Marble Blast: Community Edition Logo Submissions

We came to a decision to bookend PlatinumQuest as a name in favour of something better, but while we were coming together to finalise shit, we came to an impasse.

We don't have a logo to represent this new name.
This is where you come in.

What are we looking for?
The current running name is Marble Blast: Community Edition
With this in mind, we're looking for something that encompasses Marble Blast, a game about rolling a marble, nothing too complicated, but nothing bland and boring either. PlatinumQuest represents the entirety of Marble Blast, so you'll have plenty of references to work with just by playing through the game.
If you want somewhere to start, the best templates you got are the old logos:

• Your logo must be scaleable, meaning easy to distinguish when shrunk to 64x64 at the minimum.
• I must emphasise, nothing too complicated, your logo must be yours, this means absolutely no generative garbage.  
• Your logo must be transformative, this means don't straight up copy-paste the existing logos or use copyrighted materials as is.

What happens next?
We figure out what logo we wanna use? Granted, we don't expect you to post a final logo immediately. The idea is that we as a community gather together and narrow our decision between drafts. To put it bluntly, this is a collaborative effort, not a competition, aside from the guidelines above and common sense, you're free to approach this any way you can, take this as a solo project, collaborate with another member, describing your logo, drawing it, modeling it, anything works!


Get to sketching!!

Hello. So I made a few sketches to get something rolling. I was going to finalise those, but what's the point, we're brainstorming here. The idea is that we all submit our suggestion and see which ones we can build upon, Im not gonna give it my 100 until we find our new logo.

Lets go!
 

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1- Third Blast

 
Im calling this one "Third Blast" because its the third iteration of this logo. My mind thought of merging the chaotic pattern of Marble Blast Gold's logo and the slickness of Marble Blast Platinum. This is the result, or atleast an idea of it.

My logic with this is demonstrating something familiar, while also conveying some sort of unity between games. I have a more extreme variant that follows this logic later down the list.
 
 
2- Flamehead

 
Here comes Flamehead, this one is a slight twist on the Blast logo where it conveys speed. That's really all I got to say about this logo.

This is generic, this could be a logo for anything other than Marble Blast. I can guarantee you've probably seen this before in some pinball machine or some shit. I've chucked this one in for filter, also in hopes that it might inspire someone to make a better derivative.
 
 
3- Scenic

 
This one's my personal favourite, scenic, inspired by the Marble Blaster's cover art.
Following the inspiration, this limits the style to just MBG. While this does represent something players are familiar with, it doesn't really conveys variety, it doesn't scream community edition. But this isn't really the biggest problem here.

With something this detailed, when you shrink it into an icon, it becomes this amalgamation of colours and shapes. This logo looks better as something on a title screen or a server icon, some place where it benefits from being visible at all times, not something you're supposed to notice at a glance.
 
 
4- Super Third Blast

 
Finally, we come to Super Third Blast.
This one is similar to it's original variant, except it adds a platform and a border, tying Marble Blast Ultra and PlatinumQuest into the logo and completing the unity. The blast changes colours when it intersects with the platform, that way, it stays visible instead of being obscured, it could look cool when its coloured in.
 
Now aside from losing detail when shrunk, I am literally frankenstein-ing all the logos into one. There's defintiely a better approach to conveying unity without depending on what's already established, but on the other hand, we don't wanna go completely off the mark with this. More Scenic and less Flamehead.
 

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With that, this is all my submissions. Maybe I might throw in something more if I think of anything new, but this is all I can muster for now.

Let's start a discussion! Do you have a favourite logo here? What about your least? Anything here could be improved upon? Or do you disagree with my thought process?

And you know what, since it stands to reason Im the only remaining artist here (Lily's on a really long vacation rn, trust), let's play with "prompts."

If none of these are to your liking, describe your vision of a logo and I'll sketch it.
All I ask is to remove your aggression if what I draw isn't to your exact liking, unlike those resource leeches, I actually have feelings, even if I come across as apathetic to some of you...you know who you are.

Stylistically, I love the third one the most too, and agree that it's probably not great as a small icon. I do think a gem would be better than a powerup though.

