The Holiday Season & The Search for the Perfect Logo

Yohoho!

The holidays are upon us, stuffed with their overindulgent merriment. At Porcelain Fortress, this is the season of jól, the Icelandic Christmas, when families come together during the darkest time of year to share a cozy, candlelit atmosphere (and perhaps tolerate each other’s company).

In Iceland, storytelling is a cherished holiday tradition, so we thought we’d gather you around the fireside and regale you with a tale—not about the holidays, but about how we arrived at our current logo for Walk of Life. How’s that for a segue?

Like many other products, a good logo is essential for a video game. We could toss around marketing buzzwords like "recognition" and "brand awareness," but at the end of the day, the goal is simple: to catch the eyes of people scrolling at breakneck speeds through oversaturated game catalogs.

When we first started working on Walk of Life, the successor to No Time to Relax, it felt natural to stick with the recognizable style of its predecessor. After all, why mess with something that works?

But as it turns out, we have bigger plans for Walk of Life. We want it to stand out as its own independent creation—related to its predecessor, but distinct. Think of it as a sibling rather than a conjoined twin.

We stuck with this second logo for quite a while. It had a fun, cartoony vibe that would have been right at home in the mobile gaming world, where we originally planned to market the game.

But plans changed, and Walk of Life is now headed to the PC and console market. As a result, we had to change the logo again so people wouldn’t confuse it for a mobile game.

This was an interesting concept, but it didn’t quite get off the ground. It had a bit of a street art vibe—more fitting for a game like Jet Set Radio or Bomb Rush Cyberfunk than a wacky life simulator.

Who knows? Maybe we’ll revisit it someday if we release a DLC where players arm themselves with spray cans and rollerblades to take on a dystopian, fascist government.

At one point, we considered framing Walk of Life as a sort of sitcom, inspired by 80s classics like Full House and Cheers. While we didn’t fully commit to the sitcom idea, we did draw some inspiration from shows of that era, and the logo seemed to capture the vibe we were aiming for.

After a few weeks, though, the team felt the logo was missing something. So, we decided to have a sit-down and settle this logo business once and for all. We created a thread in Slack where we all posted some of our favourite logos to try and find what we needed to make ours better.

We realized two things were missing from our logo: a touch of color and a visual element to complement the text. To address this, we decided to incorporate the in-game pawn—used by players to move around the map—as an iconic visual for our game.

Now we felt like we were getting somewhere. The addition of the pawn to the logo proposals really brought it to life, and the little strut its doing tied well into the titular walk.

After a few more iterations, the members of the team decided on the one they liked the best. Although the decision wasn’t unanimous, we ended up with the game’s current logo.

And there you have it, our end result (for now!) We’re very happy with the logo we decided to go with, but if you think we made the wrong choice, be sure to let us know in the comments!

Now, what were we talking about? Something about the holidays? Oh well. Merry whatever!

What is Walk of Life?

After an age of hushed whispers and dealings in the dark, we’ve finally announced what it is that Porcelain Fortress has been secretly working on. If you haven’t seen it already, take a look at the trailer for our upcoming game: Walk of Life. Check it out on Steam!

Yeah, I watched the trailer for your game. I liked it.

Thanks!

So what is it?

Given the popularity and praise that No Time to Relax received, we felt it was only natural to further the royal bloodline and expand the formula with an heir -  a successor to take up the mantle of the world’s most accurate life simulator.

As with No Time to Relax, Walk of Life throws players into a series of boardgame-like turns where they must scramble to find their footing in the rat race and hopefully emerge as the victors in the ultimate game of life. 

Welcome to Calicornia! 

Players familiar with No Time to Relax will encounter a lot of similar themes when playing Walk of Life for the first time, including the often miserable weekend events as well as the dangers of forgetting to eat. Higher education will again lead to better opportunities in the job market which will allow players to buy some gaudy furniture to place in their rundown apartments.

So this is all quite familiar. Why not just add more stuff to No Time to Relax?

Here be dragons. Dragons of CODE.

No Time to Relax was a game made in six months - a baptism by fire that resulted in a product that’s kept the company afloat and amassed a devoted community of players that has enjoyed the game for years.

While the game remains as good as ever, the underlying code is quite messy. Dealing with soupy code means updating and implementing new things is tricky, and some of our crazier ideas didn’t make it into the game as a result. 

In the end, making a new game just made sense in order to get our ideas into the world.

Sure sure, but why “Walk of Life - a No Time to Relax adventure”? Why isn’t it called No Time to Relax 2?

There are a few reasons why.

What a game!

