Northern Oak Games · Independent studio

Games with heartwood.

We make games with craft and character, and we build our own technology to do it. HEARTWOOD is the engine behind Long Shot Motors, written from the ground up here.

See our games HEARTWOOD for developers

Games

Three worlds, one standard: build it properly, make it feel good, ship it when it's right.

A rusty red hatchback with a wing and a bottle rocket flies over a sunlit gravel quarry

PCAndroidComing soon

Long Shot Motors

Build a junker. Send it over the pit.

You wake up in a quarry trailer and the road out is full of zombies. Fight your way to the car, bolt on whatever the junkyard gives you, and launch yourself over the pit. Land it, drive it out, escape. Then try the lake.

Physics-driven launches, crashes and landings
Upgrades you can see on the car: rockets, wings, floats and skis
The Breakout: fight from the trailer to your car
Two levels: the Gravel Pit and Cottage Lake

Built on HEARTWOOD

Wake up
The Breakout
Bolt it on
Cottage Lake
The marina

High-Top Ballistics: the clown flying over the fairground

AndroidComing to Google Play

High-Top Ballistics

Load the clown. Pull back. Let the big top fly.

A one-thumb circus launcher about distance, timing and very little dignity. Fire a monochrome clown out of the big top, upgrade the act, and see how far the show can go. One price, no ads, no in-app purchases.

PCOut now

Scrapwright

A junkyard dog against the whole scrapheap.

A top-down survivors roguelite in hand-crafted pixel art: 84 waves across 6 stages, 35 enemy types and 12 bosses, with meta-progression carrying you from run to run.

HEARTWOOD

Our engine. Now inviting developers.

A C++20 game engine for games that have to be right. Same inputs, same bits, on Windows, Linux and Android. Configured in plain text, run headless from the command line, and tested end to end.

01 Deterministic

Fixed-step simulation on Jolt with cross-platform determinism. Replays never drift; a bug replays exactly.

7,200 / 7,200 physics step hashes identical
Windows x64 · Linux x64 · Android arm64

02 Rendering

An HDR forward renderer on a frame graph: a physical sky with image-based light, PBR clear-coat paint with stochastic flakes and thin film, four-cascade shadows, VAT crowds and water.

D3D12 · Vulkan · Android Vulkan

03 Physics

Jolt in double precision, built for cross-platform determinism and stepping at a fixed 120 Hz. Simulation fixtures replay whole launches and check every result.

Jolt 5.6 · dp=1 · cpd=1 · 120 Hz

04 Tested

Unit tests, simulation fixtures, golden-image comparisons and per-device performance budgets. All of it runs headless, on a laptop or a server.

966 unit cases · 1,425,680 assertions
93 simulation fixtures · golden images

05 Pipeline

Our own asset cooker for BC7 and ASTC textures and packed content. Windows builds cross-compile on Linux; the full game runs headless on a server GPU.

Windows cross-build 86 s · Linux build 2 min 29 s

06 Built for AI-assisted development

Text-first data, a headless command line, scripted captures and reproducible frames. HEARTWOOD is designed to be driven by coding agents as well as by people.

configs · cvars · console scripts · headless CLI

Lit: HDR · physical sky · clear coat
Frame graph: per-pass GPU timings
Six instances, one server GPU
VAT crowds

The studio

Heartwood is the dense core of a tree, the part that has stopped growing and started holding everything up. That's how we want to build games: solid at the centre, made to last.

Craft over churn

Fewer games, finished properly. Every system tuned until it feels right in the hand.

Own the stack

Our engine, our tools, our pipeline, from the physics step to the pixel.

Prove it

Deterministic simulation, automated tests and measured budgets. We don't guess whether it works.

Press & media

Writing about us?

The press kit has our fact sheet, logos, screenshots and trailers, all free to use in coverage.

Open the press kit

Studio: Northern Oak Games
Based in: Canada
Games: Long Shot Motors · High-Top Ballistics · Scrapwright
Engine: HEARTWOOD (in-house)
Contact: hello@northernoakgames.com

Let's talk.

Players, press, developers interested in HEARTWOOD, or anyone with a good idea.

hello@northernoakgames.com