Game logo ideas

We are currently thinking about the logo for our game and we are still not sure how it should look like. It consists of three words (it's name for now is Essence of Horhsal, maybe we'll keep it) that are like - one is on top, on in the middle and one below. The one on top looks a bit more mystical and the one below metallic while the middle one is more normal. The game itself is about a pretty normal guy who gets tricked by a colleague in doing something that not only fires him but also leaves him with a big repair debt (because he hurt his own company he worked for) he has to pay off while looking for clues on how he can get back at his former colleague and show that it wasn't his fault (and also why the other one did it in the first place).
The gameplay itself consists mostly of battles as well as social interactions and something like mini-games in the form of different side jobs (it's like a 1/3 of each with the social aspect a bit higher). There are no dungeons and everything plays in the downtown of a big city with different places to visit there. I'd say it's a mixture between RPG, a bit of fighting game (because of some of the battle system mechanics) and a bit of simulation, inspired by Persona, Yakuza and Catherine with a more mature feel - most characters are in their twenties and thirties.
Are there any tips on how we should make the logo look like? We would make it ourselves, of course.

 

Ideally a logo would be representative of the art direction of the game itself. This, I should think, would be the number one guiding principle for how it should look, and yet it's the only thing you didn't talk about for your game!

I won't give you the standard (and correct and also useful) advice to focus on your gameplay first and get that in order before worrying about silly things like the game's name or logo. Instead, I'll assume you know that and are underway building the game itself and it's coming along well, and that you're now at the point where you need to start producing marketing materials to be able to share the game properly.

Use your game's aesthetic as a guide. Sketch a bunch of ideas out using that guide and share them with the team. Or have the team sit down and share their sketches, and put them all together until you have something you all like.

 

Ah yeah, the style. It's not pixelated but rather a more hand-drawn style like Indivisible uses. And yes, I already have a lot of gameplay mechanics and want to try to find an animator (we'll clearly need one) now.

 

Not just the technique, but the actual direction. If you have art for the game, you must have some sort of guiding principle for it all, right? That same principle should dictate the direction for your logo.

 

It's very hard to give useful advice for your logo without seeing any screenshots. If you need some inspiration, here is a Tumblr with various game logos.

But yeah, like Schneider21 already said, the logo should fit the style of your game. It's very hard to say "your logo should look like x and y!" without having played your game.

 

It should look like the logo for something your target audience wants to play. Anything else is largely irrelevant.

Think of it this way: what other games would someone who likes your game also like?

Pick the most popular games out of that list, and look at their logos. If a pattern jumps out at you, follow it. Crossbreed it with your own game's style. Right now, for example, Steam thinks I should be playing Grim Dawn, Doom, and Dead Rising - it's put all three of them in my discovery queue. All three of these games have a grungy damaged-text look in ALL CAPS, and two of them (the big budget ones) are flat white rather than modeled and textured. So if I were making a game similar to these three games, I would also do a flat white grungy damaged-text logo in all caps.

Whether I like this is not even a question I would bother asking. It doesn't matter what I like.

 

Thanks a lot, everyone. I think we will be fine now.

 

<<<

 

A really high end graphic designer donated a logo to me. Talking to him was interesting, his take on it was that game logos as a whole are friggin terrible. That industry wide they were overly complicated and bad.

He talked about how in traditional logo design - super easy identification is the most important thing. The logo gets stamped on everything, resized, recolored, etc. Traditionally a good logo needs to be clean and simple, so you can put it anywhere - and have it still be immediately identifiable.

I've noticed more games doing this lately, you see it in games where the logo is also the loading icon, etc, they use the logo (or the icon) everywhere. Borderlands comes to mind as probably the strongest example.

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This is just the first hits that come up for borderlands logo in google.

This is a logo that clearly works. Worth noting that the text itself is really secondary to that icon.

Gears of war is another really good one:

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I am not at all a graphic designer by trade - but talking to a pretty heavy hitter about it - he convinced me. Simple clear shape. Immediately identifiable. Can be used in all kinds of different places/shapes/sizes.

PS: I think this kind of thing is even more important these days. You need to post info about your game all over the place, on different websites, different videos, different banners, all kinds of shapes and sizes, etc. So the more traditional ideas about logos are even more relevant for games these days than they were a decade ago. For example, if you're targeting Steam - they alone want like 7 different images for different things, capsule, banner, tiny list, etc. Indiedb has like 5 different image sizes. You want to be able to use your logo in all of these places and have it work.

 

well, to be fair, coming up with good logos is not something you can do in a minute
professional designers spend days, or weeks to come up with something that fits the company and follows common design rules
its not something you can come up with if you don't have any education on this matter, because there are a lot of things you have to keep in mind, like how will it print, are there words or shapes that have a different meaning in different countrys, etc

 

I didn't mean to say it like "oh you need super professional mega high end"...



Any of these could be amazing for example (source: http://makezine.com/2009/06/27/future-death-machine-nose-art/)

You need an icon anyway right, your players need to click on something to open the game. Why not just use that icon (or a variation) as your logo?

Maybe you even already have a great icon you made for a special ability or something that just felt 'right'. Consider it!

Especially these days, you need an icon for so many things. There are a billion sites that all need small profile pics. Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc - all these need profile thumbnails. So make sure your logo works there!