When designing Walk of Life, we took inspiration from some of our childhood classics, such as Lucas Art’s Day of the Tentacle. While that masterpiece was the sequel to Maniac Mansion (and was sometimes referred to as Maniac Mansion II: Day of the Tentacle), the developers wanted to emphasize the game’s unique tone and style with a new title.

Walk of Life’s scope is larger than No Time to Relax. We want to implement vastly different gameplay modes, crazy new mechanics, a new artstyle, and a whole slew of other things that drive the game’s concept further away from No Time to Relax.

Ultimately we decided to go with a new title: Walk of Life.

Okay, but again: WHAT IS IT? What can we expect from Walk of Life?

Pawn your dreams for a rent payment!

Hey! You’ve been asking a few too many questions, pal! There’s a long time until our summer release in 2025 and we need to reserve some topics for our future devblogs.

Until then, gorge your eyes on the above artwork of the pawn shop owner, one of the NPCs you’ll encounter in Walk of Life.

But I-

See you next time!

Dev Blog II: Son of Dev Blog

After a brief yet ominous rumble, the Porcelain Fortress Dev Blog emerges from the depths, breaking years of radio silence. Since our last update predates the release of our breakout title, No Time to Relax, the time feels right to bring you all up to speed on what’s been going on with us.

You may have gotten wind about the recent news of our funding which made the news the other day. If not, you should check it out. It’s a pretty good indicator of how drastically things have changed since the company was founded in 2017. At the time, we had just lost our office space and were scrambling to find a shared workspace, eager to avoid running the entire operation from the living room where we had been holed up just months earlier.

The living room situation, circa 2017.

Upgrade!

After rejecting an offer for a literal cupboard, we landed a snug little room with luxurious amenities that included actual windows and complimentary coffee. Although it was a bit cramped for the five people working at the company at the time, it felt like a dream come true.

We worked on a lot of ideas before we decided on No Time to Relax, which we ultimately ended up developing in six months and releasing to international success – a story we’ll dive into in our next blog.

The Porcelain Fortress team, along with good girl Betty Rose who we met on the boardwalk in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

Over the last year, the team has grown from four members to fourteen. Members include programmers, artists, writers, administration and game designers, all working on a mystery project we can’t wait to share with you when the time is right.

To transform this talented crew of misfits into a game-developing Voltron, we knew a bit of team building was in order. Luckily, we had access to the perfect place for such a task.

Innovation House, which hosts Porcelain Fortress’ offices in Iceland, also has a location in Gloucester, Massachusetts. They generously offered us a stay in their beautifully refurbished 18th-century mansion where we could soak up the fruits of New England and get our ducks in a row.

After a grueling session of team building and exhausting brainstorming, we had transformed into a well-oiled machine, ready to dish out fantastic games. As the team has always had an affinity for the occult, we decided to reward ourselves with a trip to the nearby city of Salem. 

We’ll leave you with some fabulous pictures of the team’s visit to America's capital of witchcraft, but we’ll be back next week with a retrospective of No Time to Relax.

Codename: Furiosa

It’s Player Unknown Battlegrounds meets Micro Machines meets Burnout! That was the tag-line at least… It was the autumn of 2017 and the entire company was in Japan for Tokyo Game Show. One evening, while we sipped bear at Goodbeer Faucets in Shibuya, the idea of a pvp, multiplayer, race & arena battle between heavily decked-out cars came about. How hard can it really be to connect 100 individual together in real time? Well we never got that far…

This would have been such a good box-cover…

Now compared to some of our other projects Codename: Furiosa was rather short lived, only about a month of development time went into it all in all. The developer team spent most of the time looking into car physics (which turn out to be much more complicated than you would think!) while Simmi brainstormed character designs and game mechanics.

The core theme was “What if Death Race 2000 had streamers?”. Every competitor out there would be clamoring to increase their viewership rating and getting out alive.

First iteration of the game’s character designs.

The basic game-play loop we originally came up with.

Simmi drew this up as a idea summary sheet.

We thought about vertical vs horizontal maps. Do you continually need to move up the ramps here towards the top instead of towards a center?

A more horizontal type of battlefield design.

Ultimately we realized that:
A) We didn’t really have the networking know-how at the time to pull this off.
B) Car physics are way harder then you think they are.
C) None of us is actually interested in developing racing games.

So we cut our losses and swept Codename: Furiosa under the rug. Not all was lost though! The code monkeys salvaged some networking parts and reading through papers on vehicle physics was informative at least…

If you don’t want people to use your house as a ramp Mr. Griffin, then why did you build it that way?

