(All artwork shown was developed in collaboration between myself and our team.)
Rocket Games was a small independent game studio looking to find a foothold in the competitive mobile game market. With only a 4-person team and a short runway, we researched, designed and built a game that fit our challenging constraints: a simple slot machine for mobile phones.
In a few months, we launched a game featuring 4 unique machines with different mechanics and themes. It gained enough traction to allow development to continue a little longer.
Our team had very little knowledge of casino games and needed to learn quickly. This informed our development strategy of building and shipping games fast. We experimented with a wide variety of themes and styles, each needing their own branding and illustrations. Every additional release helped deepen our understanding of slot players' preferences.
By the 3-year mark, we had built over 60 unique machines across 15 different apps. Experienced colleagues joined the team and helped sharpen our process and strategy. We were now objectively a real game studio!
A selection of apps we shipped, each containing multiple unique machines.
Each machine required an appealing logo that can hint at gameplay and theme from within menus.
Each app release contains many different machines, but the strongest performing ones would be used in marketing.
Continued refinement led to the release of our biggest hit: Viva Slots Vegas. Viva resonated deeply with our audience and transformed our little studio into a major player in the mobile casino market. Rocket Games (Later renamed "Rocket Speed") was acquired by Penn National Gaming, one of the largest casino operators in the US.
Building and shipping games is rewarding work, but the icing on the cake was sketching a logo and watching it get translated into stickers, t-shirts, mugs and a 5 foot tall neon sign. I can't claim there was a deep meaning behind it, but now I see a common thrill between entrepreneurship and an astronaut jumping rope with their own severed oxygen hose.
Steven and Chris enjoying the warm glow.