Redemption Road Games

Overview

Redemption Road Games is an independent game development studio based in Atlanta, Georgia and Los Angeles, California. The studio was founded by brothers Ian Fisch and Paul Fisch, who serve as Lead Coder and Game Director respectively. The team consists of approximately 20 developers. Redemption Road Games is the studio behind Kingmakersthe third-person shooter and real-time strategy hybrid set in 1400 AD medieval England. The studio was previously known as EQ Games and has also operated under the name Pixel Dash Studios.

Despite the small team size, Redemption Road Games has built one of the most technically ambitious indie projects in recent memory. The studio's approach centers on writing everything from scratch in C++ and HLSL, giving them complete control over performance optimization and allowing custom systems that off-the-shelf solutions cannot provide. This philosophy has produced a game capable of rendering thousands of AI-driven soldiers, fully destructible buildingsand modern military hardware all running simultaneously at 60 frames per second on mid-range PC hardware.

Core Team

The Fisch brothers have been working together on game projects for years. Their complementary skill sets (one focused on programming and technical systems, the other on design and creative vision) form the core of the studio's leadership. Both have been actively involved in public-facing communication about Kingmakers, appearing in interviews, developer diaries, and presentations. In the tech interview, all four team members listed above sat down with John Linneman to walk through the game's animation, AI, and performance systems in detail.

Daniel Balazs, as Technical Director, works closely with Ian Fisch on the low-level engine optimizations that make the game's scale possible. Trace Myers contributes across the codebase, handling everything from gameplay mechanics to engine-level features. The tight-knit nature of a 20-person team means that most developers wear multiple hats, and the boundaries between roles are fluid.

Road Redemption

Before Kingmakers, the studio developed Road Redemption, a motorcycle combat racing game that served as a spiritual successor to the classic Road Rash series. Road Rash was a popular franchise in the 1990s published by Electronic Arts, and after the series went dormant, the Fisch brothers created Road Redemption to carry on its legacy. The game was funded through a Kickstarter campaign that raised over $173,000 from more than 4,400 backers, exceeding its $160,000 goal.

Road Redemption launched on Steam in October 2017 and was later ported to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. The game combined high-speed motorcycle racing with melee and ranged combat. Players could swing weapons at rival racers, kick opponents off their bikes, and use firearms while barreling down highways at high speed. The console ports were handled through the Pixel Dash Studios brand.

The game's success gave Redemption Road Games the foundation and experience needed to tackle the significantly more ambitious Kingmakers project. Several technical challenges in Road Redemption (physics-based combat, AI behavior at speed, and managing multiple simultaneous action elements) foreshadowed the demands of Kingmakers. The procedurally generated roads and random enemy encounters in Road Redemption also informed the dynamic, emergent gameplay philosophy that carries over into Kingmakers' approach to combat and strategy.

Studio Details

Technical Philosophy

Redemption Road Games has a distinctive technical philosophy that prioritizes performance and scale over visual fidelity alone. Their decision to build Kingmakers on Unreal Engine 4.27 rather than UE5 was driven by the physics processing demands of destructible environments and the need to animate thousands of medieval soldiers simultaneously. While UE5 has newer features, none of them could match the processing speed that UE4.27 provides for the specific physics workload Kingmakers demands.

The studio's custom GPU shader-based animation system is the clearest expression of this philosophy. Rather than trying to animate 4,000 or more characters on the CPU (which would be impossibly expensive), they moved the animation work to the GPU using HLSL shaders. The CPU sees every soldier in a static T-pose. The GPU runs shaders that play the actual animations, blending 8-way walk cycles and 4-way run animations. When soldiers are distant, they use lightweight vertex animations. When the camera moves close, the system transitions seamlessly to full skeletal animation for visual fidelity.

The entire codebase for Kingmakers is written in C++ and HLSL, with no Blueprint visual scripting. This all-code approach gives the team maximum control over every aspect of performance. For a team of 20 developers, this level of technical ambition is notable, and it explains both the game's impressive capabilities and the time required to build them.

Development Timeline

Kingmakers has been in development for over five years. The timeline from public announcement to its current state includes several major milestones and one significant delay.

The October 2025 delay was significant. The game was less than a week from its planned Early Access launch when Redemption Road Games pulled it. Game Director Paul Fisch explained that the team was not going to release the game until it had 10 to 15 hours of solid content, and they simply did not have enough content ready. In a more detailed update, the team acknowledged being behind schedule on building systems, enemy-capturing mechanics, UI, and cinematics.

The delay received a generally positive reception from the community, partly because the studio was transparent about the reasons. Rather than releasing a thin Early Access build and promising updates later, they chose to wait until the game met their own standards. The game had accumulated over one million wishlists on Steam by this point, reaching the number seven spot on the platform's most-wishlisted list, which gave the studio both motivation and pressure to get it right.

Cut Features and Design Decisions

Not everything the team prototyped made it into the game. One of the most notable cut features was a giant cyborg mech, described by Paul Fisch as a titan unit that would march around and move soldiers out of the way. The team built a working prototype and played around with it, but ultimately decided it was too much. The mech broke the game's internal tone. While Kingmakers is deliberately absurd in its premise (modern weapons in medieval warfare), the mech pushed past the line where the absurdity stopped being fun and started being immersion-breaking.

The team also considered moving the game to a Roman setting at one point, inspired by the Reddit story "Rome Sweet Rome" about a modern Marine unit transported to ancient Rome. The concept was appealing, but Paul Fisch and the team determined that the medieval English setting was more iconic and better suited to the gameplay they wanted to build. The Welsh Rebellion of 1401 provides a specific historical framework that grounds the time travel premise in a real conflict, and the castles, knights, and siege warfare of medieval England are more immediately recognizable to a global audience than the Roman equivalent.

Army of Darkness, the 1992 Sam Raimi film, has been cited as an inspiration for the scale and tone of the action. The film's premise of a modern person transported to a medieval setting with modern tools (in that case, a shotgun and a chainsaw) maps directly onto Kingmakers' core concept. The game embraces a similar sense of scale, humor, and over-the-top action, filtered through a strategy game framework rather than a horror-comedy film.

Publisher Relationship

Kingmakers is published by tinyBuild, an indie game publisher known for titles like Hello Neighbor and Graveyard Keeper. tinyBuild's involvement provides Redemption Road Games with publishing support, marketing resources, and distribution infrastructure that a 20-person studio would struggle to manage independently. The partnership allows the Fisch brothers and their team to focus on development while tinyBuild handles the business side.

tinyBuild has been publicly supportive of the delay decision and the team's development pace. Alex Nichiporchik, tinyBuild's CEO, is an executive producer on the Netflix film adaptation alongside Jon Carnage, which indicates a broader focus on the Kingmakers IP beyond just the game itself. The publisher's willingness to delay a highly wishlisted title rather than push for a premature launch speaks to the level of confidence they have in the final product.

Film Adaptation

The Kingmakers intellectual property attracted attention outside the gaming industry well before the game's release. A feature film adaptation is in development at Netflix. The screenplay is being written by Christopher MacBride, and Shawn Levy's production company 21 Laps (with producer Dan Levine) is attached to the project. Story Kitchen, a company that specializes in connecting game properties with Hollywood, brokered the deal.

A Netflix film adaptation being greenlit before a game has even entered Early Access is highly unusual. It reflects both the strength of the concept (modern soldiers in a medieval war is an immediately compelling visual premise) and the broader industry trend of game-to-film adaptations following the commercial success of projects like The Last of Us, Fallout, and Arcane. For Redemption Road Games, the adaptation deal raises the studio's profile significantly and could drive additional interest in the game itself.