WOADSHARD is a dye-works collective. We build games the way we fire clay — coil, slip, kiln, cool, and pull the shard. Our interaction logic is fermented in a woad vat that has not been emptied since 1800 BC. The blue is not a color. It is a bacterial agreement with time.
You dip a length of undyed linen into the vat. It comes up yellow-green, then oxidizes to blue in the air. The game is this oxidation — every interaction is a dip, every cooldown is the 40 seconds it takes the oxygen to arrive. Players who rush the breath get pale results. Patience dyes true.
A narrative game told in unfired clay. You coil a story, smooth it with slip, and carve marks before the kiln. Once fired, the text cannot change — every edit is a crack. Based on the Pitmemark tablets we excavated behind the works in 2014. Some shards still smell of heather.
A divinatory game. You steep 64 pebbles in the vat, lay them to dry on the kiln roof, and read the bloom. The bacterial flower on each stone is unique to that batch of fermentation. We've logged 11,000 blooms since 2016. None repeat. The vat decides the RNG.
Our longest fire. A game reconstructed from sherds of a 3,800-year-old beaker found in the vat-shed floor. We re-coil it in digital clay, fire it at 950°C, and let players re-break it. Every playthrough is a new fracture pattern. Estimated cooling: 2028. The vat is already steeping the soundtrack.
WOADSHARD runs from a lime-washed works on the eastern shore of Skye, where the woad has been grown since the Bell Beaker folk arrived. Five dippers keep three vats — Vat 1 young, Vat 2 resting, Vat 3 fermenting since before the first MacDonald. The kiln is fired with driftwood and old roof timbers. We don't patch the roof; we fire the replacements.
We don't ship games. We pull shards. A title is ready when the clay has cooled, the vat has bloomed, and the dipper who coiled it can read the crack pattern without flinching. Sometimes that is one season. Sometimes the beaker takes a decade. The vat is older than our language for deadlines.
Our tools are half potter's wheel, half shader graph. We slip-code in the morning, dip-test in the afternoon, and read blooms by the kiln at dusk. The works has one rule older than the studio: nothing leaves the yard that wasn't fired on the yard. The vat approves. The kiln confirms.
Keeps the fermentation alive with urine, heather ash, and shouting. Can tell a vat's mood by the green of the surface scum. Coiled *The Indigo Breath* over one winter, dipping the code 400 times. Sleeps by the vat. Says the bacteria dream in Old Norse.
Fires every shard. Reads cooling cracks like tea leaves. Built the fracture engine for *Bell Beaker Echo* from 3,800-year-old sherd patterns. Refuses to fire anything that hasn't been coiled by hand first. Keeps a bucket of grogged clay from 1998.
Tends the Woad Oracle. Logs every bacterial bloom, paints them in woad on linen, and binds them into ledgers. Her RNG is the vat microbiome, sampled daily. Claims the blooms predicted the 2023 roof collapse. The works believed her and fired early.