Behind the screen: Handipoints

When we were working on Handipoints in the early days, we did not realize that Handipoints will be our main project for almost two years. Viva Chu the CEO of Handipoints is calling me by email asked me to make the designs for his start-up web company, at that time I am still soloing, and soon after few tasks passed, I recruited my old friends to help me out, till now we are still in happy happy working on Handiland graphics.

Here are the list of our works at Handipoints.

Logo

Handipoints is a smart, fun way to do chores for kids and parents. We tried to incorporate the mascot into the logo, to make Milo closer to the users.

Here is the final logo. We tried to use as little color as possible.

Mascot

Handipoints mascot is a cheerful, playful and a curiosity kitten. The mascot is named Milo by Viva Chu. At the first stage of the design, Milo is very Disney like style. When Handipoints upgraded, and published Handiland. We thought that the Disney style do not match with the handiland, the new style need to be different than other illustration or animation, but not too different from the previous style.

At the first stage of mascot design. We tried to give Viva Chu some option by sending him this rough conceptual chracters.

And then we have agreement to choose the Cats. And here’s Milo in sketch. The character design was done by Putri Prameswari.

These are some early illustration that we created for Handipoints.

Character Designs

We also did plenty character designs for other cats and Milo’s friend, Petals. Here’s some evolution of how we did the cats from concepts into the final stage as you can see in Handiland.

Initial cat design

Cat breed design

Finally we are quite satisfy about how each breed will looks like. But, the cats are too thin to use for isometrical game. We have to try to find some way to alter the design for isometric game. Here are the result.

Animations and game graphics

Kids are loves animation, and yes, we are also working on the Handipoint’s animation. In the early of Handipoints launched, animation are act as bonus when kids finished their chores. On the later release, we are produced animations for bonus video, special movies or game intro. Our experience working on animation help us a lot to produced fast animation turnaround with good quality in mind.

In the new Handiland kids can play mini games to earn points. We have been working on game graphics, once again there is no trouble at all to incorprate all Handipoints identities into the game.

Sorry, some of the scenes are cut off due to the different of our flash animation aspect ratio and the editor aspect ration.

Illustrations

Most of the illustrations are used as cover book and catalog images for cat’s costumes. The challenge is that we have to make every artist who work on the illustrations to use similar styles.

One of big task is creating the Costume Catalog image. Each costumes has its own page where kids are browse thought costume catalog to buy for the cats costumes.

Our illustrator use Adobe Illustrator for background creation, and the compisite the Cats with it’s costumes inside Flash. The challenge is to make every costume illustration match the costumes theme, and thus almost entire illustration is unique.

Handiland

Right now, Handiland is still growing. We are also handling the creation of Handiland scenes. The scene creation is quite the same with working on the illustrations. The different is the design need to be more carefully planned, because each scenes are interconnected.

After the scene mockup approved, then the mockup is ready to be sliced into symbols and rebuild the scenes using the level editor. Sometimes we have to go back to mockup and then export it to level editor.

Nominated in Webby Award

Last week we have a little surprise. Handipoints is nominated in Webby Award in Parenting/Family Category. Being nominated is quite a honor for us and all Handipoints staff.

Closing

I am very sorry that i can not wrote our work progress in details, because there are too much to tell and works. And sorry for my broken English, there are plenty grammar errors.

See you for the next behind the screen post :-)