Fire With Fire: Promotional Poster for PAX 2013

Well, if you haven't heard by now, we'll be showcasing Fire With Fire at Penny Arcade Expo this weekend! Theory mentioned it on his site a while ago. Should be a lot of fun seeing all the other games other people have as well.

We'll be handing out posters for attendees so we needed some good old fashioned promo art to show off what the game is about; you know, get people interested in finding out more.

Started with some sketches. Went through a lot of different ideas of how to give a feel of the overall game with a single image. I tried everything to think of worthwhile poster layouts, from a simple grid of all of the Creeps, to looking up compositions from the Lion King (don't ask.). Eventually I settled on the idea of two opposing 'worlds' showing the Creeps and the Towers, separated by a logo of sorts in the center.

I liked the version with the Creeps up top better; they're the stars of the show after all. The first one one is a little too Heaven/Hell...

Theory wanted a slight shift in the logo fonts/colors so those were changed a bit.

The first versions looked plain, so I added more Creeps/Towers in the background and rearranged some things in the composition.

Once that was done, the lines were redone in Illustrator for a more precise feel.

As for the logotype, I didn't actually have the font that Theory wanted to use so I had to recreate the letters with shapes in Illustrator. Fortunately, two of the three words were identical so it could have been worse! I made a black and white version for more general use.

And the version for the poster. Slanted for emphasis, of course.

From there it was a matter of repainting the colors in Photoshop within the new linework to complete the poster. It wasn't as bad since I had basically already made most of the color decisions in the earlier versions. We're hoping to have posters as well as other souvenirs to hand out for people passing by our booth, so I think everyone will have something to take with them by the end of the weekend. Oh, and of course you're free to, you know, play the actual game while you're there.

See you in Boston!