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Headlight Studio
August 6, 2026 at 09:13 PM
Filled the empty Team Growth section with the current team picture, refined the Early Access target to late 2027, corrected the localisation and PvP commitments, and added the legal entity, creator programme, alpha waiting list closure, and anti-fraud position
Headlight Studio is an independent game development studio based in France, near Montpellier. The studio is the developer and self-publisher of Rooted, handling all aspects of production without an external publisher.
The studio was founded by Mathieu Pascal, who is the game director and founder. Pascal leads the creative and technical direction of Rooted and oversees all studio operations.
Headlight Studio is located at 199 Rue Helene Boucher, 34170 Castelnau-le-Lez, France, near the city of Montpellier in southern France.
The studio is fully independent with no external publisher. All production is handled in-house, including environment art, gameplay programming, technical design, audio, and publishing. This approach gives the studio complete creative control over Rooted's development.
Game | Genre | Status |
|---|---|---|
Open-world survival, co-op | Alpha (Early Access target: late 2027) |
The studio's headcount has moved in both directions across the project. More than a dozen people contributed to the original prototype, and the move into full production in early 2026 was announced alongside team expansion. Since the weekly development logs began in May 2026, however, they have been written in the first person by the studio's founder, and the Week 25 log covers a conference talk he gave on solo development with Unreal Engine 5. The jobs page currently states that the studio is not actively recruiting and accepts spontaneous applications only.
The practical picture is a small operation with a single voice on public communication rather than a large team, which is consistent with the studio's stated reason for staying independent and for a development timeline it compares openly to other survival games that spent four or five years in Early Access.
Headlight Studio is an indie French team based near Montpellier, working as both developer and publisher of Rooted. The studio's communication frames Rooted as a long-term project shaped by playtest cycles, alpha cohort feedback, and dedicated alpha events run alongside the core development cadence.
In Q1 2026 the studio confirmed the transition from pre-production to full production for Rooted, alongside team expansion and accelerated development cadence. This change underpins the late 2027 Early Access target and supports the ongoing Phase 3 content drops.
Crowdfunding launched in Q3 2022 and brought in more than twenty thousand backers, with closed alpha builds reaching backers from Q4 2023 onward. The studio runs limited-time seasonal events (Halloween 2023 cosmetics, Christmas 2023 cosmetics) for testers and shares dev updates regularly through the project site, store community page, and dev blog.
Public commitments include the late 2027 Early Access launch on Steam and the Epic Games Store, mandatory crossplay between the two storefronts, progressive localisation with eight languages listed on the storefront at present, modding support with Steam Workshop blueprint sharing, PvP on dedicated servers after the full release, and a console release planned after the full PC release.
Headlight Studio is registered as a SASU, a French single-shareholder simplified joint-stock company, with its registration held at Montpellier. The storefront listing for Rooted credits Headlight Studio as developer and Headlight Studio, SASU as publisher, which is the same entity under its full legal name rather than two separate companies.
Two programmes run alongside development. A content creator programme opened to applications in June 2026, ahead of Early Access; it asks for at least 10,000 followers on one platform, regular uploads or streams within the previous 30 days, and a gaming focus, and offers free keys, official assets, early access to updates, and a direct line to the studio. Separately, the free alpha waiting list closed in mid 2026 after 139,092 registrations, with the studio stating plainly that it could not satisfy even a fraction of that demand.
The studio has published a standing warning about cloned websites that copy its storefront in order to take payment details, and about malware distributed under the game's name. Its stated position is that only the official site is legitimate, that it never sells keys through direct messages, and that it never asks players for their keys. Reported clone sites are verified manually and submitted to browser safe-browsing services, domain registrars, and hosting providers, with most taken down within one to three days.
