Full-Cycle Game Production
Concept, vertical slice, production and launch handled by one dedicated team so nothing gets lost between hands. Ideal for studios and publishers who want a single accountable partner.
From £45,000 · 6–18 month engagements
Liverpool Game Development Studio
Games forged with patience, wonder and craft
We are a small Ropewalks studio building console, PC and mobile titles from first sketch to launch day. No crunch culture, no shortcuts — just carefully made worlds that players return to.
A studio you can build with
Eleven years shipping games from the Baltic Triangle to Steam
40+
Titles shipped across Steam, Switch & mobile
11 yrs
Crafting games from Liverpool since 2015
6.8M
Lifetime downloads across our catalogue
4.7★
Average player rating on shipped titles
A note from the founder
We treat game-making like slow craft, not a factory line
I started Dragon Mystic Forge in a rented room above a coffee roaster on Bold Street, convinced that games deserve the same unhurried care as a piece of furniture or a good meal. A decade later that belief still runs the studio.
We keep our teams small — usually five to nine people per title — so every artist, designer and engineer can see their fingerprints in the finished world. We playtest early, we listen to our communities, and we refuse to ship anything we would not happily play ourselves.
If you have a world you want built with genuine care, come and talk to us. We would love to hear where it begins.
Elspeth Marlowe
Elspeth Marlowe · Founder & Creative Director
Inside the forge
Scenes from the studio and the worlds we tend
A quiet look at how our games come together — from whiteboard mornings in the Ropewalks to the final polish before launch.
Concept mornings
Mood boards and first sketches for Emberfall
The animation bay
Hand-keyed character passes in our Bold Street loft
Playtest Fridays
Community sessions with local players every fortnight
Launch prep
Final colour grading and audio mixing before release
What we build
Full-cycle game development, all under one roof
Bring us a spark of an idea or a half-built prototype — we can pick it up at any stage and carry it to a polished release.
Unreal & Unity Development
Gameplay engineering, tools and optimisation in Unreal Engine 5 and Unity 6, tuned to run smoothly from Switch up to current-gen consoles.
From £520 / day
Art & Animation Studio
Concept art, 3D modelling, rigging and hand-keyed animation with a warm, painterly house style that has become our signature.
From £3,200 / character kit
Multiplayer & Backend
Dedicated servers, matchmaking, save systems and anti-cheat built to scale from a cosy co-op session to thousands of concurrent players.
From £6,500 / module
QA & Playtesting
Structured test passes plus fortnightly community playtests run from our Ropewalks space, with clear, prioritised reports you can act on.
From £310 / day
Porting & LiveOps
Bring an existing title to a new platform, then keep it healthy with seasonal content, patches and telemetry-led balancing.
Retainers from £2,400 / month
Questions & answers
The things clients ask us most
Search below or browse through — if your question is not here, our contact form is a message away.
We are happiest on small-to-mid-scale titles — think a focused indie game, a premium mobile release, or a co-development slice of a larger project. Budgets typically start around £45,000 for a full production and scale from there. We are honest early if a project is too large for a studio our size.
Absolutely. Roughly half our clients are elsewhere in the UK, Europe and North America, and we run remote-friendly production with regular video check-ins. That said, we love welcoming partners to our Bold Street studio when a kick-off in person makes sense.
Our core expertise is Unreal Engine 5 and Unity 6. We ship to Steam, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, iOS and Android, and we handle the certification paperwork for console releases as part of the engagement.
A vertical slice usually takes three to four months, while a full commercial release tends to run twelve to eighteen months depending on scope. We map out milestones with you at the start so there are no surprises, and we review progress every two weeks.
Yes, and we do it often. We begin with a short paid audit of the existing codebase, art and documentation, then give you a candid report on what is reusable and what needs rebuilding before we commit to a production plan.
You do. Unless we agree otherwise in writing, all game IP, source code and assets we create for you are transferred to you on final payment. We only keep the right to mention the work in our portfolio, and even that we will hold back if you ask.
Start a conversation
Tell us about the world you want to build
Share a few details and we will reply within two working days. Every enquiry is read by a real member of the team, not a bot.
Visit the forge
23 Bold Street, Ropewalks, Liverpool L1 4DJ
Studio hours
Mon–Fri, 9:30am – 6:00pm · Playtest Fridays until 8:00pm