Since the summer of 2024 I've had the pleasure of working on developing a mobile app and some physical games for Kouvolan Lakritsi. The company's brief was to make the tour of the liqourice factory more fun and engaging. Our team's solution was a gamified tour app that the visitors can use while walking around the factory. In addition, we have also created a set of memory cards and a chess set.
The first thing I was working on was the memory game. Kouvolan Lakritsi wanted their products to be front and center in everything we created, so that was a must for the cards. Inspired by the Laku mascot in Kouvolan Lakritsi's logo I got the idea to make characters of different products and have them on the memory cards.
Final illustration by Alina Sunik
Final illustration by Alina Sunik
Final illustration by Alina Sunik
Original sketch for the characters
Iterations for the card backgrounds
When presenting the cards for Kouvolan Lakritsi's CEO Santeri Nisula, he absolutely fell in love with them. Which meant that we wanted to include the characters into the tour app as well. The first game with the characters was the Flying Liqourice game, based on Kouvolan Lakritsi's achievement of sending their liqourice to the atmosphere. In the game the player tries to jump from platform to platform to get increasingly higher and hopefully reach all the way to space. This game's assets were created solely by me and I had a lot of fun drawing them, especially the backgrounds.
Character sprites
Platforms
Original concept
The second game I worked on is a merging game where the player tries to fit as many candies into a bag by merging the same type of candy. The idea for this game was based on the Guinness World Record for the biggest bag of candy that Kouvolan Lakritsi got in 2020. This game's assets were also created solely by me. In the proces I got to design some new characters inspired by more liqourice products, for example the bag of liqourice herself and the calm and collected box of liqourice.
Mockup of the game screen
While working on the games for the app I also helped with making the chess set that used the characters as game pieces. I drew the concepts for the pieces and then my team member Jyri Jaatinen modeled the pieces to look awesome in 3D.
Concept art
3D models by Jyri Jaatinen
That's all I've done so far on the project, but there is still plenty more to come. Stay tuned ;)
