Warcraft is a franchise known to many because of World of Warcraft. But Warcraft started out as a Real Time Strategy game that painted the way for the gameplay in Starcraft (because Starcraft was trying not to be Warcraft). Warcraft 3 released with an editor that allowed extensive modifications to the engine that has been well used to create custom content. Although Starcraft 2 has it beat, Warcraft 3 is still a game deserving of attention, and how better to enjoy by reverse-engineering the logo.
Photoshop is the program of choice today as it will allow us to apply all our effects and still change what the text says. Open up the program and create a new file of reasonable size (800pxx600px if you wish). To get the text looking like it does in the Warcraft logo, you want to get the “Lifecraft” font (link here). There are other fonts floating around, but Lifecraft looks the most accurate. Type out a word of your choice and apply Lifecraft with the colour #ffe824. This will serve as a base colour that gets manipulated with the bevel lighting we add.
Go to the layer effects (Layer>Layer Style) and add a bevel&emboss effect. The depth is going to be 200%, the size 250px (the maximum), angle of the light is going to be -108 with an altitude of 50, the highlight colour is #fffb8e and shadow colour #c4302d. This will give us a golden shine and red-tinted shadows. Whether or not you use the global light option isn’t relevant since we do not reuse the light settings.
We have one last step with this text, and that is to give it a stone-like appearance. Photoshop provides a small collection of sample rock patterns that we will be making use of, so add a pattern overlay layer effect. Open up the pattern selections, and if you do not see any rock textures you will want to click the small gear on the right, select “Rock Patterns”, and append them to the current selection. Change the blending mode to Luminosity and the opacity to 20% to complete the look.
It may be known that I enjoy Warcraft 3 a lot, and so when doing a Warcraft-like logo I go for the Warcraft 3 variant. Add more text consisting of the roman numeral for 3 (“III”) still using Lifecraft but a much larger size; position it centered behind your main text with a colour of #8b8b8b. To get accurate appearances I modified the kerning by -75 and the height by 110%.
The first thing you want to do is copy the pattern overlay effect; alt-drag the label onto the new text text layer. Now add a bevel&emboss effect with the following: depth is 200%, size 250px, light angle 175, altitude 10, highlight colour #c0a78a, and shadow colour #221c06. This will give the text a very pillar-like appearance similar to what the Warcraft 3 logo has (if you want picture accuracy, this will need to look like bronze ingots; the stone appearance works just as well, however).
This completes the text effect; I gave the main text a thick black stroke to keep it legible (it has a very dark background in the logos). A few tips on producing logos very similar in appearance would be to capitalize a center character (the logo looks like “WarCraft”, and I used the text “GlitChed” for this reason); and the main text can contain a background slab (Warcraft 2 has a plank of wood, Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos has a burning rock, Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne has icy rock, and World of Warcraft has a variety of map tablets).
With this text, you can build a world capable of resembling Azeroth and attempt to beat World of Warcraft and its accomplishments. Use these techniques as you will; they carry the rugged rock look with a not-often seen golden colour scheme.
Warcraft is a franchise owned by Blizzard and has had its biggest success with World of Warcraft and its many expansions. Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne remains my preference with a powerful editor, seemingly limitless supply of custom maps to play, and an interesting and, at times, challenging campaign.
