Our own engine
Shardbound runs on Kiln, our renderer for Metal and Vulkan. Owning it means we can chase the things a game like ours needs: a big shared world, upscalers, ray-traced light.
About KilnA small, independent game studio
We light one lantern at a time.
Ninth Lantern makes games on an engine of its own. Our first is Shardbound, an online RPG in early access, built in the open and paid for by the people who play it.
In early access now
Shardbound
A classic tab-target MMORPG: pick a target, learn skills as you level, run dungeons with friends and meet strangers in a world that persists. Every player shares one clock and one sky, down to the rain.
It's unfinished, and we say so. You can play it today; most of its art is placeholder, and early access pays for the art and the work still to come.
How we work
Three things we keep to
Paid for by players
Development is funded through Shardbound's early access. The people who play it are the people we answer to, so we build in the open.
Early accessHonest about where we are
Placeholder art is called placeholder. What's planned is marked planned. Every performance number we give says what it was measured on.
About usThe engine
Kiln, fired in-house
Shardbound started on raylib and outgrew it. Kiln replaced it with our own layers: Metal on macOS, Vulkan 1.2 everywhere else, shaders written once in GLSL and translated at load time.
- ~2.7 ms
- ray-traced sun shadows, one ray per pixel at half size
- 2.8 → 1.05 GB
- texture memory in a town, after block compression
- 102–111 FPS
- our temporal upscaler at 67% render scale
- 0.14 ms
- to update ~11,800 live particles
Measured on an Apple M4 at 2646×1602.