INDIE ARENA BOOTH Online 2020A massive browser MMO indie game festival.

MMO Game Convention ⦁ My work on this: 2D Art, UI Design

INDIE ARENA BOOTH Online 2020

As Covid 19 took hold of economies everywhere, conventions where cancelled left and right. Especially in the games industry there was a severe lack of online alternatives – live streams could only take you so far.

Hamburg-based event company Supercrowd Entertainment had to reinvent their indie game showcase Indie Arena Booth as well. They choose to tackle the problem head-on by developing this years edition as a full-on free-to-play browser MMO that took place during the Gamescom 2020. All in a time frame of roughly four months, of course.

You can still play the interactive credits booth in your browser.

THE BROWSER GAME

The heart of IAB Online was a free to play browser MMO. After you create your own funky avatar you can enter the world of indie games. Users could freely explore 250+ convention „booths“, custom made by the game developers themselves. These little worlds where filled with arcade machines to see their games, join their streams, watch trailers and download their demos. The developers came up with a vast array of themes, interactions and stories sorrounding their games, so that exploring the convention felt as magical as visiting Indie Arena Booth in real life.

THE USER INTERFACE

Alongside the 2D assets for the game I designed all User Interfaces. Building on the colourful and bold branding of Indie Arena Booth and the visual style of the game I developed an interface thats easy to use, playful in its visual language while delivering all needed information without clutter. Somewhere between 80s toys and comic panels.

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THE SANDBOX BOOTH BUILDER

Shipping Indie Arena Booth Online in such a short timeframe was only possible with the help of all the indie game developers themselves. Thats why we created a sandbox editor to enable them to build the booth of their dreams. The editor made it possible to design your own booth from scratch, fill in any info about your game and even think up your own branching dialogue interactions for users to discover.

THE ASSETS

If you want to give developers the freedom to create a booth that exactly fits their games topic, you need a lot of diverse assets. We created an asset pack of 1500+ hand drawn 2D Assets to create anything you could dream of, from crumbling ruins to cyberpunk props, from artsy trees to rainbow bananas. All of the assets worked with our custom shader and could be coloured any way you want through the editor.