Whilst at New Game Plus, I was fortunate to have an opportunity to interview Murray Somerwolff and Rothio Tomé, the developers behind the upcoming punk narrative record store sim, Wax Heads. It was an extremely wonderful and fascinating conversation, not only on the development of the game but also on the magic of vinyl, live streaming and much more.
If you enjoyed this conversation, then please consider wishlisting the game on Steam and follow Wax Heads on BlueSky.
Murray: Hi, I am Murray Somerwolff. I am one half of Patattie Games, and I am the creative director on Wax Heads. I essentially oversee the art, writing and design of the game.
Rothio: And I’m Rothio Tomé; I’m the creative technical director, and I’m more aligned to the technical side of the project, so programming, designing and SFX.
I’ve just played the demo. As you can tell, I really enjoyed it because I thought I’d been playing it for 20 minutes, and I hadn’t; I’d been playing it for 55 minutes, so that definitely says something about the game. But for people who are reading this and who don’t know what Wax Heads is, what is Wax Heads?
Murray: Okay, so Wax Heads is a cosy punk puzzle narrative record store game where the aim is you have to recommend the right record to the right customer.
And that sounds very basic, but there’s so much more to it, like in the demo, having to try and match the right records with the right customers. Although it was quite easy at the beginning, there were some near the end there that were really quite tricky. How hard has it been to balance that throughout the game?
Rothio: Even though it’s a game about managing a record store, as you said, we focused a lot into trying to solve puzzles, and that puzzle is, ‘What’s the perfect record for everyone?’ We have a lot of characters in there, a lot of different customers, all of them lovely, and the way we wanted to create the puzzles is that they are all different, like how they clothe themselves, if they publish something on social media or even the descriptions of the albums themselves, but the specifics of each puzzle and how they advance and increase in difficulty have been in the hands of Murray.
Murray: I just want to give one caveat to say that the demo you played, we do do a little bit of a cheat because we want to show some of the cool stuff, so we did jump ahead and stick a bit from later in the game earlier, so the fact that you noticed the difficulty curve means that in the full game that will feel a little bit softer.
Where did the inspiration come from for Wax Heads?
Murray: I’m a huge music geek; I love records. I played in bands, and also I love games. It’s always been an interest of mine how to talk about music as a cultural object through the mechanics of games, and the actual inspiration for it came from us playing Wilmot’s Warehouse, which is a great game where you are a small little abstract shape. I was like, ‘Wouldn’t this look really cool as records?’ ‘What if this is like a record store?’ And then from there it (the base of Wax heads) was a record store, a perfect conduit, as it’s a hub for a place to hang out and talk about music. Then originally the idea was to make some procedurally generated kind of game. I realised my brain can’t really fathom or get my head around that, so instead the deduction puzzle and the focus on people’s connections to records and music became more of an appropriate and interesting kind of way to settle into.
There seems to be a wide variety of characters in the game. Are any based on real-life people, or are they all fictional?
Rothio: There are a few of them that are actual people that we put in, people we love, and we wanted to have their very own character in the game. For example, we have Daisy, who is Murray’s wife, and their two kids, and also we have my mother-in-law; she loved the game, but she sadly passed away before the release of the game, so I asked Murray if we could add her, and she’s now part of the game, and her character is looking for a record for her kid, who is now my partner.
It’s really cool to have the opportunity of making some memories stay there forever, and also because of the illustration style of Murray; it’s really different between all the characters, and they all feel really alive. They all feel really peculiar, quirky and a little bit weird, but you grow some affection for them, and they totally fit (in the game) even if they are real people, because all of them, even the fictional ones, have really strong personalities, so that’s really lovely to see.
The art style is quite striking, actually; it’s really nice, kind of Paper Mario-y in some respects. Where did the idea for that come from? Was that the original art style that you always wanted, or were you playing around with different ones to start with?
