Community driven · Contributor owned

A better game studio.

Trapframe is a community-driven, contributor-owned studio. We build games in the open, share revenue with the people who help build them, and ship them paid on Steam when they're ready. Our first world is Noosphere.

Manifesto Ledger

Currently building

A brutal, co-op stalker-like set in Oregon's Columbia River Gorge, just after the violent end of the 2nd American Civil War. An unexplained disaster, the likes of which the world has never seen, envelops the valley and blurs the lines between emotion, thought, and reality itself.

Enter the Valley

What we're about

Principles, not promises

We're not like the other girls.

Contributors get paid

Contribute to our games or tech and you earn a share of revenue. The bigger the work, the bigger the slice.

Built in the open

Source available and developed in public. You can read every commit and every decision behind it.

No telemetry. Ever.

We don't track you, profile you, or sell anything about you. There is nothing to opt out of.

Simulation over spectacle

Systems that keep running whether you're watching or not. Consequence you don't get to undo.

Original worlds

Our settings, factions, and stories are our own. No borrowed IP, no reskinned anything. We borrow ideas an mechanics from games we love, extend them, and make them our own.

Patient by design

Quiet, deliberate, slow where slow is right. The world doesn't perform for players, it exists despite them.

simulation + networking engine

SIMN: built in Rust for Godot, open to everyone.

Most studios keep their tech behind locked doors. We do the opposite. Our simulation/networking engine, and its tooling, are open source. Build whatever you want with it. When someone makes it better, everyone benefits. Rising tides and all that.

How it's built Source on GitHub

Build it with us

Want in?

We're looking for engineers, artists, writers, sound designers, and modders who get the vision. If your work ships, you share in what the game earns.

Join the team See the ledger

Newsletter

Something that doesn't suck in your inbox... for once.

We're not assholes about it. Only dev log updates, news about the games we make, and the occasional company update. No spam, no selling your email, no dark patterns. Double opt-in, and you can unsubscribe in one click.