How to Make Designer Toys, The Case of Tencent IP

Cubie Goose is the official IP of China Tencent E-sports, a designer toy like a square TV. Tencent created the IP Cubie Goose in the early stage and applied it to the game interface, which was loved by players and solved a series of online IP promotion problems.

Take advantage of the trend,  Tencent made these designer toys and blind boxes after months of promotion. I will use the first person to write for the specific making process.

Why Design This Art Toy?

Many brands are making their IP into designer toys, so where are our differences? Because when interacting with gamers before, the rewards used are gifts or virtual game coins. Now that we have the platform’s own IP Cubie Goose, we can make the platform’s art toys to replace the previous reward methods.

In IP promotion, brand symbols, and users’ cognition can be strengthened through materialized designer toys. From the perspective of communication, IP can help players understand our game and help the platform enhance the competitiveness of the game industry.

The Challenge of Designers

It is our designer’s first time doing this project, which is a great challenge for the design team. Especially in the role transformation of designers, from product UI designers to brand toy designers, designers are required to master the knowledge of the toy design process and production technology.

Because it is a customized project, the production cycle will be very long, usually 3-6 months. From 2d design to 3d model, prototype, color sample, final sample, and mass production, designers need to communicate and confirm with the art toy manufacturer constantly.

Designers have participated in designer toy exhibitions many times, and learned relevant experience from toy designers, so as to be familiar with toy design standards and find the direction of platform IP toy design. After learning, the designer finally can control the whole toy development project and has a detailed design process.

The Direction of Designer Toys

We first made an analysis of competing products and found that IP toys in the market can be divided into two categories. One is the IP of well-known brands, such as Tmall’s IP. Their IP has a very good marketing effect in the application of their apps, users are deeply impressed by the symbol of the cat head.  As well as Discord, LINE, and QQ, which are particularly well-known among users. We found that they all have one thing in common, that is, the shape is very simple and emphasizes symbolization.

The other is the IP developed by artists and illustrators, it will have their personal feelings and creative ideas, and it will appear in different styles, showing a variety of materials and extremely rich modeling colors, which is a market trend and is loved by their fans.

Users of the Tencent Penguin e-sports platform, 76% of young users aged 13-32. In terms of product IP, it emphasizes the symbol of the Cubie Goose. Therefore, in order to meet the needs of users and brand promotion, we decided to adopt the concept of the square, on the one hand, to strengthen the users’ memory of brand symbols, on the other hand, following the trend of the market, through square packaging, square box, colorful laser, and playability design, to make a Cubie Goose art toy blind box to help IP offline promotion.

The Process of Art Toy Design

Based on the prototype of Cubie Goose, the design of the Cubie Goose art toy is divided into the following four steps.

1. 2D sketch
2. 3D model
3. Colors
4. Materials

This will be introduced in detail in the next article.

What I Say

Some designer toys are designed coolly in the draft, but their structures are complex, with many movable functions and different colors. which is difficult to achieve in actual production and the production cost is high. So designers need to change the design drawings, simplify the design and remove some widgets. Because in custom designer toy making, there will be many production steps to ensure that the designer toys made are the same as the design drawings.