About the studio
Built in New Zealand.
Built for worlds that matter.
Shoreforge Games is an independent game development studio with a single focus — building the kind of deep, ambitious, living-world games that stay with players for years. No committees. No compromise. Just the game we believe needs to exist.
The name
Where iron meets the sea.
Taranaki is a region defined by contrast — a dormant volcano rising from a coastline of black iron sand beaches, where the land meets the Tasman Sea in a way that feels both violent and beautiful. It shaped how we think about making things.
Shoreforge — the meeting of shore and forge. The natural forces that shape the coastline of our home, and the creative process behind every game we build. Raw material, pressure, and heat — turned into something that lasts.
Why we exist
Some games don’t get made unless someone decides to make them.
The games that inspired us — sprawling RPGs where choices had real weight, survival worlds that felt genuinely dangerous, living worlds with their own histories — took enormous teams and enormous budgets to build. For a long time, that was just the reality.
That reality is changing. The technology available to independent developers today makes it possible to build systems of a depth and ambition that simply weren’t accessible before. We exist to take advantage of that — to build a game we’ve always wanted to play, and that we don’t believe anyone else is building quite like this.
How we build
Depth over breadth. Systems over spectacle.
No shortcuts on systems
Every mechanic is built to interact with everything else. Survival affects combat. Combat affects faction standing. Faction standing affects the economy. Nothing exists in isolation.
The world earns its story
There’s no hand-written narrative to follow. The story of every server emerges from the simulation — from what players do, what factions decide, and what nobody stopped in time.
Player freedom is non-negotiable
No classes. No locked roles. No predetermined path. We design for players who want to discover who their character is, not be told.
Technology in service of design
We use the best tools available — not because they’re impressive, but because they let us build things that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.
Technology
Built on the best available foundation.
Age of Corruption is built in Unreal Engine 5.7 — using Lumen global illumination, Nanite virtualised geometry, Voxel Plugin for fully deformable terrain, and a custom dedicated server architecture running a persistent world simulation. Every system is multiplayer-replicated from day one.
“The forge is lit. The journey has begun.”
See what we’re building →