Unreal Engine 5
Nanite geometry and Lumen lighting across both production lines, with a custom fork for our streaming and save systems. Two of our engineers contribute fixes back upstream to Epic.
Core engine
Zürich, SwitzerlandEst. 2016Unreal Engine 5
Worlds are not built. They are forged.
NovaForge Studios is an independent game development company on the shore of Lake Zurich. We craft AAA and indie titles for PC and consoles — slowly, deliberately, and entirely in-house.
Chapter I — The Studio
Who we are
We are forty-two developers, artists and engineers working from a converted machine hall in Zürich-West — a district that once forged turbines and now forges playable worlds.
NovaForge began in 2016 with three people, one rented motion-capture suit and a conviction that Switzerland could ship world-class games. A decade on, we run two production lines under one roof: a AAA team building large-scale action RPGs, and a smaller indie unit that takes creative risks the big line cannot afford. Each feeds the other — tools, technology and, above all, ambition.
We publish on PC, PlayStation and Xbox, we own our IP, and we never crunch our way to a deadline. Precision over panic. It is a very Swiss way to make video games, and it works.
- Founded
- 2016, Zürich
- Team
- 42 people, 14 nationalities
- Titles shipped
- 5 — two AAA, three indie
- Platforms
- PC · PlayStation · Xbox
- Engine
- Unreal Engine 5, customised
Every game we ship passes through the same fire — six stages, one flame.
Chapter II — The Craft
Game development pipeline
Six stages carry an idea from a sketch on the studio wall to a certified build on a console. The order matters: nothing enters production until it has survived the stages before it.
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Discovery & worldbuilding
Writers, designers and a small art strike-team spend eight to twelve weeks answering one question: is this world worth years of our lives? Lore bibles, tone boards and a playable narrative sketch decide it.
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Vertical slice
One level, fully realised — final art quality, final feel. If the slice does not make a stranger reach for the controller a second time, the project returns to discovery or dies here. Most die here. The survivors deserve it.
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Pre-production
We lock the design pillars, budget every system, and build the tooling the full team will live in for the next two years. Boring on paper, decisive in practice — schedules slip in pre-production or not at all.
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Full production
The whole studio converges. Content teams ship a playable build every Friday; a strike team playtests it every Monday. Combat, quests, audio and performance are tuned in weekly loops, never in a final scramble.
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Polish & hardening
Six months reserved before release — not for finishing features, but for sanding every edge. Frame-time budgets are enforced per platform, and external playtest groups in three countries hammer the build.
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Certification & launch
Platform certification, day-one patch discipline, and a live team already staffed before the first player logs in. Launch is a beginning; we support every title for a minimum of two years.
Chapter III — The Forge
Technology
Unreal Engine 5 is our foundation; the rest is machinery we built because nobody sold what we needed. Everything below runs in production today.
Foundry — worldbuilding toolkit
Our in-house editor layer for terrain, settlements and quest logic. A designer can block out a valley, populate it and script an encounter without leaving one window or writing one line of C++.
Proprietary
Bellows — build & test farm
A 40-node farm under the studio floor compiles, cooks and smoke-tests every commit on PC and both console devkits. A broken build pages its author in under nine minutes.
Infrastructure
Optical motion capture stage
A 36-camera optical volume with real-time retargeting into the engine. Directors watch performances on final characters, in final lighting, as they happen on the floor.
Performance
Audio & localisation pipeline
Wwise-driven adaptive audio, recorded in Zürich and mixed for eleven languages. Dialogue re-records flow from the booth to a playable build in the same afternoon.
Sound
Before a single polygon exists, a world must be seen.
Chapter IV — The Vision
Concept art
Every NovaForge world begins in the art bay: eight artists, two thousand sketches a year, and a rule that nothing is modelled until it has been drawn, argued over and drawn again. Creature silhouettes are tested at thumbnail size; if you cannot read a monster at twelve pixels, you will not fear it at four thousand.
Our art directors keep a physical wall — printed, pinned, rearranged weekly — because a world's identity is decided by what hangs next to what. The wall for our current AAA title has survived three years and roughly nine hundred pins.
Browse our ArtStationChapter V — The Performance
Motion capture
Down one floor from the art bay is the volume: a 36-camera optical stage where stunt performers, fencers and actors give our characters their bodies. Combat choreography for our sword work is designed with a historical fencing coach from Bern — real bind, real measure, real footwork, then exaggerated exactly as far as the fantasy demands and no further.
