Late LightGAMES
A white farmhouse at night under a full moon. One front window glows warm with computer screens inside. Below it: Late Light Games.

An independent studio making games in the hours after the house goes quiet.

See Every King DiesAbout the studio
Every King Dies title screen: the game logo over a bright illustrated town with a king and queen at the hall, a tavern, a market, and heroes facing a wolf and a ghoul.
Title screen · Every King Dies
Now building

Every King Dies

Kings change; new heroes lay claim; the town remains.

A kingdom sim for mobile that you can play hands-off or hands-on. Build a settlement that grows from a tribe into a kingdom. Heroes hunt monsters and bring loot home. Families rise out of poverty or fall back into it, and the crown passes down the generations until a rebellion, a death or an abdication hands it to someone new.

Leave it on screen while you work or cook dinner. Step in when you want an escape. When you close it, the kingdom waits for you exactly as you left it.

  • Tribe
  • Village
  • Town
  • City
  • Kingdom
Early Access soonFree to playNo adsAndroid first, then iOSIdle friendlySingle player
Visit the game pageJoin the Early Access list
Barn doors slide open on a small dark office lit only by a monitor. Kids' sneakers and a baseball glove sit by the door. Below: Late Light Games.
The studio

Days belong to the kids. The late hours belong to the games.

Late Light Games is an independent studio started by a dad who wanted to be there during the day: for homework at the kitchen table, dinner together, and coaching baseball.

The games get built in the gaps. Some of the work happens during the school day. A lot of it happens late, after the kids are in bed, in the room at the end of the hall with one light still on. That's where the name comes from.

It's also who we make games for. Parents rarely get a free evening to play for hours. We make games you can pick up and put down, where a two-minute check-in counts as much as a long session.

Our first game is Every King Dies.

Get in touch
How the game gets made

Twenty years of code. Zero years of drawing.

I'm a software engineer with twenty years of programming behind me and no talent at all for drawing. Making a video game has been my dream since I was a kid. What was always missing was an art team, and the hours a big studio has.

Agentic AI tools changed that. AI writes and tests code under my direction, and it generates the art, which I review, revise and approve piece by piece. The design, the rules of the world and every decision about what goes into the game are mine. That's what lets a studio this small exist, with the work fitting into school hours and late nights.

The other side of AI

Most fear of AI is really fear of big companies using it to cut people so profits go up. I share that worry. But it's only half of what's happening. The same tools let one person build what used to take a whole studio, and that includes every developer who's been laid off. Every one of them can now be a competitor.

That's what excites me. A studio like mine has no shareholders to satisfy, no office to rent and no investors to answer to, so it doesn't need big margins or inflated prices. More independent studios means more games, more variety and fairer prices for players.

If AI still makes you uneasy, I understand. I hope this makes supporting Late Light Games a little easier, and I'd encourage you to back independent developers everywhere.

Where your support goes

Buy something in Every King Dies and your money goes to a gamer dad, not a corporate boardroom. Human artists do better work than any tool, and as soon as sales allow, hiring them is first on the list: to improve the game's art and add new visual features.

Are you an artist?

If you'd like paid work on Every King Dies at a small studio's scale, write to info@latelightgames.com. Let's talk.

Rudy WilkinsonFounder, Late Light Games