You know you’ve done emoticons right when…

…they start communicating visually…

…they play games…

…they tell stories…

A lot of these also happen to be fun meme’s that people use, like the second example, which is a common wall post that people write after they have attacked someone. Attacking another user is termed “spam attacking” because most people make multiple successive attacks.

As far as process, we first did a study of the kh (knighthood) lingo that had been created as well as common emotions that were expressed by users while playing the game. Some other examples of kh lingo are: squirrels and squirrel lords, ghost walls, and bracket surfing. We then explored several different art directions and iterated on the direction that was most expressive, fun, and captured that medieval feeling of the game.