Revision 9

Chaos Manufacturing is the independent studio developing and self-publishing SOL Shogunate, which is the studio's debut project. Founded by veterans of major action and RPG productions and complemented by film post-production talent, the studio operates as both developer and publisher, so design, engineering, and storefront decisions all originate in-house rather than at an external label.

Studio Profile

Leadership

A small core of named leaders sits at the head of the studio, mixing the two co-founders with senior leads who front the public dev-diary appearances. Each brings a different slice of the AAA action and RPG world into Chaos Manufacturing.

Veteran Pedigree

Beyond the founders, the studio recruits across two distinct talent pools. Game development veterans on the team have shipped projects at Riot, Blizzard, CD Projekt Red, Guerrilla, Respawn, Treyarch, and ZeniMax, a pool that covers competitive online design, large-scale RPGs, narrative-led action RPGs, first-person shooters, and engine-heavy AAA development.

The studio's core has been up to five people full-time, a number that fluctuates depending on where the project is in its go-to-market cycle. Around that core sits a constellation of fractional contributors across production, art, audio, narrative, marketing, and community. Public credits and dev-diary footage have surfaced around 16 named members from both pools combined. Public-facing leadership on SOL Shogunate has been led by Game Director Leszek Szczepanski and Narrative Director Cindi Knapton, who together fronted the first dev diary in April 2026 and have been the studio's main on-camera voices for setting and story. The founders have surfaced more often in trade interviews than in the dev-diary video itself.

Origin Story

The studio CEO has placed the origin of SOL Shogunate on a single piece of concept art by Aaron Nakahara, a stylized image of a samurai warrior with a burning light at the center of the face. That image gave the project its visual north star: a future samurai with an intentional aesthetic rooted in a specific reason, rather than a generic ninja-and-neon coat of paint over a sci-fi soldier. From there, the studio built out the alt-future setting, the lunar shogunate, and the gene-spliced protagonist around that founding image.

Chaos Manufacturing was founded around two years before the December 2025 reveal, with Game Director Leszek Szczepanski and CEO Guy Costantini meeting and deciding to start the studio together. The team built the company on the premise that it would punch above its weight by being small, autonomous, and remote-by-default rather than tied to a single office.

Five Studio Principles

Mission

The studio's headline mission for SOL Shogunate is to combine combat, story, and music in harmony. In practice, that shapes three decisions: combat is tuned for fluid, fast-paced exchanges rather than slow attrition; story sequences a personal revenge arc that opens onto a wider conspiracy; and the soundtrack scales with battle stakes, framing boss fights as interactive music videos rather than background score.

Funding And Independence

Chaos Manufacturing is self-funded through angel investors, with additional financing partners coming on board through 2026. The studio retains full creative control over SOL Shogunate and operates as both developer and publisher today, though the CEO has stated the studio is open to a publishing partner that retains the studio's creative control and brings something to the table the studio cannot do in-house.

The funding model is structured so that the studio only grows as much as it needs to, with equity for everyone on the team in the early phase and profit sharing planned once equity stops mattering. The stated intent is to avoid the kind of forced growth that has hit larger studios when external money pressured a scale-up the project did not need.

Science Consulting

Aerospace engineer Taylore McClurg consults on the science layer, working with the team since early development. Her brief is to keep the lunar setting plausible where it can be: low gravity behaviour, the rationale for space elevators over rockets at the Moon, the long-term health cost of low-gravity life and how the elite offset it through exercise as a privilege, and the in-world reason that kinetic firearms are largely absent and the way of the sword carries the combat load.

Production Approach

The game's art is handcrafted. The studio's principal concept artist traveled across Japan taking reference photos to build the lunar cities and surface biomes on top of real-world inspiration, and Chaos Manufacturing's stated philosophy is to let artists choose the tools they work with rather than mandating a top-down toolchain. The CEO has framed this as a quality-of-craft decision and has left room for the toolchain to change later if new tools materially help the work.

The development team is remote-by-default. The studio has stated it does not require contributors to move across the ocean for the role and tries to adapt the company's working pattern around the people on the team rather than the other way around. As of early 2026 the project was nearing the end of pre-production, with production estimated to run for about another one to two years toward the 2027 target window.

Unconfirmed Details

This page will be updated as Chaos Manufacturing publicly confirms additional studio details, team members, and any work beyond SOL Shogunate.