Murray: That’s a great question. My background is illustration, so I would say that just through my artistic process, I have to some degree an illustration style that I’ve cultivated. That being said, when I started to work on Wax Heads, I really wanted this to have something which really stands out as a definitive kind of characteristic, and I was trying out some different stuff, and what really landed for me as I was reading through my comics was Scott Pilgrim, and I was like, ‘Scott Pilgrim’s got a really dynamic, really chunky look; it’s got this kind of almost relationship to music as well.’
And once I kind of settled into that, that seemed to be a really strong guiding star, like the North Star for the game. I will say that the sticker quality came from Tangle Tower by SFB Games. I love the way that the animation in that game is so exquisite, so I knew we couldn’t do that, because we’ve got, like, over 60 characters, but at least the way they pop on the screen and they have that kind of sticker quality, that kind of tactile feeling, was something I wanted to incorporate into the game, so that’s what kind of meshed Wax Heads into what it is today.
It’s really quite joyous, even like the little bobs that the characters have as they come through the screen.
Rothio: When the art is so amazing, it’s really easy to work over it, to try to unify the elements that can be interactive. I can use the same outline just to make it clearer. I am also really obsessed with UX, like trying to make things noticeable; for example, I use that in a lot of different objects, and also because I didn’t want the work to feel really static, but at the same time it’s impossible to fill them with hand-drawn animation when you have that many characters and environments.
I tried my best to make them feel as alive as I could with some shaders, to do some wiggle animations, and to add all the interactive items I could put around them, so those are special small details. Normally, when you are the programmer, you are just in a mechanical way of just doing the work that has to be done, making a lot of design decisions. In our case, because it’s a rather small team and we trust the decisions of each other a lot, we always have room to say, ‘Okay, it’s not working; we have to iterate on this assertiveness.’ So because of that, I could take a lot of decisions into animations and interactions, which I think are a good complement to the art that was made.
Definitely, I’ve played similar kinds of games in the past, and the characters are always quite static, you know, and it just makes them not feel as alive as they could be, so the way in which you guys have managed to give that feel in the game is really quite incredible.
Rothio: At the very beginning, there were characters that didn’t have expressions, and the expression system was a lot of work, but I think, looking in retrospect, it was totally needed, and I created a few tools to speed up the process. For example, the different combinations of expressions with the eye direction and how to implement that system into the dialogue so you can have some feeling of them being slightly alive by moving, fading in, and fading out. The cool thing is that I could create all the systems for Murray to use and to implement that fit into his overall creative vision.
Of course music is an integral part of the game. How much fun did you have coming up with the albums and artist names?
Murray: One of the things I’ve been asked a couple of times about is if there are any real artists or if there’s any one-to-one, like it’s not the Beatles but the Fleas, for example. And it was important to me not to make these kinds of bands but to make this fictional world feel real and feel believable, to immerse people in it, because what it is is a conversation with music as a culture, and that means if you’re thinking about parody or the uncanniness of it, then you’re going to be taken out of it.
So when I was making the bands and albums, I was pulling from different inspirations, but really, when I was inventing them, I was really bringing them to life in my own head, going, ‘Well, this would be cool,’ and then taking that into the music, which actually brought it to life for our composer Gina Loughlin.
That was really fun because we come from different musical backgrounds. I’m 10 years older than her, so we have different musical backgrounds, and the way we did it was for every band we have a song for, I would give her three different references and be like, ‘Right, this is what I’m thinking for this,’ and then she would hear a lot of music that she had never heard of before. So hearing her hear it for the first time and then amalgamating it just created this really fun back-and-forth conversation about what we liked about it and what was interesting.
One of the parts of the development process you guys have been doing is doing the live streams. Tell me about why you started to livestream and how beneficial it’s been for you.
Rothio: When I first met Murray and he came with the idea to develop Wax Heads, one of the conditions I had was to livestream the process. I started streaming long before the development of Wax Heads, but I was always streaming small technical tools and small interactive games on Twitch, and to be honest, they can be helpful and entertaining to see, but they don’t represent the real development of a game. I wanted to showcase this and to show everyone how different each stage in the development can be. So it was really interesting the first time I streamed and introduced Wax Heads, and now, the moment the publish button is pressed, I will be live streaming too, so it’s been a whole process.
