How This Studio Came Together
SkyLine Corp didn't start with a business plan or investor pitch. It started in 2019, in a rented office above a print shop on Spring Street in Phoenix. I had just left a mid-size game company where I'd spent four years as a designer, and the thing I missed most wasn't the salary or the health insurance — it was the feeling of making something where I actually understood why every decision got made.
At that bigger studio, I'd sit in meetings where feature choices came down to analytics dashboards and quarterly targets. Nothing wrong with that from a business standpoint, but the games we shipped felt assembled rather than authored. I wanted to build something where the weird, specific, sometimes uncomfortable creative choices could survive contact with the production pipeline.
So I started prototyping on evenings and weekends. The first year, nothing I made was good enough to show anyone. That's the part nobody puts in the origin story, but it's true. I built maybe six or seven tiny things — puzzle games, interactive fiction pieces, a walking simulator about a lighthouse keeper — and they were all scrapped. Not because they were broken, technically, but because none of them had the thing I was actually looking for. That sense of weight. That feeling where a player's choice sits in their chest for a second before they make it.
By late 2020, I had enough rough prototypes to show a couple of people. One of them was a programmer I'd worked with at my previous job. They looked at what I was doing and said something like, "This is messy but the core idea is solid." That turned into a collaboration, which turned into SkyLine Corp becoming an actual thing and not just a folder on my laptop.
What We Build
We make narrative-driven indie games. That means interactive experiences where the story isn't a layer on top of the gameplay — it's the gameplay. Choices have consequences that ripple forward, environments tell stories without text dumps, and the mechanics themselves carry thematic meaning.
We also write about game development on this site, because we think the indie game space has too much cheerleading and not enough honest post-mortems. Our articles cover design decisions, prototyping approaches, and the unglamorous reality of shipping games as a small team.
What We Don't Do
We don't make free-to-play games. We don't integrate advertising SDKs. We don't build live-service infrastructure. We don't chase trends or genre-bandwagon. And we don't take on work that requires us to mislead players about what a game is or what it costs.
How We Keep Our Information Honest
Every piece of writing on this site goes through a process that we think is more rigorous than most indie game blogs, though we're always trying to improve it. Here's what that looks like in practice:
First, we only write about things we've actually done or directly observed. If we're discussing a design technique, it means we've applied it in a project — or we explicitly say we haven't and explain where the information comes from. We link to primary sources wherever possible: academic papers, official documentation, post-mortems from developers we respect. When we cite statistics, we trace them to the original dataset or report rather than parroting numbers from secondary coverage.
Second, we distinguish between opinion and evidence. This sounds obvious, but a lot of game development writing blurs the line. "I think branching narratives are underused" is an opinion. "Studies show branching narratives increase player retention by 40%" is a claim that needs a citation, and if we can't find one, we don't make it.
Third, we update our articles. When something we wrote turns out to be wrong or outdated, we revise the page and note the change. We don't pretend we always knew what we know now. The update dates at the top of each article are real.
Finally, we invite correction. If you read something here that you know from direct experience is inaccurate, email us. We'd rather fix a mistake than defend one.
Who Runs This
SkyLine Corp is registered in the state of Arizona. The studio is self-funded — no venture capital, no publisher advances, no crowdfunding campaigns at this stage. Revenue from contract work pays the bills while we develop our own projects.
Business address: Spring St, Phoenix, AZ 26584.
For business inquiries, use the contact form or email us directly at amelia.hernandez77@icloud.com.
People
Page Updates
June 2026: Added methodology section, updated team information.
January 2026: Revised origin narrative with additional detail.
March 2025: Initial publication.