Independent games studio

Games made for the fun of it.

Wholehearted Studio makes games worth losing an evening to, and worth playing alongside other people. Cogwars is our first for 2026, and it will not be the last.

Play Cogwars See the games

First for 2026: Cogwars
Plays in: Any browser, no install
Made in: Sheffield, UK

Games

What we've made so far

Cogwars is the first. More are coming this year, and this is where they will turn up.

In testing

Cogwars

Build a factory. Arm a fleet.

Lay out a factory on a grid and watch it tick along without you. Mine, smelt, belt and craft your way up twelve tiers of goods, then take what you make to a market you share with everyone else playing — where what you sell moves the price for all of you. Then build a shipyard, because the top of that tree is a fleet: probes to scout the galaxy around you, fighters and bombers to take what somebody else has stockpiled, and a radar dish so you see theirs coming.

Genre: Factory & economy sim
Plays in: Any browser
Play with: Everyone, one shared galaxy

Play Cogwars

Cogwars is still in testing, but it is open to everyone — no passcode, no account.

Playable now

Landfall

Five countries a day, drawn as shadows.

Five countries turn up as black silhouettes, and each one asks you three times: which part of the world is this, then which country, then which of four cities is its capital. Get the region in three and the country opens up for six more guesses, every wrong one telling you how far off you are, pointing the way to go, and filling in another piece of a world map. A wild stab at the wrong hemisphere still leaves you better off than you were.

Genre: Daily guessing game
Plays in: Any browser
Takes: Five minutes a day

Play Landfall

No passcode, no account — open the link and play. Scores are kept in your browser.

Playable now

Keystone

Eight letters, and the word that uses them all.

Eight letters in a ring. Build as many words as you can out of them, and each letter can only be used once — so a word runs from four letters up to all eight and no further. The word that uses all eight is the keystone: there is one hiding in every day, it is worth double anything else on the board, and take it out of an arch and the rest of it falls down. Three difficulty levels decide how much of the dictionary the day asks for; the letters are the same for everybody either way.

Genre: Daily word game
Plays in: Any browser
Takes: Ten minutes a day

Play Keystone

No passcode, no account — open the link and play. Scores are kept in your browser.

Next up

Cogwars is the first of several.

There is more on the way this year. As soon as one is fun enough to share, it will appear right here.

Studio

What we're about

Fun comes first

A game earns everything else by being good fun to play. If the first ten minutes are not enjoyable, it goes back on the bench.

Better with company

Our games put people in the same world rather than in separate save files. Half the fun is finding out what everyone else has been up to.

A link is the install

No launcher, no download, no forty gigabytes. If you can open a tab, you can play — and so can whoever you send it to.

Come and say hello.

A question about Cogwars, an idea for a game, or a bug you found at two in the morning — we would genuinely like to hear it.

hello@wholehearted.studio