An independent studio
Small armies.
Unsolved mysteries.
Big imaginations.
Games and creative apps, each sparked by something we want to make. Welcome to Forge Explore.
Meet the projectsOn our workbench
Three games. One creative app.
One of four maps
Toy armies. Real decisions.
Modern toy armies. Four distinct maps. Scout your rivals, grow your towns, and adapt your strategy to new geography—knowing when to advance or hold your ground.
Explore Tin EmpiresThe game, the board, and what’s next.Scout before you strike. Better information makes battle forecasts more precise.
Grow towns and gather the resources that keep your armies moving.
Battles reward preparation and the right counters, rather than dice rolls.
More about Tin Empires
Start with a scattered foothold, connect your territories, and decide what you can actually hold. Push again after a victory while your army still has movement, or stop before the frontier stretches too far. Play across four maps, each with different geography, routes, and frontiers to shape your strategy.
Defend · Experiment · DiscoverLittle commanders. Big ideas.
A curious planet. A lab to protect. Build defenses between waves, watch your plan unfold, and use what you discover to make it better. A tower-defense adventure for curious minds, designed for iPad.
Explore Outpost LabThe adventure, the learning, and what’s next.Compare ranges, choose tower sites, and decide how to spend your credits.
See what each defense did and where creatures got through. Turn an observation into your next idea.
Discover visual targeting rules as new creatures give you new problems to solve.
More about Outpost Lab
Placement, tower combinations, and simple behavior rules introduce logic and experimentation through play. Pause and inspect during a wave, then move defenses freely between waves and try again. A robot sidekick helps you notice what happened. Outpost Lab is in development, with no public release date announced.
A little imagination goes a long way
DoodleBloom
Little ideas. Big color.
A coloring app for little imaginations. Pick a picture, choose a brush, and make it yours with a finger or Apple Pencil. Or create a new page with a grown-up.
A little more DoodleBloomMeet the app and find your happy colors.Magic mode keeps a stroke inside its region. Free mode lets it wander.
Markers, crayons, pencils, brushes, and a colorful library of ready-to-color pages.
A grown-up can help turn an idea into a new coloring page. Save it and keep creating.
More about DoodleBloom
Start with bundled pages that work offline, return to saved drawings, and use undo and redo while you experiment. Magic, Free and Fill offer different ways to color. Export a picture to share or print, with grown-up controls around page creation and family settings.
Hôtel Orphée · French RivieraTheParallax
Files
One hotel. More than one history.
A journalist disappears during a 1988 gala. Enter historical moments at Hôtel Orphée, explore rooms that no longer exist, and reconstruct what happened.
Explore The Parallax FilesThe hotel, the mystery, and what’s next.Move through the hotel as it existed then, with its old rooms and hidden routes.
Pause, rewind, and observe the same event from a different place.
Compare people, places, and architecture across the hotel’s changing history.
More about The Parallax Files
The first case follows journalist Juliette Moreau’s disappearance. The hotel’s opening in 1929, a fire in 1956, renovation in 1974, and separate recordings from 1988 all leave traces in 2026. You are present in these reconstructions, but history cannot perceive you. Finding the right time is only part of understanding the mystery.
Project hero images are promotional artwork. Expand the project details to see available gameplay and app captures.
The studio
Made from
personal curiosity.
Forge Explore is an independent studio making games and creative apps, shaped by family life and a fairly constant stream of ideas.
My kids—a nine-year-old boy and a five-year-old girl—are a big part of that. Watching what catches their attention often gets me thinking about something we could play, make, or explore together. Other ideas come from my own childhood, something I encounter or learn about, or a thought that pops into my head and sticks around.
Some become strategy games, some become mysteries, and some become tools for creating. I follow the ideas that keep making me curious, then build them into something we can try.
Back to the projectsAlso from us
Illustrated stories to read together, with books that can be made personal to your family.
Explore Forge Imagine (opens in a new tab)