Reimagining the Ifrit in HAWKED: A Cultural and Creative Vision

Reimagining the Ifrit in HAWKED

I was asked to support in the design of an Ifrit skin for HAWKED. My goal was clear: build something rooted in the mythology rather than a pile of clichés. We ended up reimagine one of the most iconic figures in Middle Eastern and Islamic mythology through a lens of respect, authenticity, and originality.

The Game, briefly

HAWKED is a free-to-play extraction shooter by MY.GAMES where Renegades raid X-Isle for artifacts, solve traps and puzzles, and fight players and AI. It leans into comic-book energy and treasure hunting instead of military cosplay.

Start with the lore

The Ifrit in Islamic and pre-Islamic sources is a powerful class of jinn formed from smokeless fire. It lives in ruins and underworld spaces, organized in tribes and courts. It shapeshifts. It resists ordinary weapons. It isn’t a Christian demon. It’s fierce, cunning, and spiritual.

That frame set the palette. I moved away from fire spam and worked with stone, smoke, and a contained glow. The lower body became hovering stone fragments, a nod to old depictions where genie-beings drift rather than walk. Earth and ruin mattered more than flames licking everywhere.

Visual language

Power reads better when it’s composed. I shaped the armor with clean geometry that echoes Islamic visual logic without quoting patterns. Eyes carry the supernatural charge. A flame crown sits above the head to signal presence and ritual, not mayhem. Colors sit in bronze, deep violet, and ethereal blue. No red-black inferno.

Horns didn’t fit. I pulled the silhouette toward regalia. Think crown, not beast. The figure feels commanding.

References and guardrails

My board mixed historical material and modern reads on jinn. Mesopotamian weight. Winged scale. Smoke over fireworks. Contemporary pieces like Pulvis’s concepts helped define “elemental and solemn” instead of “theme-park genie”.

I flagged the traps: no goat-devil with lava veins, no Disney bottle-tricks, no orientalist costume party. The aim wasn’t to sanitize the Ifrit. It was to respect it.

Outcome

The skin hasn’t shipped, but the process mattered. It followed the same line I used elsewhere on HAWKED’s cultural content: build from source, keep the tone playful where it fits, and stop before it turns into a collage of stereotypes. In earlier work that gave us things like the Berber Corsair and the Houara Dance emote, players from the regions noticed. The feedback was quiet and specific, which is the best kind.

Myth carries its own gravity. If you let it lead, you get shapes, materials, and colors that feel inevitable. The result is exciting and sellable without leaning on “infernal red plus spikes”. Reverence and creativity can share a room. When they do, a skin reads like a story instead of a gimmick. The design didn’t feel like an afterthought or a cultural mashup. It felt considered, and you can read more about it in a dedicated portfolio entry called HAWKED Cultural Content.