Night Wraith Studio

Night Wraith Studio is an independent games studio based in the UK. Right now, "the studio" is one person — me, Chris Speare — building a cooperative survival horror game called Deep Ice (though this title may change before release).

The short version

I've spent twenty years as a software engineer, primarily in distributed data processing working with PHP, Java and C#.

Until this year, I'd never written a line of gameplay code or opened the Unreal Engine Editor. Deep Ice is what happens when two decades of building systems — architecture, networking, testing, infrastructure — gets pointed at a medium I've loved my whole life but never made.

The engine and the C++ I learned from scratch to build this. The discipline underneath it I didn't. That's the bet Night Wraith Studio is built on: that a solid engineering foundation, built properly from the start, is the hardest part to fake — and the best thing to build a game on top of.

How I work

In the open, and honestly. This site is a dev log, not a marketing funnel. I'd rather show you a working greybox prototype and tell you plainly what's built and what isn't than post a trailer full of things that don't exist yet. The systems come first; the paint comes later.

Engineering first. The whole game is written in C++, versioned properly, tested automatically, and built through a self-hosted CI/CD pipeline — the kind of setup you'd expect from a team, run by one person. Not because it's glamorous, but because it's what lets a solo developer move fast without the whole thing collapsing under its own weight.

One game at a time. Deep Ice is the first thing Night Wraith Studio is making, set in a world designed to outlast it. But the focus, for now, is entirely on getting this one right.

What we're making

Deep Ice (working title) is a 1-to-4 player cooperative sci-fi survival horror game set beneath the ice of Jupiter's moon Europa. You can read more about it in the introduction post, and follow the build as it happens right here.

Get in touch

Follow development on this blog — subscribe to get new posts as they go up. For anything else, reach me at hello [at] nightwraithstudio [dot] com.

— Chris, Night Wraith Studio