The Chair is about a seat nobody agrees you earned. The old boss is gone, you're sitting in for him, and everyone around you is deciding whether to follow. We wanted the first image of the game to say all of that with nobody in it.
Blocking out the room
We started with a flat composition: a wingback chair behind a heavy desk, backlit by a harbor at dusk. The window matters. This is a port city, and the money comes in on containers, so the cranes stay in the frame.
Every object is a sentence
On the wall, a portrait of the old man with a black mourning ribbon across the frame. On the desk, a cigarette still burning in the ashtray: someone was just here. A single white carnation. A rotary phone that's about to ring. And a bill of lading with the consignee blacked out and a red RECEIVED stamp, because in this story the paperwork is where the power really lives.
Then the paint
The blockout had the story but not the weight. The Chair takes its cues from painted political dramas, so the final piece had to feel like oil on canvas: warm light, heavy shadows, brushwork you can see. We're a small studio and we lean on modern tools to do some of the heavy lifting, but the decisions are ours: what's in the room, and why.
The logo is the last piece. It's set like the header of a document, Minutes of the House, not for circulation, with a red ACTING stamp slammed across it. Andre isn't the boss. Not yet.