Walk of Life News

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!

Prithee, forsooth, verily, and yonder!

Now that we’ve exhausted our vocabulary of medieval sounding words, let’s talk about quests. As we teased in the previous blog, quests are one of the features we’re experimenting with for Walk of Life to increase the game’s replayability.

A recurring piece of feedback of No Time to Relax was that after a couple of playthroughs it was easy to figure out the optimal strategy of the game. The game could effectively be solved as players would follow the same strategy every game to get the maximum amount of points.



One way to prevent players from always following the same path is to present them with different choices every game, meaning that they can’t follow the same strategy every time but must instead adapt to what the game throws at them.

Quests are a new feature that are meant to serve as one of the main ways for players to earn points in Walk of Life. Each quest includes one or more objectives that players must complete within a specified timeframe to earn a score bonus.

A key aspect of quests is that they are random and players will not get the same quests every game. Some quests may line up with what you were going to do anyway, while others may force you to take a bit of a detour from your gameplan.



Quests are obviously not some revolutionary new design but a simple addition to the game that should feel intuitive to players while addressing what we felt was an issue with our game design. You don’t have to use nanobots in a situation where duct tape does the job.

So what kind of quests do you put into a life simulator?

Without slimes or dragons for our players to slay, quests will have players tackle mundane, everyday happenings. For example, “Lottoman Empire” will ask you to buy a bunch of lottery tickets, while “Suds all, folks” will require you to wash your hands at one of the game’s bathrooms.

Wait, did we just reveal that our game has bathrooms? That was supposed to be a whole devblog in and of itself.

Fine. Take this sneak preview of one of the many bathrooms in Walk of Life. See if we care.

Oh, hi!

You’ve caught us in the middle of work as we are currently neck-deep in elbow grease, viscera, and God only knows what other fluids to release the perfect game.

But, since it’s you, I guess we can make a little time for a devblog.



When we started scoping out Walk of Life, we began by looking back to its predecessor and the lessons we learned from it (if any).

Over the years since its release, the No Time to Relax community has provided us with a bunch of feedback through reviews, emails, and the in-game feedback button, with comments ranging from heartfelt praise to all-caps vitriol about us and our mothers.

No Time to Relax was well received, maintaining a "Very Positive" user review score on Steam—for a brief and beautiful period even reaching the coveted "Overwhelmingly Positive" rating.



So, these are all strong points of No Time to Relax that we must keep in mind not to lose when developing Walk of Life. Now let’s dive into the negative feedback.

A highly requested feature we couldn’t deliver was more content. Players wanted more of the world they inhabited in the game. Why can’t I visit the hospital or work at the harbour even though I see it? Unfortunately, adding more content to the game was tricky because the game’s code was hastily assembled in only six months and had a tendency to unravel when fiddled with.

Player interaction or lack thereof was another complaint that we did deliver on with the hex shop, although some players thought the system could have benefitted from more depth.



The most common complaint was that the game’s optimal strategy was relatively easy to figure out after a few playthroughs. Even if they initially liked the No Time to Relax, many players felt the game became repetitive after it had been “solved”.

All of this feedback is immensely useful to us and we think we’ve come up with a system that will go a long way with tackling the replayability issue: quests

What are quests, you ask? Well, you can probably guess, but we’ll tell you more about them in our next devblog. Until then, enjoy this sneak preview of someone you might encounter in Walk of Life.



Did we gloss over some of the things you liked or disliked in No Time to Relax? What would you like to see in Walk of Life? Let us know in the comments!

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!

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rx3fDyx1XLU

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.



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?



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.

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?



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!