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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 Kingmakers, the third-person shooter and real-time strategy hybrid set in 1400 AD medieval England.

Founders

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 to explain the game's technical and design decisions.

Road Redemption

Before Kingmakers, Redemption Road Games 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 launched through Kickstarter crowdfunding and was eventually released on Steam, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch.

Road Redemption 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 game's success gave Redemption Road Games the foundation and experience needed to tackle the significantly more ambitious Kingmakers project. Several of the technical challenges in Road Redemption (physics-based combat, AI behavior at speed, and managing multiple simultaneous action elements) foreshadowed the technical demands of Kingmakers.

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. The studio's custom GPU shader-based animation system is a direct product of this philosophy: rather than trying to animate 4,000+ characters on the CPU (which would be impossibly expensive), they moved the animation work to the GPU using HLSL shaders.

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 performance optimization and allows them to implement custom systems (like the GPU animation pipeline) that would be difficult or impossible to achieve through higher-level tools. For a team of 20 developers, this level of technical ambition is notable.

Development of Kingmakers

Kingmakers has been in development for over five years. The game was originally scheduled to enter Early Access on October 8, 2025, but the release was delayed indefinitely. The current target window is sometime in 2026. During the development period, the game accumulated over one million wishlists on Steam, reaching the number seven spot on the platform's most-wishlisted list. This level of anticipation for a game from a small independent studio is unusual and speaks to how effectively the concept has captured player interest.

The game 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.

Film Adaptation

The Kingmakers intellectual property attracted attention outside the gaming industry well before the game's release. A 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.