Helping a new app game take over Oxford Circus Underground Station

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Clash of Kings is an app strategy game designed by Elex Tech. The idea is simple: build your castle; train your army and then go fight other players in the large online world. It’s a hugely successful MMO game now, with millions of players worldwide. However, when it was launched in this country in 2016 it was totally unknown.​

The brief that we took when I worked as Senior Creative at The Sharp Agency, was to take the game directly to millions of potential players, just as they might be in the mood to twiddle their thumbs on a new app game. The result was a take-over campaign throughout Oxford Circus Underground Station that used dynamic battle scenes to really put people in the mood to play.

Working with a copywriter, I art-directed the creative from initial concept mood boards to setting up the final artwork. My concept was to focus on the player-to-player battles. Each player has their own castle that they can build up, develop and defend from attack over time, and this is certainly involving and important. However, the real fun is gathering your best forces, striking out over the landscape and pitting them against the armies of other players from right around the world. The concept became the long continuous battlefield, with massed armies racing towards each other.

 

I art-directed the creation of these continuous battle scene landscapes, which were illustrated by Elex Tech’s own graphic artists, who were based in China. I designed the track-side posters to show the whole battle, which dominated the North and South bound tracks of the Bakerloo Line, and then designed the graphic wraps that covered two sections of pedestrian tunnel and followed passengers up the escalators. 

Our work won the “Traditional: Transport” award at The Drum’s Creative Out Of Home Awards 2016.