About AuckFast Studios
We build games that celebrate deep systems and replayability.
Our Story
AuckFast Studios was founded by two long-time collaborators who believe that good design doesn’t shout; it speaks through systems, structures, and consequences. After years of creative work across academia, research, and experimental games, we returned to where our ideas first collided: games that play with genre, and complex emerging systems.
Based between Auckland and Belfast, we are proudly small, defiantly focused, and committed to designing games that defy convention, demand attention, and provoke thought.
Our Mission
We build spaces where systems lead, choices resonate, and worlds are built to be solved.
We strive to make games that offer freedoms to explore the game world, and the systems that reside within it. Sometimes that means success for the player, and sometimes that doesn’t, but regardless of the outcome, exploring the systems rewards.
In every case, the goal is the same: engaging systems that reward intention, invite experimentation, and reveal themselves through play.
Deliberate design. Focused systems.
Our Team
Nigel McBride
Nigel turns structure into story. Before games, he studied the outer edges of musical meaning - where form meets perception and ontology causes problems. Now he brings that same focus to gameplay systems: layered, deliberate, and built to immerse. At AuckFast, he leads design from the inside out, shaping mechanics, themes, and how they interact together.
Ralph Versteegen
Ralph thinks in systems. Beyond his work on experiential experiences, he works on open-source software and on topics including computational science and mathematics, statistical learning, and analogical reasoning. He builds the scaffolding behind AuckFast’s worlds: logic that organises and adapts, underlying how the world holds together even when everything else falls apart.