We make small strategy games with a lot behind them.
Island Road Studios is an independent game studio in the United States. One game so far, built slowly and measured carefully.
The studio
Island Road Studios LLC is a small independent developer registered in Georgia, United States. We build turn-based strategy games — the kind you can finish on a train, that still reward a second look at the board.
We are not a publisher and we do not take outside work. Everything on this site is our own, and the one game we have is the one we are still working on.
What we're making
Sunder: The Living Forge
A turn-based strategy game about outthinking rival powers in the Shatterlands — a world split apart, waiting to be forged anew.
A match is short by design. You start with one city and a handful of units on a procedurally generated map, and you have a fixed number of turns to build a larger claim than three rivals. Research, expansion, terrain and timing all pull against each other, and the turn limit means you cannot have all of them.
How it plays
- Four map types — continents, archipelago, highlands and pangaea, each generated fresh from a seed.
- Daily and weekly challenges — everyone plays the same seeded board, ranked on a global leaderboard.
- Asynchronous duels — play a friend a turn at a time, across devices, without either of you waiting.
- No account required — the whole game plays offline. Signing in only carries your record between devices.
The eight factions
Every faction is free. None of them is unlocked by paying, and nothing you can buy will win you a match. Each one bends the same rules in a different direction:
How we build it
The phrase "a lot behind them" is the part we care about. Three examples of what that means in practice:
Balance is measured, not guessed
When we change a faction, we do not ship it on instinct. A headless simulator plays the game against itself — hundreds of seeded, fully deterministic AI-vs-AI matches per change, with the faction roster rotated between turn-order slots so that a faction's strength can be told apart from the advantage of moving first. A change that looks good and measures flat does not ship.
The board is readable if you are colourblind
Ownership on the board is carried by colour, which makes colour-vision deficiency a playability question rather than a polish one. Every pair of faction colours is measured under simulated protanopia and deuteranopia, in a perceptual colour space rather than raw RGB, and an automated test fails the build if any two factions come too close together. An earlier palette that looked fine to us put two factions within a hair of each other for a deuteranope; the test exists because we shipped that once.
Nothing is sold that changes the outcome
Every faction, map type and mode is available to every player. We would rather sell you nothing than sell you an advantage.
Development log
Sunder has been in active development since July 2026 — 168 commits and 34 test suites so far. Recent work:
- Contact shadows across the whole board, so units read as standing on the ground rather than floating above it.
- Fatalities — a rare, earned cinematic on a decisive kill. Budgeted to at most twice a match, always skippable, and off during ranked challenge runs.
- Fixed the opening camera on phones, which had been framing the board backwards on narrow screens.
- In-app account deletion, a written privacy policy, and the iOS privacy manifest.
- Great Harvest now scales with the resources actually on the board instead of a flat number.
Get in touch
Questions, bug reports, press, or anything else:
We read everything and reply to most things.
Island Road Studios LLC
2696 Ashford Rd NE
Brookhaven, Georgia 30319-3260
United States