Early build
Alderen
A first-person dungeon crawl through a world you can dig straight through.
Index Express builds roguelike games on its own engine — a first-person descent into a dungeon you can dig through, and a third-person horde run across alien ground that is generated whole before you land on it.
The studio
Index Express is a small independent studio with one obsession: worlds that are built rather than repeated. Every game here runs on the same in-house engine, which means the same trick pays for all of them — a world's identity is a seed and a short list of what happened to it, so no two runs hand you the same room twice.
We make the tools as seriously as the games: the dungeons, the creatures, the pixels and the data tables are all authored against a live viewport in our own editor. Nothing here is licensed off a shelf and skinned. It is a small catalogue on purpose, and it is built to be deep rather than wide.
The games
Early build
A first-person dungeon crawl through a world you can dig straight through.
In engine
A third-person horde run on alien ground that's generated whole before you arrive.
Early build
Thirty minutes in a Victorian-steampunk town, with your sanity as the clock.
The workshop
Everything Index Express ships is made in one place — a docked, dark, deliberately un-generic editor where the whole game is built against a live viewport. Scenes and meshes, rigs and animation, materials, tilemaps, data tables, and the game itself running inside the window you're editing it in.
In engine
Devlog
Move a few sliders and a creature builds itself — body, skeleton, palette and movement. We judge them as black silhouettes so nothing survives on colour alone.
We stopped drawing the map and started drawing the hole. Now every floor has a silhouette you can recognise the way you'd recognise a coastline.
For months our sunsets looked like a power cut. It was never the lighting — it was the last step before the picture reached your monitor.