By KarI Snyder, MFA
The Elements Club Unity Match® video game mixes together a dash of cane fighting, a good round of scientific investment, and lots of seductive lip smacking as users play through a classic Match-3 video game.
Set in Victorian London between 1892-1897, The Elements Club® follows the lives of various members as they each unlock the power of love and fortune. The premise of the series is that it was founded by Lord Ashton Gray in 1887 as an investment group dedicated to scientific endeavors.
The game targeted women ages 35-54 years playing games on Facebook, Amazon, and Steam via desktop and iPad.
- Creator / Executive Producer
- Video Game Producer
- Product Designer (100%)
- UI/UX (100%)
- Audio Design (100%)
- Video Production (one of two)
- Writer (100%)
- David Kurcina, Co-Producer
- TJ Jones, Lead Coder
- Steve Rynolds, Jr. Coder
- 2 years
- Adobe Photoshop
- Adobe Illustrator
- Adobe Flash
- Sketch
- Adobe PRemiere
- Adobe Audition
- Facebook Games
The romance within the game featured a masked signer who falls for a horse trainer. The lead characters were join by a cast that included an invention loving scam artist, a prophetic animal-lover, a roof-top leaping thief, and a stoic club founder. The series capitalized on "quirky, yet loveable" characters and plot lines. As a late-Victorian story, the look and feel pulled heavily from periodic aesthetics.
Unlike a modern UI for a mobile app, this video game required UI with very detailed and lavish Victorian embellishments. I shot photos of Victorian furniture, architecture, and jewelry, then carefully cut out parts to blend into period illustrations to form new UI elements.
Unlike a website or mobile app, typography that has added embellishments or strokes within a game engine normally needs to be treated as individual art assets. I made four stylized sets of alphabets to use for various text alerts and in-game pop-ups.
Forty-two badges with both earned (colored) and un-earned (black and white) versions were crafted with each featuring a custom illustration. Twenty-five tailsmen awards were also crafted and each featured a mix of gems with flowers to match the storyline of the female lead loving gems while the male lead was a botanist.
Elements Club: Unity Match® was the World’s 1st full-motion Match 3 casual video game! The Unity Match® video game and the online interactive story world feature integrated branding features that matched the style of the project.
For the game mechanics, I crafted seven kinds of game levels that included collecting items within the Match-3 grid, scoring high, making matches on certain types of tiles, time limits, and building up chemistry through certain color matches. Matches of four were combined to allow a player new tools to unleash within the chemistry vortex. Matches of five caused a cascading point effect.
“Great game. Love it,” Lisa Marie Mann
“This is a very intense adult Match-3 game. Keeps you on your toes,” Jeff Pool
"Most Match-3 games are just really dorky.You have awesome graphics,” Julie Duncan
The game included 54 minutes of video which was crafted into cut scenes, as well as audio cut-scenes and images. All episodes were filmed within the Heritage Square Museum in Los Angeles using live actors.
The number-one request from players of the video game was, "Where is the show on Netflix?"