Obviously not 100% of the development can be shown because there are some parts that have to be a little bit secret; they can be covered by NDA, but the rest, like all the systems, etc., has been streamed. It’s been really cool because some of the audience have grown a lot of affection for the game, and they have their favourite bands, and we have discovered together how those bands sound in reality. I got a lot of feedback from the people that were watching the streams. Obviously not 100% of that feedback can be used, but it was interesting to see in real time the perspective. Developing games, especially when you are by yourself or in a remote team, can feel really lonely, so being able to just chat with other people while working is really helpful to keep yourself motivated.
It must be quite cool in a way to watch back some of the old streams to see how far you and the game have come.
Rothio: Yeah, Twitch has this thing where the content itself is temporary; that means that I cannot look back to previous streams. I also like that idea of them being temporary and having to be enjoyed at that time. It’s a moment in the story that you just forget about, but I had a few clips and GIFs that I used to announce the streams; if you look back at those images and then how the game is right now, it’s crazy. You can see the essence, but the changes have been massive.
Obviously Wax Head‘s very much about vinyl records specifically. What is it about vinyls that captures the imagination, especially now in this day and age, considering they were practically a dead format at one stage, but now they seem to be thriving again?
Murray: There are a couple of reasons for that. I think there’s definitely the pushback against tech, streaming and that kind of stuff. I find that when I’ve been using streaming, music feels more disposable; it feels like you skip stuff. When an album is out on streaming, you don’t really tend to engage with it as an album, and an album is a body of work; it’s like you put out a thing where the songs have got some particular kind of conversation between them, so for me, records have this very magical quality: the fact that they’re attached to the way you feel it, the album art, the way that it’s presented, and the fact that when you put the record on, you get a certain order of songs.
I always find it interesting where the break is, where you have to flip, which I love, because then you know you’re forced to sit and listen to it – you are engaging with that as an album, as opposed to ‘Oh, I just want that one song’ – like, that’s it. When I go into the record store, I can spend hours in there. The number of ways you’re pulled by an album, some of which you don’t even know what they are; it grabs your attention, you’re like, ‘What is that?’ It invites you in, so I like to think, and at least the response as well; people we’ve been talking to – there is a magic there and a feeling of art and the human touch. You can feel the humanity that’s been put into a record, which you don’t quite get from Spotify.
When’s the game planned to get released?
Rothio: The 5th of May.
Wow, so close.
Rothio: Yeah, it’s really close.
How are you feeling about that?
Rothio: Oh, it’s something, yeah; it really is difficult to explain to someone that is not in the same circumstance. I have heard through a lot of other developers that were in this same situation that it’s all a bit weird, and I tried to imagine what they felt, but until I’m in this position of releasing something this personal that you have put almost your all into every day and your life for the last two and a half years of development, it’s a really weird feeling.
It’s like something really big is coming to an end, and not knowing what is going to happen in the days after, how people are liking the game or what’s going to happen in the next few months – it’s really, really weird. But I know that I am very happy and proud of all the work we have done. You can see that we put our souls in there, and I hope that people will appreciate and enjoy everything about the game.
Murray: Yeah, I mean, I think Rothio hit it on the head. It’s like being weightless; it’s weird to get to this certain point where I can happily say we’ve done everything that we can, and the game is a product of that effort and that passion. Now we’re just in a weird place of just waiting and hoping people connect with it. When I experience stuff, when things move me, that’s what I hope to achieve by making art myself, so if anyone feels moved by it, then that’s the best thing we could ask for, and all we can do now is wait and see.
And just to finish off, can you describe Wax Heads to me using just one word?
Rothio: Just one word? Okay, hmmm… Maybe it’s a little cliché, but I would say ‘cosy’. Like, yeah, cosy.
Murray: Earnest
As mentioned, Wax Heads releases on the 5th May, 2026 on PC, Xbox Series X|S, PS5 & Nintendo Switch.
