Graphics Engineer / Technical Artist (Rendering)
Does: How the game draws — the hand-inked line look, lighting and shaders that keep the art faithful on a phone.
Skills: Unity 6, URP, HLSL/Shader Graph, Metal, iOS profiling.
Mongril Labs / Building the impossible
Carny Island
Labs
Planned sequence: Game 1 launches solo on PC/Steam, with multiplayer added later. Next comes solo iPad, then a Mobile/Tabletop party game intended for 4–14 players. Tabletop players take turns and also play in between turns.
In development. Current labs and tests are not the finished game.
We build the machinery carefully enough that something impossible can possess it.
The AI team / 13 specialist roles
One studio.
Thirteen jobs.
Brett Clements production estimate supplied 2 August 2026. The original role descriptions and duration estimates below are historical planning reference, not a current release schedule.
2 August 2026 · historical production planning
The original stages are preserved below. The current platform sequence appears at the top of this page.
Stage 1 — Game 1 launch on Steam and itch.io for PCStage 2 — Game 2 mobile game for iPad
Equivalent US human-hire cost. US-market estimates based on approximately 2020 rates.
Gameplay Programmer
Does: What the player does — digging, tools, energy and detection.
Skills: Unity 6, C#, New Input System.
Systems Programmer (World-State & Persistence)
Does: The engine that remembers the world — damage, weather and progress that persist across a run, inside a memory budget.
Skills: Unity 6, C#, systems architecture, memory profiling.
Build & Release Engineer (iOS)
Does: Turns the project into a signed app on the iPad, reliably.
Skills: Unity build pipeline, Xcode, iOS signing, IL2CPP/ARM64.
Technical Artist — Asset Pipeline
Does: Gets the hand-drawn art out of Photoshop and Fresco into the game at full fidelity.
Skills: PSD, SVG/vector, Photoshop/Fresco, Unity import.
Animator
Does: Brings characters and the villain to life in motion.
Skills: 2D animation, Fresco motion layers, compositing.
Lighting Artist
Does: The sky, sun, moon and shadows across the day/night cycle.
Skills: Unity lighting, URP post-processing, celestial math.
VFX Artist
Does: The spectacle — gore, weather, explosions and craters.
Skills: Unity VFX/particles, shaders, performance budgeting.
UI/UX Designer & Front-End Engineer
Does: The on-screen interface — tool tray, action button, scoreboard and menus.
Skills: Mobile UI/UX, Unity UI, haptics, PSD.
Audio Designer & Composer
Does: Sound effects, ambience and music.
Skills: Sound design, Unity audio, composition.
Narrative Writer
Does: Dialogue, lore, in-world news and epitaphs.
Skills: Game writing, world-building, script.
QA Engineer
Does: Breaks it before players do; verifies every build.
Skills: QA methodology, Unity, iOS device testing.
Producer
Does: Runs the schedule, scope and delivery.
Skills: Production management, game pipelines.