I sketched this on a notecard a few days ago (can you tell I'm not an artist?). I've had a thought like this for a while, putting "Marble Blast" in front of a larger ball with a couple smaller balls flying around it. I think it's a good in-between of typical MB logos (with the blast behind it) and being its own thing, plus it turns into an icon really well (potentially even removing the lettering in smaller uses). 

All of these look really awesome! I'm a huge fan of the fourth one specifically, I feel like it unifies all of the features in the other logos perfectly.
Just one teeny tiny addition that I would make if I were you is to integrate the PQ logo in there too. While we do need new branding to unify all of Marble Blast better with new logos and names, we also have to remember that PQ as a mod still needs representation in here too, not just the big 3 (Gold, Platinum and Ultra).
Other than that, I firmly believe that logo #4 should be the go-to logo for the rebrand, it just fits perfectly in there!

Yeah I'm gonna have to agree with Plat on this one: Logo #4 is also my favorite, with Logo #1 being my second favorite. I feel like the "Blast" style of logo is the best representation of Marble Blast especially since the two titans of MB (Gold and Platinum) have those type of logos.

Eh... not gonna lie, I think the PQ logo is hot trash lol. I appreciate where it's going, putting P and Q and a ball into the same thing, but man, never in the world would I guess marble game if I didn't know what the logo was for. At least it isn't the textured version it used to be before its black and white variant, but the downside of the current variant is a complete lack of personality and color that a very visually interesting game like Marble Blast should have in a logo. The only upside in the simplicity is being able to implement the white shape itself in other settings, sort of like the World Cup 2026 logo compared to other ones.

Anyway, vent over. I'm all for the sentiment of some inclusion of the PQ logo, but even more for it being subtle if at all. Given that the other three games are far and away the most well known, I think there's plenty of reason to limit just to those if we run into a situation about not overcrowding themes.

Edit: now that I think about it, a logo that highlights the marbles more than the original logos would be worth a consider in designing.

Nockess wrote:

I sketched this on a notecard a few days ago (can you tell I'm not an artist?). I've had a thought like this for a while, putting "Marble Blast" in front of a larger ball with a couple smaller balls flying around it. I think it's a good in-between of typical MB logos (with the blast behind it) and being its own thing, plus it turns into an icon really well (potentially even removing the lettering in smaller uses).

Honestly not so bad for someone who isn't much of an artist, to be fair, a logo of this sort would look better in 3D.


So here's me taking a stab at that in a 2D sketch instead. The central marble is a generic one because...it makes sense, it acts like a back drop just like the original logos. The surrounding marbles each follow a style from the mainline and platinum

In logo form, the marbles will be more central to the logo, they'll also be replaced with generic marbles and a unique colour (detail would be lost when shrunken, so that's a better compromise.)

Nockess wrote: now that I think about it, a logo that highlights the marbles more than the original logos would be worth a consider in designing.

I mean, I feel like all three of the original games did a fairly good job having a marble front and center. I guess MBU's does the best job of making it visible that it's a marble...

One idea I want to throw out: Maybe it'd be kinda cool if the game's icon changed depending on the theme of the level you're playing at the time. For instance, if we were using the MBU logo, maybe the icon would change to one that uses MBG tiles and Groovyball in place of the textures in the main logo while playing an MBG level. But, of course, we'd need a more general logo too for applications outside of the game itself.

Yoshicraft224 wrote:

One idea I want to throw out: Maybe it'd be kinda cool if the game's icon changed depending on the theme of the level you're playing at the time. For instance, if we were using the MBU logo, maybe the icon would change to one that uses MBG tiles and Groovyball in place of the textures in the main logo while playing an MBG level.

That was an idea I had with "Scenic" as a compromise for not properly representing the games. The main logo being based off Marble Blast Gold makes sense cause that's what most people remember, but in terms of it communicating a variety, like I said in the original post, it doesn't really do a good job at conveying that.

Not that this is an issue, we don't necessarily have to make a logo that must communicate unity. That was just the basis for a good chunk of my designs.

I've put together a concept of what that'd look like. I kinda meshed whatever colours I felt made sense, I kicked colour theory in the balls and left it for dead.

Here's a concept logo i made in Ulead COOL 3d for the fun of it