Alderen
A first-person dungeon crawler in a world of one-meter blocks you can dig through.
In development
A small independent studio
We’re Index Expressions, and we make games and apps
Right now that’s four games at different stages and one app for people who write long stories. Each of them has its own page if you’d like a closer look.
A little about us
We’re setting Index Expressions up as a company right now, and this website is fairly new as well. You’ll see more pages turn up as we have more to show you.
Most of what we make is games. Along the way we’ve built a lot of our own tools, including the editor our games are made in and a studio inside it where our creatures come from.
What we’re making
These are our four games and our first app, each with a note on where it stands today.
Outer Index 3D
A third-person horde game on alien worlds generated whole from a single seed.
In development
Inner Datum
A co-op turn-based roguelike you play with friends inside a Discord voice call.
Closed pre-alpha
Outer Index
A top-down pixel-art horde game set in Alderbrook, a Victorian steampunk town.
On holdLoreIE
A plot and story continuity engine for long-form fiction that runs offline and flags where your story contradicts itself.
In developmentHow we like to work
Making our own tools
Our editor has a pixel-art studio called Pixelforge built into it. Voxel Studio, another of our tools, is where the creatures you’ll meet in Alderen come from.
Playing as we build
Our games run inside the editor while we work on them, so we can try a change the moment it’s made. A full single-player run of Alderen already works in our own builds.
Showing early work
We share pictures from builds that are still rough, and the captions point out what isn’t finished yet.
Keeping writing private
LoreIE, our app for writers, is being built to work fully offline without an account, so what you write stays on your own computer.
News from the studio
We post a short note here when something changes in one of our games or tools.
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Workshop
How Voxel Studio makes creatures
Alderen’s creatures come from Voxel Studio, a tool in our editor. This post covers its six body plans and why we look at candidates as black silhouettes.
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Alderen
A new map for Alderen
Alderen’s map now draws only the ground you’ve walked and the stairs you’ve found, so every floor ends up with a shape you can recognize.
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Outer Index 3D
Fixing the dark screenshots
Older pictures of Outer Index 3D came out much too dark. The cause was the very last step before a picture reaches your screen, and it’s fixed now.
Getting in touch
We don’t have a contact address yet while the company is being set up. It’ll go on our contact page as soon as there is one.