Why one sitting
Most of us have a shelf of games we started and never finished. Not because they were bad, but because a forty hour game asks for a kind of time that adult life rarely hands out in one piece. You play for two evenings, life happens, and three weeks later you cannot remember the controls or why you were in that cave.
We think there is a different shape a game can take. Twenty minutes to three hours. A real beginning, a real ending, and the whole arc held in one evening so the ending actually lands. Short films exist. Short stories exist. We want the game equivalent to exist too, made with the same care as the long ones.
What we believe
Finishable by design
The length is a constraint we design inside, not a number we discover at the end. Every game has an ending you will reach tonight, and the design is tested against that clock from the first prototype.
No filler
If a section exists to stretch the play time, it gets cut. No grind, no daily rewards, no busywork between the good parts. What remains is the part we would show a friend.
Feel and craft first
A short game has no room for a rough first hour, so moment to moment handling gets the biggest share of our time. Hit feedback, camera, timing, sound. The details you feel before you can name them.
Who we are
Alexis Rivard
Game design and playtesting. Alexis decides what goes into a game, plays every build before it ships (nothing reaches the live site without his approval), and writes the devlog.
Olivier Rivard
Engineering and tooling. Olivier builds the pipeline that turns a ticket into a tested build, keeps the sites and deployments running, and looks after the automation that lets two people ship like a bigger team.
How we work
We are a very small team, and we use AI assisted tools throughout: for code, for iteration on 3D props, for the boring parts of shipping. That is what lets a team this size build a third person action game with an original combat system and keep it polished. The taste, the design calls and the playtesting are ours; the tools let us spend our hours on those instead of on plumbing.
We work in the open where it is useful. Every non obvious decision in a project goes into a numbered decision log, and the ones worth reading get written up on the devlog. Wardenfall shipped its first playable slice in July 2026 and has had a patch nearly every day since; The Rot Hunters is being built the same way, one recorded decision at a time; its first level became playable in testing in its first week.
Our games
- Wardenfall: a third person melee game set in a torch lit castle. Playable now, free, in your browser.
- The Rot Hunters: a zombie tower defense roguelike, our second game, in development.
How the studio is paid for
The games are free. The studio runs on small contributions through Ko-fi and, eventually, on small display ads that live only on menu screens. We wrote down the rules for those ads so you can hold us to them.
Get in touch
Bug reports, questions, or a note to say you rolled the credits: the contact page has the details. Press material is on the press page.