A City Sleeps

PROCESS + JOURNEY

Harmonix had a small team working on A City Sleeps, a musically-driven shoot’em up in need of branding and visual design support. The design brief called for a treatment that could bridge the gap between typical shmup genre signifiers and the game’s unique narrative tilt. In most bullet-hell games, the player pilots an air or space craft, but in A City Sleeps, the player controls Poe, a dream exorcist who enters the nightmares of the citizens of SanLo City to help free them of a force that controls the city.

Working with the marketing manager and art director, we opted to juxatpose a soft-tech vibe with hand-drawn elements in hopes of capturing the spirit of the game and attracting prospective players. Leveraging the letterforms from the logo, a custom typeface Silkworm was created for an additional level of cohesion between the game's menu, HUD, and marketing materials.