Dead Nice Studio x Amiluu: Our First Annual Collaboration
Jasmine Christmas, COO + Co-Founder
5 min read
Scully the Graveyard Gardener: Nurturing your deceased projects for all eternity
Some working relationships feel like a transaction. You send a brief, you get deliverables back, you pay an invoice, everyone gets on with their lives. And then there are the other kind. The ones where you realise within the first five minutes that you've found (in the most professionial terms) a soul mate.
That's exactly what happened when Dead Nice teamed up with illustrator Amy Gallagher (@amiluu_scribble) for what we're proudly calling our first annual artist collaboration.
The Brief
The brief started with a problem we suspect a lot of studios quietly relate to: business cards are fine but they're forgettable. You pick one up at a conference, admire it briefly and then it spends three weeks at the bottom of a tote bag before disappearing forever. We wanted to give people something they'd actually want to keep. Something they might even stick on their laptop. Something that felt unmistakably Dead Nice.
So we commissioned a sticker sheet.
The concept came together around a theme that felt deeply on-brand for a studio that works in games: a graveyard of unfinished projects. The Grim Reaper, reimagined as a serene gardener, tending to the lovingly deceased relics of game development. Unreleased builds. Cancelled games. That feature that didn't make the cut. The idea resonated immediately, not in a morbid way but in that wry, knowing way that anyone who's spent time in game development will recognise. There's something quietly peaceful about accepting the graveyard. Blessing the unfinished projects. Letting the carnivorous plants grow.
Scully the Gardener Is Born
Amy brought our Dead Nice logo, Scully, to life in her own voice: Adventure Time-inflected, bold, playful,and full of personality, alongside a cast of supporting characters that we did not know we needed until we saw them. A caterpillar sidekick wearing a tiny skull mask (a leaf, chomped to look like a skull — yes, it's a Zelda reference, yes we loved it). Mushrooms with the most derpy little faces you've ever seen. Some berries with expressions that you might recognise when you're mid-crunch...
The Final Result
What made the collaboration genuinely special was how little explaining we had to do. Amy understood the assignment not because we briefed her to death but because she got it. The humour. The warmth. The excitable-but-considered creative energy that Dead Nice runs on. She brought references we hadn't thought of and improved every idea we did have. She was, in the truest sense of the word, a kindred spirit.
The final sticker sheet made its debut at GDC earlier this year, tucked into bags, handed over at meetings and immediately slapped onto laptops by people who didn't wait to get home first. That, frankly, is the highest praise we can imagine.
We're already looking forward to the next one.
Thank you, Amy. You gave Scully a body, a sidekick and a garden. You couldn't have been more Dead Nice about it.
Dead Nice is a specialist game UI + UX design and engineering studio. If you’d like to collaborate with us on a project, get in touch using the link below!