpretations of the same brand and we wanted to unify that bring it in a little bit more so we started looking at the brand itself what was interesting what felt right with its the essence that was um you know put forward by narrative and the and in the lore and also you know through the community and we uh came up with the version of Crusader that we have now so obviously touching these Brands you know 10 years in uh on a project there's a lot of history on the game you know meet some resistance and you know you got to be careful and how far you go into updating the brands even if it's for the better it's always good to respect you know the work that's been done prior but uh all in all uh very good experience uh so far and I think we're making some good

10. 00:07:22

    progress on a lotes in addition to making all the branding for you for the players we uh also make stuff for us working on tools as well this one of the things that I noticed when I joined is we didn't have a proper uh channel to communicate to everyone freely and openly and in in a way that would you know encourage the devs and everybody on the different various teams to actually use these tools these style guides and these resources that we are we're creating for them so we uh came up with the idea of creating a brand catalog so the brand catalog is for in-house so it's uh it's the documents that will be used for all the teams where the whole of the information for all the manufacturer Brands mostly will

11. 00:08:13

    be found and you will have downloadable links for all the assets so everything will become super cohesive uh for in house and also when everything comes out in game and in marketing uh everything will have the same all the manufacturer Brands will have the same look and feel so we starting it off with the manufacturers obviously they are front and center but um it will grow grow into you know all the rest of the brands that we we see in the in the in the universe pyro was I think is one of my favorite mandates we've done so far for The Branding team um not only because uh we're touching a specific aspect um of branding that is not like not often

12. 00:09:01

    talked about also because uh we have the right team members to tackle this sort of mandate and it was a lot of fun for it because the team was really excited about that graffiti is another part of uh of my background which uh me and Max uh worked a lot on this aspect in back in the days in our lives so we had a lot of fun building uh the graffiti structure each graffiti style were really exist in graffiti style from around the world and uh we had to reproduce as much accurately possible the uh tags uh throwups uh murals or any aspect of the realness of graffiti which that was a lot of fun basically like we drew all the graffiti and we we made their space

13. 00:09:51

    look really uh grimy and uh the signage you know the Relic signage uh but lots of graffiti too lots of like faded dirty layers and layers of stuff on the walls so it was really amazing to see how uh they they took some visuals that existed that the environment team had created and they came in and went over this with the different graffiti so they really developed like all the layers that you need for it to feel real that was something that uh you know is very rich and is extremely fun to bring forward with the visuals and branding and at that point it's it's more than branding it becomes like storytelling basically right you're telling a story through all the elements that you're

14. 00:10:38

    putting on the walls and in the environment that help sell the lore and again augment immersion and the experience for the player defining the factions that we found in like in Checkmate station by the Rend ready was a lot of fun creating that the identity of a faction a gang right um in space in in in a deric abandoned station in the middle of nowhere I think you really get a Vibe when you when you get there when you enter the The Zone like right away you know it's it's Rough and Ready they made the logo like a big sculpture so I thought this was pretty cool from like where it started to where it's at now I think the graffiti and the sculpture does it mostly had the opportunity to work with

15. 00:11:29

    the character team to define a little bit of the uh tattoos that go in line with the direction that we had you know for the type of faction we wanted this this gang to look like I started the brainstorm around tattoos which were all uh bring a bit of like uh violence and of contrast on parts of the skins of the character design so we had specific references we had as targets and a special feel that we wanted to have for this gang because there's not only one gang there is multiple and they all need to have you know each their own unique identity there's a part of me who always wanted to be a tattoo artist but I think this kind of work is uh is a work of art uh by itself so uh the character artists really managed to bring a lot of the visual identity we started from all the

16. 00:12:19

    polishing was uh really the character artist to manage and great job well to me I think the The Branding side is uh often looked over and I think we like we're building a team here to put an emphasis on The Branding side every little things the little graffiti and you know the logos and the signage the navigational signage everything I think we're trying to push it a little further it's all about making one step closer to the real world which we're surrounded every day by branding and either textures typography everything I think uh we're the cherry on top of the sunde I think it makes I think that brande makes the whole game feel more real and I think this is where we can

17. 00:13:10

    also develop like this emotional connection to everything that you see in games and uh everything that the player uses buys and interacts with the opportunity to do graphic design and advertisement fake ad ement within a game so rich and deep as Star Citizen is I mean I don't know a graphic designer that wouldn't want to like to contribute or participate or be part of a team like this I mean there's so much so much variety there's so much to do the lore and the narrative is so rich it's just a NeverEnding stream of opportunity to create really cool stuff

18. 00:13:59

    so what did we learn this week well hopefully we learned that branding is for more than just marketing uses it's a tool and an Artistry that can apply to many aspects of universe creation including signage personal identity and maintaining a universe of internal consistency that doesn't break immersion now don't forget that our Lunar New Year cor more and the associated freefly events all start today so you can Mosey on over to the robertsspaceindustries.com website for details for insid Star Citizen I'm Jared Huckabee thanks for letting us share the process of game development with you and we'll see you all here next week

19. 00:15:14

    ch