A small indie studio making story-led games and fictional novels, shaped by original, immersive characters, worlds, and mechanics. Pull up a seat by the fire and experience one of our tales.
We make action-adventure games: top-down, narrative-driven, built on systems we own and reuse. At the center of every one is a relationship: found family, loyalty and betrayal, belonging. The bonds between people are what our worlds are really about. The name says what we care about, in order.
Every game starts as fiction. Before a prototype exists, the world exists, written as a novel or short story that has to stand on its own as a book first. If the story doesn't hold up on the page, it doesn't earn a build. This is our pages-to-pixels process, and it means our games are adaptations of worlds we've already proven, not pitches we're still figuring out.
Each game is built around a single hook: a specific weapon, a specific ability, one mechanic that defines how that world plays and couldn't be swapped out without changing the game entirely. The story tells us what the hook should be. We don't bolt mechanics onto a setting, we find the one the fiction already implies.
Our stories are about people and the bonds between them: found family, the loyalty that holds them together, and the betrayals that break them apart. Belonging is what's at stake in every SMKS world, whatever its setting or hook. The systems and the action exist to put those relationships under pressure and let players feel the weight of them. When someone finishes one of our games, the connection is what we want them to carry out.
Under every SMKS game is a shared framework: health, abilities, props, and the rest, built once and reused. Tribe of the Accord is the foundation. Its systems are designed to be reskinned and repurposed so each new game starts further down the road. We invest in the engine room so we can ship more worlds, faster, without rebuilding the basics every time.
We've run this path with Tribe of the Accord, which now serves as both our first world and the technical base for everything that follows. Every game after it carries its own hook and its own story, but inherits a foundation that's already been built and tested.
We've discussed characters. Well, they need a place for the story to unfold. If we had a movie or theatre production without a set or background in place, we would feel lost. For both a novel and a game, we need to be able to picture...
Read the full post
