QuickFuze Games.

A carpool, a homemade prototype, and a first card.

Nathan and I worked at Adobe together. We started carpooling, started swapping interests, and at some point he mentioned he was making a board game with his brother Eric. He brought a homemade copy of King of Battle to my house. We played a couple of rounds. Chess meets Battleship. It was good.

The first thing they needed designed was a Turn Phases card. A small, low-stakes deliverable to see how working together felt. It went well, so it grew. Over the next two years that Turn Phases card became a full player aid. The player aid became one piece of a complete system: box, board, manual, badge. A second game started after King of Battle wrapped. And eventually the studio itself needed an identity, which is the part that came at the end.

Two years, two games, one studio identity.

The work runs in three phases. King of Battle, the full board game system. Baby Names, a second game that reached cards and a custom display face before pausing. And QuickFuze itself, the studio identity that arrived after the products were already in shape.

King of Battle is a strategy game built around pieces with stats and a turn-based combat system. Nathan and Eric wrote the rules. Eric drove the military and combat system. An oil painter handled the front-of-box art and the painted terrain on the board. My lane was everything that uses type, holds information, or organizes a player's attention. The badge, the player aid, the move tracker, the box back, the manual, and the grid and terrain lines that turned the painter's landscape into a playable board.

The first deliverable was a Turn Phases card. A single piece of card stock listing what happens, in order, on each turn. That card grew. It became the official Player Aid, with a Player 1 and a Player 2 side, every piece on the board listed with its stats, and the turn phases anchored at the bottom. Players keep it next to them through a session.

The box front uses the oil painter's tank composition. I added the title treatment, the credits, and the badge placement. The back of the box is the version a player reads before they buy. I designed that from scratch, including a tank-free composition for the back surface. The manual was written by Nathan and Eric. I designed the layout, the headers, and the rule diagrams.

King of Battle's design wrapped in summer 2025. The game has sold to date as made-to-order print runs, not at retail. Nathan and Eric fulfill orders as they come in.

After King of Battle wrapped, Nathan moved on to Baby Names. It's a riff on Utah's tradition of unusual baby naming. Each round a Trend card is dealt to the middle. Players combine name cards from their hand to fit it. The Trends are constraints like "ends with eigh," "add an X," or "make it musical." A judge picks the best name. I worked through several card-back concepts before landing on the final direction. The title got a custom display face, built specifically for the wordmark and the card headers.

The game didn't make it to a box or a printed instruction set. The cards and the type are what exists. If Nathan picks the project back up, the system is ready to extend.

Most studios design their identity first and their products second. This one ran in reverse. The brothers built the games, lived with them, and only then decided they needed an official studio brand. The QuickFuze logo and a small set of lockups followed.

Designing a parent identity after the products are already in shape is a different problem. The mark can't fight for attention on a shelf next to the games it represents. It also can't disappear into the credits page. The QuickFuze mark is built to live on the back of the box, in the studio's own footer, and on a store page that points to the work already done.

Two more logos for Eric.

Eric, who drove the military system on King of Battle, came back separately for two more logos outside of the games. Triloop and Global Armory. Both stayed lightweight. A mark, a small lockup set, a quick turnaround.

Spillover like this is the quiet evidence a working relationship is working. The first project earns the second. The second earns the third. And the third comes back as a different brief from the same person.

What this project asked of the design lane.

A few decisions worth naming.

The illustration lane was separate. The oil painter handled the box-front art and the painted terrain on the board. My lane was the type, the badge, the box back, the manual layout, the player aid information design, the grid and terrain lines that overlaid the painted board, and eventually the studio mark. The work is honest about who did what. The painted surfaces are the painter's. The information surfaces are mine.

The Turn Phases card was a deliberate small first deliverable. It tested whether the collaboration worked before either side committed to the full system. That card growing into the official Player Aid is the working method this project taught me. Small first artifacts that earn the next bigger one beat a long upfront brief.

A custom display face is a one-product investment. Baby Names didn't need a full alphabet. It needed a wordmark and a header style with the same skeleton. Building a working set of glyphs sized to the title kept the type and the cards in conversation with each other without the cost of a full typeface.

The studio brand came last on purpose. Most parent marks are designed before the products and have to predict what kind of studio they're representing. By the time QuickFuze got its mark, the work already said what kind of studio this was. The mark's job was to acknowledge that, not to invent it.

Two years of design that started with a side conversation.

The shape of this relationship is the part worth naming. Nathan and I were colleagues at Adobe who shared a commute. He brought a homemade game to my house to play, not to hire me. The first paid piece was one card. The full system, the second game, and the studio identity followed because the first piece went well and the second went better.

The pace was the pace of two people building something around the edges of their day jobs. Work paused when Baby Names ran out of momentum. That's how partnerships like this end, and that's fine. The relationship is preserved. If Nathan picks up another game, I'll be there for the design.

Most freelance portfolios are organized around the dramatic single project. The truer signal is the second project, the third project, and the deliverable a client commissioned without a long brief. QuickFuze isn't a single case study. It's a working relationship that produced two games, a studio mark, and a working method I've kept using since. That's the part that matters.