No releases, no audience, no press. The site's whole job is the list.
Voidwyrm Games is an independent studio making narrative horror titles, founded in 2026. It has no released games yet, which makes its website a different problem from the others here: nothing to sell, nothing to prove, and one asset worth building, which is the list of people who asked to be told.
The hardest brief of the four
Every other site in this portfolio has something to work with. A contractor has a safety record. A store has products. A band has ten years and three records. A game studio before its first release has none of that, and the temptation is to compensate with atmosphere: a dark landing page, a logo, a countdown, and a mailing list box nobody fills in.
The reason that fails is that it asks for the one thing a stranger will not give you without a reason. An email address from someone who has never played anything you made is not a low-value conversion, it is the single highest-value one available to a pre-release studio, and it is worth building a whole site around rather than a form in a footer.
There is a second audience most pre-release studio sites forget entirely: curators, festival juries and press. Those people are not browsing. They have a deadline and a spreadsheet, and they are looking for assets, a logo, a fact sheet and a contact who answers. A studio that makes them email to ask for a press kit is a studio that does not get covered.
And there is a third constraint that comes from the genre. "Narrative and substance" is a claim, and it is the exact claim every horror studio makes. It cannot be asserted on an about page. It has to be demonstrated by the writing on the site itself, which means the site is the first piece of evidence about whether these people can write.
Five decisions, made once
The mailing list is the product until a game is.
It gets a real place in the structure with a real reason attached, not a popup and not a footer field. What a subscriber actually gets is stated before the box: what you send, how often, and what happens on launch day.
The press kit is a page, not a zip file behind an email.
Logos, screenshots, a fact sheet, a boilerplate paragraph and a named contact, all on a URL a journalist can find at eleven at night without talking to anybody. It costs an afternoon and it is the difference between being coverable and not.
The devlog is the search strategy.
A studio with no titles has no keywords. Nobody is searching for a game that does not exist. What people do search for is how something was made, and a studio that writes about its own process builds an index presence out of the only material it has, which is the work in progress.
Narrative is demonstrated, not claimed.
If the pitch is writing, the site's own copy is the audition. Every word on it is being read as a sample whether or not anyone intends it that way, which raises the bar on the about page considerably and is the right kind of pressure.
A game page is a template, not a project.
The structure assumes titles will exist: one per game, with the trailer, the storefront links, the press assets and the fact sheet in fixed positions. Announcing the first title is an afternoon rather than a rebuild, which matters because that announcement will happen on somebody else's schedule, not yours.
A studio with no releases has exactly one asset: the list of people who asked to be told.
What the site is actually for
The build
5 pages on WordPress and Bricks with a custom child theme. No purchased theme, no builder license renewing in the background, and a site that has now outlived several generations of both.
- A structured band history, dated by era, which is added to rather than rewritten.
- A discography with an entry per release, including the 2023 instrumental version of the debut, which most band sites would have left off entirely.
- Streaming and social links in one place, maintained as data rather than hard-coded into a footer.
- A single contact form covering booking, press and general mail, with consent recorded properly rather than assumed.
- A shop link pointing to the existing storefront rather than a second commerce system.
The one with no result yet
This is the newest of the four and the only one I am not going to pretend has a verdict. It launching in 2026 and the thing it is built to do, which is accumulate an audience before there is anything to sell, takes a year to show up as evidence.
It is in this portfolio for one reason, which is that it is the honest version of a problem plenty of clients arrive with: a real business, a real plan, and nothing to show yet. The pages that follow from that are different pages, and pretending otherwise by borrowing the layout of a company with fifteen years of proof is how a new business ends up with a site that looks like it is bluffing.
If you are in that position, this is what I would build you, and I would tell you the same thing I am telling you here: the site is not the proof. It is the thing that collects the audience you will show the proof to.
Your field has its own version of this.
Every sector has three or four things its websites get wrong that cost real money. Finding them is the first half of the job. Tell me what you are building and you will hear back within one business day.