"What's the harm in asking?" – Dlala Studios on taking a big swing to get comedy legend Bob Mortimer for the upcoming game Murals

GamesIndustry.biz reports that Dlala Studios has brought British comedy figure Bob Mortimer into Murals, after founder Aj Grand-Scrutton and lead writer Kelsy Abbott wrote a Mortimer-inspired character and then decided to try for the real thing. The studio got a script in front of Mortimer’s team, he liked it, and he later recorded as Magic Dave, the character tied to the game’s Vending Machine of Delights.

The bigger story for developers is that Murals is Dlala’s first fully owned IP. After years of work-for-hire on projects like Battletoads and Disney Illusion Island, the studio is using its own cash plus outside investment to self-fund half the game and publish it itself. Grand-Scrutton frames that as a deliberate gamble: the team can’t lean on a licensor, but it also gets to control the creative direction and keep the upside.

On the design side, Murals is pitched as an easy-to-pick-up combat game with depth, built around persistent “Eeries” that function like modular trinkets and let players tune weapons over time. That structure suggests a hybrid between linear progression and buildcraft, which should be interesting for designers and systems folks watching how Dlala balances accessibility with replayable loadout experimentation.

The studio’s path also underlines how much trust matters in licensed work. Dlala’s earlier support on Sea of Thieves helped earn Battletoads, and that track record later fed into Disney’s Illusion Island. Now the team is applying those lessons to something it owns outright, with the usual risk that comes from betting on original IP rather...