Say hello to the pawn—the figure that will represent the player as they navigate the world of Walk of Life.

Our previous game didn’t have a pawn in the traditional sense, but instead used floating disembodied heads to mark each player's movement. A bit ghastly in retrospect.

For a game that’s as board game inspired as Walk of Life, the importance of a good pawn cannot be overstated. A well-designed pawn makes it easier to follow movement, track actions, and understand what’s happening in the game. This might seem minor, but it can make a huge difference.

Since we want players to embody all sorts of characters in Walk of Life, the pawn needed to be versatile—a blank slate that could represent anyone. To achieve this, we once again looked to No Time to Relax for inspiration, this time drawing from our weekend event cards.

The cards in No Time to Relax featured highly expressive yet amorphous figures—perfect for delivering humor while remaining abstract enough to represent anyone.

Our first iteration for a pawn in Walk of Life was quite similar, but with some alterations to better fit our new art style.

This new pawn was simpler than the one in No Time to Relax, but we felt the pawn needed to be even sillier and funnier so we could really crank the wackiness up to eleven.

In the end, we went for a design that was even simpler yet more expressive. We went with a cartoonier style with wobblier lines, maximizing potential hijinks.

We really like where we landed here, so much so that we threw the pawn into the game’s logo, hoping for it to be an iconic part of the game’s image.

You can expect to see these little guys moving around the game board, as parts of event cards, and in the icons of various actions you’ll be performing in Walk of Life.

And here we have the pawn on the game map, ready to face whatever fresh hell life has to offer. In addition to being your token on the game board, the pawn will also be featured in the icons of various actions that players will take in Walk of Life.

Here’s a couple of icons for actions you’ll be able to perform at the gym.

We can’t wait to show you more of the pawn - stay tuned!

Health.

Happiness.

Hygiene.

Stress.

Long ago, the four attributes lived together in harmony. Then, everything changed when the Landlord Nation attacked.

Attributes! We all have them, and we all like to exaggerate them. (I should know—I scored an IQ of 190 on a very reputable online quiz.)

Attributes play a crucial role in life simulators. They give players a clear and relatable sense of how their character is doing in, well, life. They also unlock opportunities for interesting game mechanics and plenty of humorous content.

In No Time to Relax, attributes were directly tied to your final score. Higher health and happiness meant a higher score contribution. This led to an odd strategy: maximizing these attributes early in the game let players essentially ignore them afterward.

Conversely, letting your health or happiness drop to rock bottom wasn’t a big deal—you could just wait until the late game to pump them back up for maximum points. Stress functioned a bit differently, and only began affecting you once it got too high.

In hindsight, this didn’t work too well for a life simulator. In real life, you (unfortunately) can’t just stockpile health and happiness and then coast. Maintaining these parts of your life is a constant effort, not a one-time task.

From a gameplay perspective, it also led to linear strategies for players who wanted to optimize their score. Ignoring attributes for most of the game generally meant less decision-making.

We want this to change for Walk of Life. Our most recent experimental change was to disassociate scoring entirely from attributes and instead tie it to other achievements, such as the quests we talked about in our last blog.

Instead, players will now have to carefully maintain their attributes at the same time that they pursue objectives to maximize their endgame score. If your health, happiness, or the newly introduced hygiene, fall too low, dire consequences will follow, making quests and other achievements significantly harder to get.

This functions similarly to how accumulating too much stress did in No Time to Relax. And don’t worry, stress is still there!

Walk of Life is meant to be a hectic and hilarious life simulator, and we think having your attributes falling out of balance every so often will go a long way to emulate the hardships we all face in our day to day lives.

Then again, this is all experimental and might not make it to the game at launch. Everything you’ve just read is vapor. A flickering shadow. Sand sifting between your fingers. Tears in rain. Fleeting and meaningless.

See you again for our next blog!