2018-2019 we found ourselves working pretty hard to bring a newborn to this world - ATOMMIX. Oh no, it's not a humanoid baby, it's a special edition Extra Crunchy card game.
As we love creating characters, we love even more creating a character with a background story from which you can learn stuff. This is where we got nerdy (or should we say nerdier?) and realized we can learn anything we want by creating characters, so what is it that we want to learn the most?
We always wanted to understand the physical fundamentals of this reality and in order to break it down, we wanted to understand the periodic table. Though it is organized in a clever way, it is a mess when you try to understand it for the first time (or second or third...😂 ).It contains different concepts and requires a skill of zooming in and out. Seems like there are enough visual tools to make the data of the periodic table way more accessible. At this point of envisioning this, we knew we had to make it happen and we gotta make it fun. Eventually the plan was to create a card game that would visually portray each element as a card. This way we'll understand the micro world better and therefore, this reality. It would also allow us to communicate it better to others.
Our first design was of the element Helium:
To fund all this sweet ambition, we thought of going for Kickstarter, but not before we painted some walls worldwide with some of our elements
We designed the layout of the card, singled each of every element's characteristics, designed 30ish major elements and we were ready to go for the campaign!
But we had a surprise coming...
You know this feeling when you are enjoying the waves of the ocean, perhaps you are on a surf board looking forward to catch a wave, and suddenly a big wave forms in front of you and it's growing bigger and bigger and you feel you are getting tinier and tinier and high up above the surface, eventually you are at the mercy of mother nature? This is kind'a how we felt starting the campaign! It was definitely a crucial step in making it happen, quite stressful actually! After completing the work, we can say that we finally know chemistry, though it's high school level chemistry, we know it pretty well. When you break it down it did also help us get a more visual perspective of this reality from a different set of 'zooms'.
We see this game as a reference point for a whole bunch of games we plan to create, an open source that we will refine and define the more we explore and create.
Our goal is to make this research approachable and colorful for anyone who is tired of old school science templates.
For now we created 45 element cards and we keep creating more elements till we reach the whole 118!! There are so many elements and this reality is made out of mostly 3-4 of them (hydrogen, oxygen, carbon..) each of them is a doorway and a tool that can help us expand. It's also fun to just observe the card and let the art do it's job of course, there's no magic without mystery and exploration 🔭.
These days we're playing around with different game ideas that will focus more on the art and the characters but mostly, we're focusing on telling the story of Hydrogen (While we’re discovering it ourselves bit by bit). For a start, we’re designing the sculpture of Hydrogen and the water fox while also creating a short series of animations to tell the story of the origins of this character, all at the same time of course 🤯.
you can learn more about the story of Hydrogen here.