The Workshop

Everything Index Express ships is made in one place. Our editor is a docked, dark, deliberately un-generic authoring tool 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. Press a key and it launches standalone. Every menu item, hotkey and palette entry runs the same underlying command, so there is exactly one answer to what a tool does and which key does it.

Two studios live inside it. Pixelforge is a full pixel-art suite — canvas, palette, selection, professional drawing tools, animation and export — so sprites never have to leave the project they belong to. Voxel Studio turns a handful of sliders and a seed into a complete creature: body, skeleton, palette and movement, previewed live, re-rolled sixty-four at a time until one of them looks like it wants to bite you. Creatures made this way walk around in Alderen today.

Underneath sits the engine: a .NET core with a native C++ renderer driving both Vulkan and Direct3D 12 from the same shaders, a deterministic 60 Hz simulation, and networking built for small-group co-op. Its rendering device layer is derived from the Godot Engine's MIT-licensed source, which is credited in full on our credits page. It's not for sale and it isn't the point — it's the reason a studio this size can ship a destructible voxel dungeon and a procedurally generated alien world out of the same building.

What makes it interesting

• One editor for 2D, 3D, pixel art, animation, data and packaging — with the game running inside it
• Two renderer backends from one codebase, so the same frame runs on either graphics driver
• Voxel Studio: procedural creatures from sliders and a seed, exported as plain data the game just loads
• Pixelforge: an in-editor pixel studio with its own document format, animation and export
• Deterministic simulation, which is what makes seeds, saves and replays the same idea