Rainbow for iOS (and for Android!) will be out tomorrow, and as part of the assets for the Google Play store, I needed to design a large (1024x500) promotional image for the game.
As you can see above, I arrived at an pretty good image. I think it captures the essence of Rainbow's art style and gameplay, while striking a balance between cleanliness and boredom.
Arriving at this image required a few iterations. My first mockups had a hand-drawn rainbow that just didn't seem lively enough:
I tried patching in some spirals, but they still didn't look right to me. Perhaps this is because I'm over-familiar with the way cubic splines look (and/or the way rainbows actually move in the game):
So I ended up hacking in a special game mode that uses a white background and hides the level while taking screenshots; and repeatedly played through a simple (splitter-only) level to come up with some rainbow patterns. This turns out to be somewhat difficult.
This was good as a first cut, but too busy. After trimming a few of the characters from the bottom of the image, and playing through my empty level several more times, I arrived at the final version:
I also needed a smaller version of the image with a slightly different aspect ratio (180x120). For this I re-arranged the TCHOW logo to above the word "Rainbow" and strengthened the halo to make the letters more readable:
The final promo and small promo images -- along with high-res versions of other game assets -- can be obtained from the Rainbow Press Kit.
