Future Monopoly - Income Tax Building.

Whoa! Almost missed posting my favorite Future Monopoly design. I remember that this was one of the hardest designs to create. I mean really, what icon symbolizes Income Tax? The Income Tax Monopoly card symbol, a diamond within a diamond, didn't feel very powerful.

I tried some casino-esque varitions, and then some vault/fortress types with giant hands or pincers that would grab money, but nothing really looked well-considered. Still, we needed something oppressive, strong, and intimidating. I started with a box for the the building design since everything needed to fit within a rectangular perimeter. To make it oppressive, I tried to have the building literally look down on the player, so I just leaned a side out over the sidewalk and added a red eye sensor. The spire became an antenna and boom, the "big brother" evil machine overlord design was born!

Additional Future Monopoly Designs.

After a lot is purchased it transforms into a public park. On the low value end, the properties have less and less foliage or holographic foliage and on the high end, there's grass and real trees and fountains. You can see that even early in the project, the terrarium idea of protecting the foliage from the elements makes an appearance.

Additional Future Monopoly Designs.

My "Free Parking" structure. It kind of reminds me of Johnny Rockets. This was loosely based on several parking lot toys I've seen. I often find when stylizing things for "family" based properties, it helps to look not only at real life references, but at really little kids' toys, where they start to abstract down to only the most basic shapes. It makes making the jump to other styles an easier transition, while maintaining it's parking loty essence.

 Above are a series of empty lot "for sale" signs. Building on the idea of multiple levels and structures expanding and building themselves up level by level, we left the the surface as a translucent circuit board so you can see that there's a shaft below it the house/hotel might grow out of. I especially notice this now looking at the lot signs and trains, but aside from being more "family" friendly, we were really limited by time and budget and so we had to keep the shapes of our designs very simple. However, we ended up really putting a lot of time into the interior designs and textures, breaking things up with lifework, pattern, and color shifts. Our overall style owes a lot to these automatic constraints.

Future train designs.

Future Monopoly Houses.

 One rule that ran through all the Monopoly pitches I've worked on was that all of the building designs had to decrease in oppulence and size as you make your way around the board away from the Boardwalk. In addition, the designs had to work with the game mechanic of filling a property with houses until the player upgrades to a hotel. Each rectangular property was split into 4 even pieces and each building had to fit in one of the quarters. Other than just vertical scale, the number of levels to the house as well as the inclusion of porches and patios were used to show wealth. One of the ideas put forth early in conception was the idea that plant life was a precious commodity in the future and so only the richest people have yards and foliage on their property. To fit with our modular design style, we designed all our buildings as fully self-contained terrariums.  To create a little variety over the course of eight designs, I ended up putting little gardens and grottos on different floors to vary up the design.

Future Monopoly

Boardwalk

 Corner to Corner - "Free Parking" to "Go to Jail"

Houses and Hotels

A few years back, I got the chance to work on a couple of themed Monopoly projects for EA - a futuristic monopoly, a world cities monopoly, and a Nintendo monopoly. The schedule was very intense, but luckily, I did not have to split my time with any other projects, a rarity at BrainZoo. The client wanted a futuristic take on Monopoly City referencing retro and art deco scifi styles to create a very fun and family oriented atmosphere. This was awesome and had plenty of source material, but extremely difficult as well in that several fantasy films had recently come out utilizing that same style. Finding our own niche without looking like "Meet the Robinsons" or "Robots" was not easy. In the end we settled on a Cloud City/5th element approach. Since the game was not designed to have an open world exploration approach, but rather a turn based progression from street level, from property to property just like the board game, we looked for ways to make the world feel bigger. By placing the world in the sky, we could show other possible game levels in the distance and thus, part of a much more expansive world. By making the streets see through, we could show that Monopoly City itself was merely the top of some unknown quantity of levels. A theme that came up a lot as we designed was the idea that Monopoloy City continuously expanded, unfolded, and evolved. A lot of the  building structures are very modular for that very reason. Small things coming together to make large things. More to come soon!