2024
Squad Busters Typography
A gem of a typeface
Supercell is a video game development company based in Helsinki, Finland, with offices in San Francisco, Seoul and Shanghai. Since its founding in May 2010, they have released six video games to the global market: Hay Day, Clash of Clans, Boom Beach, Clash Royale, Brawl Stars and Squad Busters, enjoyed by hundreds of millions of players worldwide.
It is a company that believes in the power of video games to bring people together through fun, innovative and memorable experiences. Their new game, Squad Busters, needed fun and dynamic typeface, befitting a game designed for a wide global audience.
Squad Busters: assemble your squad and collect gems to win
Squad Busters is a mobile video game released globally on 29 May 2024. It is a strategy game in which the player assembles his squad of characters to fight and collect coins and gems.
The player with the most gems at the end of the game time wins. The characters are drawn from all of Supercell's other games and other major IPs, making Squad Busters a consolidation of all of these games into one universe.
Immersive typography
The main challenge was to achieve a typography with high legibility, to aid rapid understanding in a dynamic environment with high-speed interactions such as a real-time online game.
A fun and impactful tone of voice had to be maintained for use in Supercell's marketing and communications. All while covering multiple languages of the Latin and Korean alphabet. So we developed the Squad typeface with many styles. Some styles were designed for optimisation of a digital interface and others to work in punchier headlines that emphasise the idea of fun expected by players.
Speedsters, attackers, tanks and healers
Just as each character has its own functionality in the game, Squad has its own. With four different weights for the different needs of both the interface and the marketing materials. Whether in the menu, in-game, in popups, or in any player interaction, the typography is weighted to optimise the experience, with roman, italic and bold, generating a broad typographic palette.
A global challenge
Another important challenge was that both writing systems, Korean and Latin, should share characteristics of weight, endings, contrast and dynamism, without losing the fun tone. The typographic palette had to be shared with both alphabets, so that the overall experience of the game would be the same for all players.
Characters transform, typography transforms too
For the Korean syllabary, a typeface with intelligent components was developed, in other words, where the same phoneme is able to take many forms, with respect to size, context and the readability needs of each of the 3,200 syllables of this language.
Working in this way allowed us to adjust and control the design of many syllables at once with automation, which gave us more creative freedom to explore the individual shape of each phoneme.
