We build strange, hand-tuned games from a workshop on Hackney Road.
Neon Artifact Journal is a small Shoreditch studio making original indie titles, custom engine tooling, and honest writing about the craft of game development.
A five-person workshop where design docs and dev logs share the same table.
Founded in 2016 above a print shop on Hackney Road, we split our week between shipping our own games and building the tools other small teams wish existed. Every project starts as a paper prototype and a written brief — no exceptions.
We work in Godot and Unity, prototype in a fortnight, and publish a public dev journal for each build. If a mechanic cannot survive a Tuesday-afternoon playtest with the whole studio around one screen, it does not ship.
Four steps from a rough idea to a game on a storefront.
Fixed scopes, written milestones, and a playable build at the end of every stage. Prices are in GBP and exclude VAT.
Discovery & Design Doc
We pressure-test your concept, map the core loop, and hand you a plain-English design document you actually own — yours to keep whether or not we build the game.
Playable Prototype
A vertical slice you can hold in your hands: the core mechanic, one polished level, and controller support. We run it through a full-studio playtest before you ever see it.
Full Production Build
Content, systems, audio integration, and platform work in fortnightly sprints. Every milestone ships a build to your device and a written update to the shared journal.
Launch & Live Support
Steam and console submission, day-one patch prep, and three months of post-launch fixes. We stay on call through your first big update.
Five specialists who all still write code and playtest on Fridays.
Mara Whitlock
Fifteen years across mobile and PC. Keeps the design doc honest and runs every Friday playtest with a timer and a notepad.
Mara Whitlock
Fifteen years across mobile and PC. Keeps the design doc honest and runs every Friday playtest with a timer and a notepad.
Devan Osei
Writes the Godot and Unity tooling that lets the rest of us move fast. Once rebuilt our save system live during a game jam.
Priya Nair
Turns loose ideas into tight loops and branching scripts. Author of most of our 180-plus journal entries on game feel.
Tomas Reid
Shaders, pixel art, and pipeline glue. Makes builds run smoothly on a five-year-old laptop before anyone talks about the latest GPU.
Teams and players who lived through a build with us.
They handed us a playable prototype in two weeks that we took straight to a publisher meeting. The written design doc alone was worth the fee.
The custom Godot tooling they built shaved days off every level we made. Our tiny team suddenly shipped like a studio twice the size.
Their public dev journal is why I backed the game. Watching the mechanics evolve entry by entry made me trust the launch completely.
We came in with a messy idea and left with a fixed scope and a real launch plan. Every milestone shipped exactly what the journal said it would.
Tell us about the game you want to make.
Drop us the rough idea, your platform, and a ballpark timeline. We reply to every genuine enquiry within two working days.
- Call the studio+44 20 7739 6880
- Visit us58 Hackney Road, Shoreditch, London E2 7NX
- Email us[email protected]
- Studio hoursMon–Fri, 10:00–18:00 GMT · Shoreditch, London E2