BRANDING - CASE STUDY

Team Hero Coder

Year: 2023–Present
Project: Video Game Branding
Client: Fernando Restituto
Scope: Creative Direction | Graphic Design

Want to know more about this work? Drop me an email!

Team Hero Coder is an ongoing brand identity project for an indie educational video game developed and published independently by Fernando Restituto, a game programming professor at George Brown College. The work completed so far includes the logo redesign, brand guidelines, creative direction for characters and game environments, and Steam store assets*. Future work will include additional branded assets, social media templates, a players' manual, and an educators' onboarding booklet.

* Work in progress. Final deliverables may slightly differ from what is shown.

HOW IT STARTED

I first met Fernando in 2022, when he came to the Peer Tutor Lab at the George Brown College School of Design (where I was a peer tutor) looking for a design review. He was in the early stages of developing Team Hero Coder and needed a fresh perspective.

I gave him creative input about layout, proportions, colour theory, and character creation. He kept coming back, and what started as an informal review became an ongoing creative partnership and a friendship.

As an independent developer balancing the project with a full teaching load at George Brown, Fernando moves at his own pace, and so does our work.

THE GAME

Team Hero Coder is an indie educational video game that teaches coding through gameplay. You learn by doing, not by sitting through lectures.

A lifelong fan of classic RPGs like Final Fantasy, Fernando wanted Team Hero Coder to feel like an adventure with quests to conquer. He structured it as a battle between two parties whose movements are decided by a series of coding challenges that build on one another. The further you level, the more complex the coding becomes, and the more rewarding the journey.

THE BRIEFING

Fernando had a digital sketch of a concept he wanted to build on: a decision tree in which branching nodes represented decision points, chance events, process changes, choices, and consequences, mirroring both the logic of coding and the challenges of an RPG game.

It was a smart conceptual foundation, but the execution felt flat and unbalanced. A decision tree is about variation and evolution, and the design wasn't showing that. And it only reflected how the game works, not how it looks.

THE PROBLEM

How do you build a brand identity that speaks two very different languages at once—classic fantasy gaming and coding education—without losing either, when the core concept has already been locked?

THE LOGO

My new design respects the original concept while resolving every issue identified in the audit. A customized base typeface gave the logo personality: the rounded lines are friendly, but the squarish details nod to pixel art.

The decision tree nodes were integrated into the letterforms, implying the integration of gaming and learning. Varied in size and colour, they embody the core ideas of growth, change, movement, and evolution, with the letter D showing as a growing node.

The bracket, a common coding symbol, is an optional element that reinforces the game's identity without overpowering it.

The result is a logo that is fun, dynamic, balanced, and built to work across every format the project demands.

THE TAGLINE

One element Fernando hadn't considered was a tagline.

The game will be available on Steam, so I made the case that it needed one that could speak to two very different audiences at once: RPG gamers and coding students.

The result was Create. Code. Conquer.

Three punchy words, working as a call to action and telling the learning quest from the start to the final boss.

The colour palette was drawn from the game's sprites. I sampled the most prevalent colours across the character and environment assets and adjusted their values to ensure consistency and usability across digital applications.

APPLICATIONS

STEAM ASSETS

Steam's capsule system is unforgiving. The assets appear across numerous pages, scaling from large hero banners down to icons.

Fernando and I had flagged several competing titles with overcrowded, hard-to-read assets that were getting lost in the crowd. The goal was to make Team Hero Coder impossible to miss.

The solution was a design system built for consistency and legibility. The green code background narrates the transition from code to pixel. The logo is clearly readable in any size or orientation, and its variations keep the identity fresh without losing coherence.

A game that stands out at a glance, wherever it appears.

THE OUTCOME

The game is now in beta testing, with a launch planned for 2027. It will be distributed across Ontario schools, include a players' manual and an onboarding document for educators, and be promoted through social media.

Although there aren't quantifiable results yet, the new identity landed exactly where it needed to. Fernando has shared that it captures everything he envisioned for the project, and everyone who has seen it—from game developers and beta testers to educators in the design industry—has responded with enthusiasm.

Nothing beats the moment I sent him an asset, and he replied: "o.m.g."

"She's not just the top of her class; she works independently to comprehend a challenge and go beyond basic job requirements to complete the task at hand. (...) These elements are critical to ensuring the success and the income stream of my project."

— Fernando Restituto, Developer, Team Hero Coder

HOME