Performances retarget live onto in-game characters, so a director can call "again, but wounded" and watch the armoured hero limp through the actual castle set seconds later. On an average capture day the stage records four hundred takes; perhaps thirty survive.
- Cameras
- 36 optical
- Volume
- 12 × 9 m
- Retargeting
- Real-time, in-engine
Ten years, five titles, no shortcuts.
Chapter VI — The Worlds
Featured projects
- Ashen Crown An open-world dark fantasy set in a fractured alpine empire, where every stronghold you liberate rewrites the war around it. Our largest production to date — four years in, one year out.
- Halden Deep A slow-burn descent through a flooded mining town beneath the Alps, told entirely without cutscenes. Winner of the Swiss Game Award and a nominee at the Independent Games Festival.
- Sable Protocol Squad tactics in ninety-second turns, built by six people in fourteen months. Still updated, still selling, still the reason half our AAA systems designers joined the studio.
Chapter VII — The Names
Meet the team
Forty-two people ship our games. These are the ones who answer for them — laid out the way we like our names best: in the credits.
Studio Director
Matthias Keller
Co-founded NovaForge after a decade of engine work in Frankfurt and Montréal. Signs off every vertical slice personally, usually with too many notes.
Creative Director
Elena Vogt
Narrative designer turned director. Wrote the Halden Deep script in a village above Andermatt and has been chasing that silence in every game since.
Technical Director
Rajan Mehta
Keeper of our Unreal fork and the Bellows build farm. Believes a stable 60 frames per second is a design feature, and has the profiling captures to prove it.
Art Director
Livia Brunner
Runs the art bay and the nine-hundred-pin wall. Trained in classical illustration in Lucerne; draws every key creature herself before handing it to the team.
Head of Production
Sofia Almeida
The reason we ship without crunch. Ran live operations for a major online RPG before deciding schedules should protect people, not consume them.
Lead Animator & Mocap Supervisor
Jonas Widmer
Former stage combatant who moved behind the cameras. Directs every session on the volume and still suits up when a fall needs to look properly painful.
Chapter VIII — The Invitation
Careers
We hire slowly and keep people for years. Relocation support to Zürich, a four-and-a-half-day week, profit sharing on shipped titles, and a strict no-crunch policy — audited by the person it would be easiest to overrule, our Head of Production.
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Apply
Senior Gameplay Engineer — Unreal Engine
Own combat systems on Ashen Crown, from input feel to hit resolution. C++ depth required; sword-fighting enthusiasm optional but historically common.
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Apply
Environment Artist — Alpine Biomes
Build the valleys, ridgelines and ruined strongholds of a fractured empire. You should love rock formations more than is socially acceptable.
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Apply
Technical Animator
Bridge the mocap volume and the engine: retargeting, rigging, and the runtime systems that make four hundred daily takes usable.
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Apply
Producer — Indie Line
Shepherd a six-person team from vertical slice to launch. Small budgets, sharp scope, complete creative ownership.
Nothing that fits? We read every unsolicited portfolio: contact@novaforgestudios.pro
Chapter IX — The Questions
Frequently asked questions
Do you take on external development or co-development work?
Selectively. Between our own productions we accept co-development engagements in Unreal Engine 5 — full features, ports or content packages — for partners whose projects we would be proud to have our name inside. Write to us with scope and timing and we will answer within five working days.
Which platforms do you develop for?
PC, PlayStation and Xbox. We hold devkits and certification experience for the current console generation, and every title is built and tested on all target platforms from the first month of production, not ported at the end.
Do you accept game pitches from outside the studio?
We do not accept unsolicited game concepts, for the usual legal reasons. What we do welcome is people: if you have a pitch, the honest route into the building is to join it — see our open roles above.
Can I visit the studio or the motion capture stage?
We host open-door evenings twice a year, announced on our social channels, and we regularly welcome student groups from Swiss universities. Outside those dates the volume is in production and closed to visitors.
Do you offer internships?
Yes — paid, six months, in art, engineering and production. Positions open each January and August. Roughly a third of our current staff started as interns, including our lead animator.
Where can I buy your games?
Halden Deep and Sable Protocol are available on Steam, the PlayStation Store and the Xbox Store. Ashen Crown will be announced for wishlisting closer to release — the newsletter and our social channels will hear it first.
Chapter X — The Door
Contact
Publishers, partners, press and future colleagues — the door on Technoparkstrasse is heavy, but it opens.
StudioNovaForge Studios
Technoparkstrasse 1
8005 Zürich, Switzerland
Emailcontact@novaforgestudios.pro
Phone+41 44 512 78 36