Hey all! Happy Monday! For today’s blog post, I had wanted to either talk about more of Wraith past,(most notably our early history and really old prototypes and scrapped projects) especially since those kind of posts tend to be our most popular OR talking about the plans for the new mural in the studio (since it’s really fresh on all of our minds). It looks like the mural article won out! Don’t worry, though, we’ll do the other article some time here soon (hopefully after the release of Radarkanoid).
Murals seem pretty topical as of late because of the news that The Hamilton Mill (the building where our studio is located) has been selected to be one of several places Hamilton has decided to place a big ‘ol mural! It’ll be right above the parking lot. It’s pretty awesome, especially since most of us have mentioned that one would look great right there.
Hamilton’s been all about art and urban renewal for the past few years and the results really show!
On top of that, on the inside of The Mill in the front entrance way is a super sweet new mural done by the kids at the Butler Tech School for the Arts (which is, oddly enough, where I went to school. I’m so proud!)
With all these cool murals at The Mill, it’s really time we get ours started! Here’s a quick shout of the unpainted wall followed by it painted (well, it’s a shot of most of the wall, anyway).
So, you can see it’s a pretty big, blank canvas just begging for something awesome! Well awesome is something we’re going to give it! The first think you may notice, however is the big conduits running through the wall, breaking up the usable space. That’s actually fine, believe it or not. See, as you may have noticed, the studio is painted with our brand colors (mostly) and we’ve taken the pipes, radiator and conduits and painted them, orange to match the orange in our logo (yes, it’s there, go check… I’ll wait).
It’s a pretty striking look, to say the least. We’re even getting that faucet-shaped coat rack we talked about in a previous post and painting it orange just to go with the look. Those orange pipes are pretty bold, but what if I told you they didn’t just come out of nowhere…
BAM! This is an early screenshot for some sprite art on one of our smaller projects, Jet Pack Hero. It’s pretty old actually. We’ve had it up on social media for at least a year, if not two. JPH, is a pretty cool game, but we’re not really returning to it until more of Collapsus is done (and maybe even Physix).
So what does that have to do with anything? Well look at this mock-up from before we painted the wall:
And this other (very WIP) Jet Pack Hero screenshot:
Now it comes full circle!
The entire idea behind this mural is to play homage to Wraith’s past, present, and future. Right now, we’ve mapped out how it’s going to play homage to JPH and Fly Guy, but we also have plans to incorporate elements from our other current projects; Collapsus, Physix, Radarkanoid, AAAAH!!! A GIANT FREAKIN’ CAVEWORM, RUN!, as well as other projects from our past and even future games we haven’t let you guys know about yet. It’ll be pretty sweet to see up on that wall… and who knows: maybe, just maybe it will fuel our creativity and inspire us enough so we can actually get finished with one of them…
Nah.