The Book of Eri

Hello internet. Want to hear a story? Yes? Great! Here is the story of the game idea: Book of Eri. Book of Eri was a mixed 3D/2D fantasy/sci-fi game emphasizing exploration, combat and puzzle solving. The main goal here was to create a rich single player experience. The gods have arrived and split the world in two.

Here the Dream World is a physical place. You play as Eri, our protagonist chosen by the gods (known as the Acherai) to walk between the worlds. She is a gun for hire, stealing information from people dreams or inserting false memories. Ever wanted to give your arch nemesis an everlasting nightmare?

We wanted to do away with classic damage types such as fire and lightning and wanted something more spiritual. We worked with his Virtue/Vice idea and ways to incorporate it into NPC interactions and combat.

The Dream World was to be represented as a low-poly 3D dungeon crawl in the spirit of Lands of Lore, Eye of the Beholder and Legend of Grimrock. We planned to use assets from Synty Studios as the base and add to that as needed.

Puzzles, while never implemented in game, were paper prototyped. We might re-use some of those for a future project.

If Zelda taught us anything it’s that people love pushing around blocks. Pushing the block into specific action squares rotates it so the power node connects up with the lines.

In the initial concept of Book of Eri, we were planning on combining a 3D world with 2D elements such as enemies. The Dream world would be 3D platforms forming a maze in front of the player, snaking into the distance with large surreal backdrops all around. The Real world be claustrophobic hallways with shadows and light creating a spooky mood.

The dungeon view from the prototype

Since the players view would always be in fixed perspective, there would be fun opportunities to create a visually interesting game world. Long dark hallways. Light creating interesting shapes. Carpet forming a visual path forward. Spooky horror ambient music. Something appears from the darkness and leaps at you. Death.

Dark dark dark hallways, filled with dangers and darkness.

The World of Eri would draw inspiration from various artists such as fantasy illustrator Sean Murray and Mike Mignola. The formula would be something like this: 50% Medieval influence + 20% Steampunk style + 30% Surreal Dream Reality = Book of Eri.

Eri, herself, would draw visual inspiration from strong female characters such as, Jean Grey from X-men, Red from Transistor and Elizabeth Sherman from Hellboy. No fantasy bikini armor or large balloon boobs. She would be a worn out character, burdened by her past and her profession. She would wear a Dream Mask while on the job. To mask her identity and mind.

Design work for Eri, the main protagonist

NPC theme concepts

Ultimately Eri was shelved after about 3 months of work. Main reason was basically a change of direction for the company away from 3D to full 2D. This happened after we created Gundawn, a furious arena battle game, as a GameJam project.

So that’s the story of Book of Eri. An interesting (We like to think so!) little game idea we had a few years ago. Never know if we will revisit it in the future.

Porcelain Fortress: The VR years

In the autumn of 2016 we quit our jobs and started our very own video game studio. We quickly realized that making games is, in fact, really hard.

The idea started when we realized that the Unity Asset Store contained all the assets we needed to make a game. We had programmers so that part was easy (we thought) and we had been working with the Unity engine for about 2 years. The parts we were missing (music, sfx, models, etc.) we would purchase from the Asset Store.

What kind of games would we make? Well we had been working with VR for the last 2 years and at that time the VR market was expected to grow quite rapidly. So the company would ride the VR hype train and make small and fun VR games.

Here then is the story of Panazidox (Paradox + Nazi, get it!?).

Panazidox (first iteration)

Built on the fact that people enjoy shooting stuff in VR and everybody hates Nazis. To save the world you must fight this time-traveling Nazi horde. The game was intended to feature several upgradeable weapons, multiple levels and an 80’s action movie vibe.

Panazidox (second iteration)

At this point the game had turned into a tower defense of game where you would place heroes (based on 80’s & 90’s action movie heroes) and then possess them. The baddies are still Nazis but now they run through paths in a tower defense style.

Panazidox (third iteration)

At this point the game had again changed direction. Now each level is inspired by other video games. The first one was supposed to feature Wolfenstein and Doom. The assets are of course placeholders, (we had no intention of stealing art from Wolf3D for the final product). Here the player could block using a shield, switch between several weapons, use a tractor beam to collect energy orbs to travel to new levels and we even had a crafting system that would allow players to create new maps by combining different maps.

We abandoned Panazidox after about 3 months of development with one key take away point:

Get honest feedback from different people early on, nobody is going to steal your idea. By the end we had created a mess of a game that was way too complicated. Opening these projects in Unity now I realize that the first iteration was by far the best one.