Vessel Interactive Studio

Vessel Interactive Studio has four games in development. They do not share a template: one is a top-down overworld adventure, one a compact Metroidvania, one a real-time strategy game and one a step-based first-person party crawler with an optional VR mode. What they share is how they get made.

Everything in these games was made for these games

Every sprite, tile, portrait, animation and interface element is drawn for the game it appears in. That is slower than buying an asset pack, and it is the reason the games look like themselves. The same goes for audio: each title gets its own score, and Kingdom Shields goes further still: every unit in it answers back, across more than eighty recorded voice lines.

The right engine for the job

Ethral, The Bone Warrior's Oath and Kingdom Shields are built in GameMaker, which suits their 2D sprite pipelines. Vharaduun is not: a step-based first-person crawler that also has to render to a headset wanted its own foundation, so it runs on an engine written from scratch in C on raylib, with an OpenXR path for VR.

Systems before spectacle

Item-gated worlds where a new tool reopens ground you walked past an hour ago. Fog of war that punishes not scouting. An Active Time Battle system where row position decides who can reach whom. A four-hundred-year-old treaty that does its own accounting and bills the wrong signatory. The mechanics carry the story rather than decorating it.

Where things stand

Ethral is on Steam and open for wishlists, targeting Q4 2026. The Bone Warrior's Oath has a free alpha demo on itch.io that you can play right now: roughly half an hour, name your own price. Kingdom Shields and Vharaduun are in active development and have not announced dates.