Isometric Things

I’ve been working on a theme for the next GigaZone Gaming Championship, an annual gaming tournament I help organize and run at my day job. Prior to Covid-19 lockdowns we have run this event at the Sanford Center in Bemidji and have had thousands in attendance. Last year we ran the event online. We’re planning on running a small online tournament this winter and then hopefully back in person in October.

I’ve wanted to try out some designs on an isometric grid. I found a lot of inspiration from the mobile game Monument Valley. The level of detail in the screens in that game gave me something to strive towards.

Monument Valley

So after watching a video on how to set up an isometric grid in Illustrator I got busy. Most of what I was seeing in Monument Valley could be described as blocks of various sizes stacked to resemble a scene (super simplistic I know). Cubes are easy, curved objects are a little harder but not too bad with Illustrators 3d effects.

So far I’ve got a few designs in the works that I’m pretty happy with. The first is a design for a t-shirt for our “Spring Break” themed gaming tournament at work. In this one, I played with extruding elements and used similar objects in different directions to create depth. Plus crab rave, which I turned into one of our Discord server emoticons.

GZGC22 Spring Break
A detail of the grid

Another one I worked on is a design for our main event this Fall for GZG. This one is based on platforming games. I added paths for a player going through a level, reminiscent of games like Super Meat Boy where you would be shown all the failed attempts upon beating a level.

Finally this week I started working on another platform design and it turned into some sort of optical illusion deadly tower. For sure more to come like this.

Deadly Towers #1