Worlds worth coming back to.
DANCER™ is a game development studio. We build places that keep running while you are elsewhere: a football league that plays its own fixtures overnight, a wilderness whose animals remember being hunted, a hollow that burns lower every hour you stay away.
What we're working on.
All of them ours, built in-house. Clubverse™ you can play today; the rest are still in production.
Clubverse™
Multiplayer football management
Take over a club and go up against thousands of other managers in a league that never pauses. Fixtures are played whether you're online or not, so the table you wake up to was settled while you slept. It runs in a browser tab with nothing to install, and we have not managed to stop checking it on a Tuesday afternoon either.
Ember Hollow
Mobile RPG · in development
Keep the last fire lit, and head into the dark for as long as you dare. The world behind it is already written: rival factions, a bestiary, a coastline of drowned courts. It plays in five minutes and it is meant to be picked up again on the bus home.
Roguelite bingo · in development
Bingo in a boxing ring, against a bill of grans who have been at this longer than you. The balls are random. The dabbers you play between them are not.
Open-world hunting simulator · in development
Track and stalk well enough to feed a settlement that depends on you. The animals eat, move with the season, and learn where they have been hunted before. Rushing rarely works.
VR destruction · in development
Pick up a sledgehammer and take the room apart. Glass, furniture, the good crockery, all of it. Everything breaks the way you expect it to, which is the entire point, and there is nothing in there to tidy up afterwards.
Manifesto.
Four things we hold to, whatever we happen to be making.
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Moving worlds.
Our worlds keep moving while you are away, so returning means finding out what happened rather than working through a list. The league played its fixtures, the herd moved on, the fire burned lower. You are never behind for having had a life.
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Not in the script.
The best stories in a game are the ones nobody wrote. We build systems deep enough to surprise us too: a striker's slump, a herd that changes its route, a friend who goes quiet for a fortnight. Nothing scripted, all of it possible.
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Built for us.
Every one started because we wanted to play it and couldn't. Nothing is built around a payment prompt, and no amount of money will make you better at any of them.
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Worth the wait.
If something needs more work, it gets more work. No deadline overrules that. Everything here carries our name on it, and we intend to stay pleased about that.
Built in Yorkshire.
Yorkshire has been making things for a very long time. Steel in Sheffield, cloth in the West Riding, and in York a Minster stoneyard where masons still cut replacement stone by hand, shaping blocks that will outlast everyone who touches them. For most of the last century, York smelled of chocolate.
We are a much smaller part of that, and several centuries late to it. We work out of Pocklington, a market town at the foot of the Wolds, and make the kind of games we grew up refreshing at school when we should have been doing something else. All of it built by us, with nobody standing between the idea and the thing you play.
Two of us, married, working out of Pocklington in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Between us we build the lot, argue about most of it, and put the bins out.
Come and say hello.
Press, partnerships, or a strong opinion about 4-4-2. It all lands in one inbox, and it is the two of us reading it.
If you would like to play Ember Hollow, Hunter's Bar or Rage Room before they are finished, say which one. We run small playtests as builds come together, and we would rather hear about the problems from you than from a review.
Hear when something ships.
Three of these are not out yet. Leave an address and we will write when one of them is playable, and not otherwise.