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 colour 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 what do you think? Did we make the right call? Let us know if you disagree with our final decision!
Also, what were we talking about? Something about the holidays? Oh well. Merry whatever!