Behind The Art: Wax Heads

Hello, hello! Hope everyone is having a good week and looking forward to a long weekend off for Easter! We're now only just 4(ish) weeks away from the release of Wax Heads, which is CRAZY and has got me in a reflective mood. I was looking back over the artwork I've made during development and thought it might be fun to show some of the art direction journey.

To provide some background, I was an illustrator before I got into game dev. That's how I've kind of stumbled into cultivating a particular visual identity and why there is a throughline from games I've worked on; Spitkiss, Welcome to Elk, Dead Pets: A Punk Rock Slice of Life to Wax Heads. That being said, when I started developing the idea of Wax Heads, I knew I wanted it to have a very singular, bold art direction, I just didn't know exactly what...

But after some stumbling in the dark, I had a eureka moment of inspiration, which was when reading my Scott Pilgrim comics. Looking at Bryan Lee O'Malley's art style, I thought that it had the perfect bold, chunky comic visual flair that matches the tone and vibe of the record store I wanted to make.

Once I had that guiding north star, it gave me a standard to aim for and I tried to then channel the dynamic feeling of Scott Pilgrim in the world of Wax Heads.

Once I started to lock in and find my footing with the art style, the trickiest part was then trying to balance the visuals with gameplay, especially since Wax Heads is a heavy interface game. That meant lots of blocking and moving stuff around, all while trying to retain that cool, chunky cartoon aesthetic.

Luckily for all the navigating screen boundaries and painful UI/UX twists we had to make, making the albums was always a joy. Designing them was a mixture of my imagination and riffing off silly ideas I had for bands and then sometimes referencing and zoning in to purposefully capture a genre or mood. But yeah more than anything it was just a lot of fun.

Then there was making the environments and spaces. I'm much more naturally attuned to character design than I am environments, but I think breaking the spaces into little hubs and scenes, filling them full of details, that was my way in to try and really bring Repeater Records and the Apple Bed to life.

What's probably the weirdest thing about my art making process is, it's where I test out mechanics and game ideas. I make GIFS and storyboards before we actually try to commit in engine. I like to thumbnail out what I think the gameplay is, some of which sadly ends up in the cutting room floor, even though it does LOOK cool... (like these two ideas for a lunch eating ramen game and DOOM x Shaun of the Dead arcade machine).

I could talk forever on this stuff but I don't want to keep you away from the sunshine for too long (it's a glorious day where I am in East Midlands England.)

Wax Heads has easily been the biggest challenge in my artistic career - the sheer amount of characters, albums, rooms and interfaces to create is mind boggling.

But it's been awesome, I've loved it, I've loved cramming the game with details and small easter eggs and bits of personality that make this world feel alive. I feel as an artist I've really levelled up on this game and I just can't wait for you all to play it soon and see not just what I've done, but also what our whole team has put in, how all our contributions have made Repeater Records hum with life and magic.

So yeah, hope you enjoyed this self indulgent display of behind the scenes artwork and hope you have a great long weekend! Just over 4 weeks to go until the big day, but until then, take care and keep on spinning.

Murray :)