Independent Game Development
Independent Game Development
The Studio
Skjaldr is a one-developer game studio making character-driven management sims — games about the people you're responsible for, and what it costs to keep them.
Named for the Old Norse shield, built in the spirit of the skalds: every game we make is a story about names worth remembering. Our first title, The Wolf of Rome, is in development now.
“Football Manager, but the team is gladiators — and the relegation zone is a mass grave.”
You run a gladiator school in ancient Rome. You don't fight — you manage. You buy fighters, train them through the week, and on Friday nights you send them into the arena and watch. You set the tactics beforehand. Once the drum hits, it's out of your hands.
You are Torsten — a retired gladiator who lost his leg in the Colosseum to a man named Cassius Severus, and has spent every winter since trying to remember what the crowd sounded like when it was chanting his name. Your new school is a leaking roof and three bunks — one of them broken — on a frozen hilltop nobody chooses to live on.
The whole game is the climb back: from illegal basement fights, up through the provincial arenas, all the way to the Colosseum — and the man who took your leg.
Scout, buy, train, heal, balance the books. Your week is preparation; the arena is the exam.
Set your tactics, take your seat, and watch. When the drum hits, the school's fate belongs to the sand.
Some arrive with names and stories. Others are Grey Men — no name, no history — who only become someone if they live long enough.
When a fighter doesn't come back, you carve a wooden card with their name and nail it behind the hearth.
Dark, but kind. Tragic, but funny.
The glory isn't in the sword — the glory is in the weeks.
Contact
hello@skjaldr.io