Draw Match

The team I was directing was capable — but capability without clear direction in an ambiguous environment tends to diffuse rather than compound. Individually, the designers were strong. Collectively, they were pulling in different directions, hesitant to commit to any single visual approach without someone making the call. There was also a degree of scepticism about whether coherent creative work was even possible without a more finished product to reference.

My first responsibility wasn't a creative decision — it was an orientation one. I needed to establish what kind of project this was going to be, and reframe what the team's role in it actually meant. Once it was clear that we were the ones defining the vision rather than waiting to receive it, the dynamic shifted. Scepticism gave way to focused problem-solving energy. That shift doesn't happen passively — it requires someone to hold the line clearly enough that others can move with confidence.

The character was the most consequential early decision. The 3D asset the product team had developed didn't read well for a casual audience — it lacked the expressiveness and warmth the game needed. Rather than wait for product to resolve it, I directed the team to rebuild the character direction ourselves. We used Nano-based prompting workflows to rapidly develop and evaluate concepts, then brought the chosen direction to life through Kling AI animation. This was a deliberate choice to treat AI-assisted workflows as a legitimate concepting and production method — not a workaround, but a considered approach suited to the constraints we were operating under. The result was a character with clear casual appeal: expressive, readable at mobile scale, and emotionally distinct from anything the early build had produced.

The boosters presented the same structural challenge in a different form — they existed only as rough product concepts with no visual execution. Rather than surface the gap as a blocker, I directed the team to design and animate them ourselves. The standard we held ourselves to wasn't placeholder quality — it was creative work that could plausibly inform the actual product direction. That distinction matters. Design decisions made at this stage have to be defensible on their own terms, not simply functional enough to fill a frame.

Getting the motion language right required real exploration across multiple dimensions simultaneously — and the decisions in each one affected all the others. The card flip dynamics were the mechanical heart of it. Cards are the primary interaction surface: how they move, resist, and reveal carries the core emotional weight of every play moment. We worked across a spectrum of energy levels — heavier dynamics with more physical weight on one end, faster and snappier movement on the other. Higher energy carried excitement but started to feel frantic, like the game was happening to you rather than being played by you. Lower energy felt considered but risked reading as slow. We were looking for something in between: tangible and satisfying, but light enough to feel effortless.

The screenshot process was its own creative challenge — distinct from the video work, and demanding a different kind of visual thinking. Where the video was about communicating momentum and emotional arc, the screenshots had to do their job in a single frozen frame: communicate a benefit, establish tone, and create desire with no movement to carry the load.

The process started with thumbnailing — working through a range of communication angles across the screenshot series before committing to any direction. Each screen in the set had a specific job, and we defined what that job was before considering how it would look. Framing and visual hierarchy were established from the ground up: what is the player's eye supposed to land on first, and what should it find when it gets there.

Once the foundational compositions and communication logic were established, I brought an Art Director into the team to take the store creative further. That was a deliberate call — I recognised that the visual design foundations were solid but that there was a level of finish and refinement the screenshots could reach with dedicated visual design leadership that would be difficult to achieve in parallel with everything else the team was carrying. The AD took the direction, the assets, the compositional logic we had defined, and elevated the execution quality significantly. The vision was continuous. The craft ceiling went up.

The working relationship with my Performance Lead was one of the structural decisions that made the most difference on this project. Rather than operating downstream — receiving finished creative and returning feedback — he was present throughout the build. As each section took shape, he would take it informally to colleagues across the studio, gather genuine reactions, and bring those observations back directly. We'd work through the implications together and adjust accordingly.

That degree of creative-performance integration is less common than it should be in games marketing. When it's working well, feedback becomes a live creative input rather than a revision gate. It also opened up meaningful development opportunities for my senior motion designer — direct exposure to how performance thinking shapes creative decisions, rather than receiving that perspective filtered through briefs at a later stage. That kind of proximity accelerates growth in ways that a more structured, siloed process doesn't allow.

The clearest internal confirmation came when we shared the final draft in the studio-wide Slack channel — not just the marketing team, but product, art, design, leadership. Every team had been working on their own component in isolation. No one had yet seen the game as a unified whole. This was the first time they did. The response was immediate. For the founders and non-marketing teams, it was the first moment the game existed as a coherent experience rather than a collection of separate workstreams.

What the first video ultimately produced wasn't a single data point — it was a foundation. It became the cornerstone of the production pipeline, establishing the creative and motion language that everything subsequent was built on. From there, the work evolved into structured line-of-communication testing — exploring different framings of the same mechanic to understand which player motivations resonated most with the target audience. Each LOC was built on the visual and motion standards that first video had established.

The result was a scaled-up creative operation with genuine directional clarity — one that carried through into the game's actual product launch. The early creative work didn't just validate a concept; it created the infrastructure that made sustained, purposeful experimentation possible. That's a different kind of outcome from a single test result, and in some ways a more durable one.

The most visible skills on this project were motion direction and visual art direction — and both were tested under meaningful pressure. But the underlying requirement was something broader: creative leadership in an environment with no established foundations. No style guide, no finished product, no settled team direction, and a budget that offered no shortcuts.

That means establishing standards in motion and ensuring they hold. It means recognising when invention is the right call — the character, the boosters, the visual language — and executing that invention at a quality level that can withstand scrutiny, not simply satisfy an immediate production need. It means keeping a capable but sceptical team oriented toward something coherent, when the natural tendency of ambiguity is toward drift.

The model we developed — marketing creative as validation infrastructure, as directional input, as the thing that assembles a coherent picture before the product is finished — is one I carry forward. It shaped how I think about what early-stage creative leadership is actually for. And it is the kind of thinking I would bring into any team at a similar stage, from day one.