Independent game studio — Melbourne, AU
PixelForge is a three-person studio making tight, replayable arcade games that respect your time and punish your reflexes. Our next one is OVERCLOCKED — and there's a 30-second demake of it running in the cabinet on the right. Go on. One run.
Optional mini-game. Press Space, Up arrow or Enter to start and to jump over incoming voltage blocks. Press Escape to pause and release the game. You can Tab past this game — it never captures keys unless it is focused.
Current project
Synthwave survival-runner · one button · zero mercy
You are a rogue power surge sprinting down the mainline of a city that has decided you are a fault to be corrected. Runs last sixty seconds — if you're good. Every death rewinds the city, reroutes the grid, and raises the voltage. Learn the rhythm, or become the rhythm's cautionary tale.
The studio
PixelForge started in 2019 when three burnt-out AAA developers — a gameplay programmer, a pixel artist, and a composer who can't stop side-chaining — quit the same studio in the same week and set up shop in Mel's garage in Brunswick.
The rule we wrote on the whiteboard that day is still there: if it isn't fun in the first five seconds, it ships never. Every game we make is small enough to finish, deep enough to chase for months, and honest enough to cost what it's worth.
Three games later that garage has a mini-fridge, a Switch devkit, and exactly one framed one-star review ("too hard, five stars"). We're not growing the team. We're growing the games.
Devlog
Every fortnight we write up what worked, what shipped, and what got deleted at 2am.
Players kept swearing at obstacles they "couldn't see coming." They were right. We now guarantee 0.42 seconds of reaction time at any speed — here's the spawner math, and the one-pixel telegraph that fixed everything.
Read entry →Daily-seed leaderboards mean thousands of ghosts. We got a full 60-second replay under 5KB with delta-encoded inputs and a fixed-point physics step. Includes the desync bug that haunted us for nine days.
Read entry →The mini-game in our hero section is a real slice of Overclocked's movement code, ported to a canvas in one file with zero dependencies. Why we built it, what it taught us about the jump arc, and the attract-mode autopilot.
Read entry →Join the grid
One email a month: patch notes, playtest key drops, and the devlog digest. No spam, no "exciting announcements about announcements."