Using Twitter Emoji art for my roleplaying game Sunshine Over My Shoulder

I did the original design for my tabletop roleplaying game Sunshine Over My Shoulder as part of the Game Chef design contest in 2016. I always felt that it was an interesting game with some ideas I care about built into it, but for a variety of reasons it hadn't really moved off my back burner for a while. Because there are satirical elements to the game I had always envisioned a cartoon-y art style for it, but didn't think my own skills were up to the task of drawing the art myself. A while back on twitter I started seeing likes and retweets of content from the Emoji Mashup Bot pop up in my timeline, and I found many of the weird juxtapositions very amusing. And it occurred to me that emojis do have an element of the corporate faux-cheerfulness that my game is partly about. Some other company's more cartoony images might have been a little closer to the mark of the kind of art you see in corporate powerpoints, but Twitter licenses its emoji images under the CC-BY 4.0 license so they're free to use as long as you attribute them, and I went with that. Over the past few days I've been working on the game and I published it on itch.io yesterday.

It's not a very long game from a page count perspective, so I was mostly concerned with the cover image. I wanted a sun with a predatorial smile looking over the shoulder of a nervous software developer. For the sun, I started with the “sun with face” U+1F31E emoji and used the face of “smiling face with horns” U+1F608, with the face positioned to give more of a sense of interaction to the image. The software developer is “man technologist” U+1F468 U+200D U+1F4BB, horizontally flipped, with his head replaced by “face with rolling eyes” U+1F644, with the eyes rotated slightly to give the sense that he's nervously glancing behind him.

I didn't have other ideas for composed images, but to add visual interest throughout the text I used a few emojis as illustrations. For example, in the section that's describing a mechanic that relates to the “software life cycle” model I included “egg” U+1F95A, “bug” U+1F41B, and “butterfly” U+1F98B (since my career in the computer hardware industry was all about finding bugs in the design I find it personally amusing that something called “bug” is the central image there...).

Overall I'm satisfied with how it turned out for a small pay-what-you-want game on itch.io. While custom illustrations might have been better, the constraints of trying to make it work visually using only the extremely limited palette of what I could get from twitter emojis give it a certain character that appeals to me, and working with free materials was necessary for the constraints of my non-existent art budget.