Hearth

Hearth · Indie game studio and R&D lab

Block + world model = final look.

Fast, cinematic games for the couch, built on our own engine and an R&D lab pushing neural overlays.

Register interest See the lab

The bar

The look we are chasing.

Twelve clips from creators whose work sets the standard. Shown with their permission and credited clip by clip. Every clip is theirs, not ours.

Show 9 more clips

Creator and want a clip changed or removed? Email us.

How it connects

One engine in the middle.

Hearthblock + world model · Metal CClaudeMCP, agents BBlenderlook nodes, glTF HSideFX Houdinisimulation UUnrealasset exchange GGodotasset exchange RKHWorld modelsRunway, Kling, Higgsfield via MCP NNeural splatsGaussian, exploring

Hearthblock + world model · Metal

Feeds Hearth

  • CClaudeMCP, agents
  • BBlenderlook nodes, glTF
  • HSideFX Houdinisimulation

Exchanges assets

  • UUnrealasset exchange
  • GGodotasset exchange

Next

  • RWorld modelsRunway, Kling, Higgsfield via MCP
  • NNeural splatsGaussian, exploring
Running Planned · Monogram badges, not official logos

The first game

Rain. Reflections. Speed.

A bike courier racing the clock through wet New York streets: mirror puddles, warm shop windows, taxis to weave through and a city that streaks past. Simple shapes, cinematic light.

Engine and tools

One engine. A toolbox that comes with it.

Runs on Apple silicon

The engine

  • Metal-native renderer for iPhone and Mac
  • G-buffer: albedo, normals, depth, object IDs, motion vectors
  • Cinematic lighting: wet streets with reflections, motion blur, haze, bloom, film grade
  • MetalFX temporal upscaling
  • Deterministic 120 Hz simulation
  • Metal 4 tensor ops and ray tracing

Measured on an M4: 3.6 ms GPU frame, 22 ms edit to pixel.

Built by the lab

The tools

  • Hearth MCP server: agents look at the engine and change a look, write mode opt-in with undo
  • Hearth Paint: look graphs authored in Blender and shown in the engine
  • Look-dev loop: score a frame, adjust, repeat
  • Live link: edits show up in about a quarter second
  • Playtest traces: tiny recordings to find and fix bugs
  • Houdini bakes over MCP

Running today Planned

Hearth Lab

Cutting-edge tools, built in the open.

Alongside the studio we run an R&D lab. We build tools and run experiments on how games get their look. The research frontier is moving fast, and it points the same way we are.

A

July 2026 · Alaya Lab and UC Merced

AlayaRenderer-Flash

  • G-buffer to RGB
  • Wan 2.1
  • about 30 FPS

Turns a game engine's G-buffer streams (albedo, depth, metallic, normal, roughness) into stylized RGB frames in real time. Paired with a physics engine it runs a playable world at about 30 FPS (31.5 FPS on an NVIDIA H200). Built on the Wan 2.1 video diffusion model.

Read the paper ↗
S

October 15, 2026 · Skywork AI

Matrix-Game 4.0

  • engine owns state
  • low-poly proxy
  • 480p, 60 FPS reported

The engine owns rules, physics and state while a causal video model does the rendering. The engine draws only a cheap low-poly proxy. Reported: 480p at 60 FPS with under 150 ms latency on one RTX 5090.

Vendor-reported figures, not independently verified.

Read the coverage ↗
N

Concept · R&D

Neural overlay

A learned look layer that sits on top of the engine's frame, so simple blocks can read as a finished, cinematic picture.

In research. Not shipped, and we are not sharing how yet.

G

Exploring · R&D

Gaussian splat scenery

Rich far scenery at a small size, drawn behind the world.

Exploring. Not shipped, and we are not sharing how yet.

Where Hearth sits

We follow this research closely and run our own experiments on top of the engine. Nothing here is a shipped feature, and we are not sharing how yet.

Expression of interest

Want in early?

Leave your email and we will write when there is something to play or test. One email, no sharing, no newsletter.

We store your email and country only, to write back about Hearth.

Hearth Courier Coming soon

Say hi