Gubbins (it's a word game)

design ILLUSTRATION cartoon Character design Graphic Designer visual identity animation branding marketing game design

GUBBINS (IT’S A WORD GAME)

Gubbins is a friendly puzzle game where players place tiles to make words, with the help and hindrance of wildcard modifiers called Gubbins.

Clean fonts mingling with kooky cartoons are the backdrop to moreish wordplay. It’s kinda like single player Scrabble with hilarious friends wreaking havoc.

A NEW TAKE

Lead by creative couple Jessica Shipard and Darcy Smith, Gubbins is the inaugural title for us at Studio Folly. With Darcy’s game design background and Jess’ in communication design, a word game was a natural fit.

What started as riffing on game ideas, quickly spiralled into an unconventional new take on the word game genre that has since taken the world by storm.

ART DIRECTION

The initial intent was to create something super minimalist, very calm, clean type, warm palette, like a cup of tea on a Sunday morning.

Once illustrator Zac Fay got his hands on the characters however, minimalist turned maximalist and the psychedelic world of Gubbins was unleashed.

IN MOTION

Gubbins animations are all hand drawn frame by frame in vector by Georgia Kriss, which is extremely atypical for mobile games.

Georgia took Zac’s static illustrations and imbued each and every animated asset so much humour and charm.

A MEME MACHINE

Arguably the pièce de résistance of Gubbins is the postcard maker. It allows players to make collage-style postcards with the words they’ve spelled whilst playing.

We knew that people would get a kick out of celebrating their long words, impressive scores, and dick jokes, but we’ve been absolutely blown away with the detailed character designs, nostalgic throwbacks and emotionally expressive pieces that have flooded the internet.

IN THE WILD

‘Superliminal’ marketing was a big inspiration behind our approach to Gubbins social media and IRL collateral.

As an independent studio unbeholden to anyone, we take the opportunity to have fun and get weird with it. For example, we pasted ‘Lost Gubbins’ flyers around inner-north Melbourne and players loved them so much they took it upon themselves to paste them up around the world.