If you have been following my work in recent months, you will have seen some information on a game I have been working on called UrbX Warriors with my partner in crime, Tony Warriner. One of the things we struggled with from the start of our collaboration was what to call ourselves. Various names popped up, but nothing really felt right. So earlier this month we both took time out to put some serious thought into agreeing what we should be called!
We narrowed it down to a couple of names, and between us we somehow meandered the list down to one, that being “Brazen Gameplay”. It worked and represented what we were about. You would think coming up with a name would be fairly straightforward but we found it surprisingly difficult but this one just felt right. With a sigh of relief the name was agreed, but hold on… with a name there surely has to be a logo? I mean it’s the thing to do, right?
A few ideas via AI were shared between us but one image caught our attention. It was a sword pointing upwards with the words Brazen Gameplay plastered in the middle. The image was very simple, almost icon like but was enough to spark a few ideas in the ol’ grey matter…We both liked it and thus we settled on having a sword in the logo (not a broken one though!). I should say, I don’t use AI very often and never for final artwork as my work is me it’s what people are paying for, so unless I could control every aspect of a generated image (like say using Blender to create 3D art) I would feel like a charlatan touting it as such. But… it is a fantastic tool to throw out ideas, which can then spark inspiration and get those creative juices flowing. This was a good example of just that.

With our debut game, UrbX Warriors I created a logo that was heavily inspired by the SNK arcade stuff of the 90s so with the company logo I had this sense to keep the look connected whilst being different. It just felt right, so one evening I scribbled a few very rough sketches down to see what would occur. When I say rough, they make sense to me but look absolutely awful!


With this collections of ideas I was keen to get cracking first thing on creating a nice vector version from which I can then hang the final line art from. My software of choice for doing this is Affinity Designer V2, V1 would work equally well but seeing as I’ve upgraded I now use V2 going forward.
I was tempted to load up Krita and digitally paint the logo but decided to go down the vector art route as I wanted the final logo to be resolution independent.

After a few mis-starts and a dead end doodles, between us we settled on the design above. I wanted something I could use monochromatically too but had this idea to go with metal and stone for the full colour version, but… I just wasn’t sure how much detail to include as we wanted to it be fairly simple. Tony sent me the Ultimate Logo which he really liked – that iconic 80s computer game developer. From that, I thought about making the BRAZEN more reflective, sort of chrome like. If we were in the 80s I think the chrome yellow/blue sand/sky style would have been used but I didn’t want to do that, it’s very cliché and was used everywhere back then. No, I wanted something clean, clear and crisp. Blue worked, and with the subtle hue change between the top and bottom areas I settled on the final colour scheme.

One of the hardest things to commit to was how I was going to represent the shading. I have a tendency to do lots of detail but for this I didn’t feel it was needed. Just enough but not too much! I also didn’t want it to look to computed. What do I mean by that? Well, working with vector art it can be so very easy to keep things very aligned and very uniform, I didn’t want that, I wanted it to look hand drawn.
Looking over some reference images from the 70s and 80s, particularly the awesome airbrush artwork of the time, I sought to capture some of that in this design. If I could create something that would look authentic and of its time yet still appear fresh, job done! The Ultimate logo used black as a divider between the sky and the ground as well as providing some lines to show the reflection curves, which again was a throwback to that time, so I went with that.
At this stage I hadn’t even thought of adding the stone cracks in but I felt it needed it, so those went in followed by some hi-lights on the BRAZEN lettering and some very subtle shading on the GAMEPLAY text. I did contemplate making that chrome but it would have been too much so keeping it simple took precedence.
And that’s it! If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading! I wasn’t intending to write too much but in the end I thought I’d share the process with you.
We are going to be launching a Kickstarter for our debut game together under the Brazen Gameplay name, so please share and back it if it’s for you!
UrbX Warriors is an arcade style video game in development by Tony Warriner and Stoo Cambridge collectively known as Brazen Gameplay. The game will be released for the ZX Spectrum Next, PC (Windows/Linux) and Mac.
To help fund the development of the game and secure a release we are launching a Kickstarter Campaign.
If you would like to support our work please check out our campaign page and be notified when it goes live.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tonywarriner/urbx-warriors-an-original-game-for-the-spectrum-next