STUDIO
Fimbulworks
A one-person game studio in Norway, founded in 2025 and named after Fimbulvetr, the mighty winter that precedes Ragnarök. Its first game, Project Curtain, is a low fantasy co-op survival builder set in the volcanic aftermath of Vesuvius’ eruption in 79 AD.
MYTHOLOGY
The end begins with Fimbulvetr.
Three harsh winters with no summer between them. Famine spreads across the world, until the wolves Sköll and Hati catch the sun and moon and devour them.
Then comes Ragnarök.
The sky splits open. Earthquakes shatter every chain, and Fenrir is loosed upon the world, his lower jaw against the earth and his upper jaw reaching into the heavens. The seas rise as Jörmungandr writhes from the deep, and Thor goes to meet it, Mjölnir held high.
Through Valhalla’s 540 doors, Odin leads the Einherjar onto the final battlefield. He rides forth to face Fenrir, knowing it will be his end. A fate foretold. A fate accepted. And ultimately, a fate avenged. His son Vidar tears the wolf’s jaws apart.
REALIZATION
Fimbulvetr may not be entirely mythical. Archaeologists have argued that it preserves a memory of something real: in 536 AD, a volcanic dust veil dimmed the sun across the northern hemisphere and harvests failed (Gräslund and Price, 2012).
In southern Norway, the number of burials fell by more than 75 percent in the period that followed. The likely causes are the eruptions of 536 and 540, the cold years after them, and possibly plague (Loftsgarden and Iversen, 2024).
It was not the first time a volcano ended a world. More than four centuries earlier, in 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius buried Pompeii and Herculaneum under ash. Pliny the Younger watched the eruption from across the bay and described it in two letters. Many who escaped are believed to have started over in towns along the coast (Tuck, 2025).
INSPIRATION
I am not trying to make the next Valheim. I love that game. And actually, what pulled me into game development was tinkering with the config files of a Valheim mod about enchanted gear until it worked the way two confused Vikings wanted it to. So I owe you a horn of mead, RandyKnapp.
Project Curtain was born on a cold winter night in late 2024, as a game about the winter of 536. Then I looked southward, and further back in time. To that older disaster.
DEVELOPER
I handle the design, programming (in Blueprints), art direction, writing and localization (English and Norwegian Bokmål). I am self-taught, with no formal training in programming or game development, and have been working in Unreal Engine since late 2024, alongside a day job in quality control and documentation at a metal factory. Development fits around that job, so it will take a while. There is no release date, and I would rather not guess one.
I am not entirely alone, though. The studio has an eager ‘first reader’ (the other confused Viking). I show him the work in progress, and he scrutinizes most of it from the perspective of a more casual player: ideas, systems, animations, the world itself. He also handles the Spanish localization.
Further along, the game will need music and 3D art, and I would rather bring in people who do those well than do them poorly myself.
APPROACH
The standard advice to a solo developer is to make something small, ship it, learn from it, and make the next one slightly bigger. It is good advice, and I did not take it. I kept returning to Project Curtain. What I do instead is keep the game small and sure of what it is. It is about building and rebuilding, not a large open world filled with content. To hold that line, I have a few big-picture rules for what the game is not (no live-service mechanics, for one), and new ideas have to pass them.
What keeps it manageable is a habit of writing everything down before building it. Some of it stays as notes for later, and some gets discussed back and forth, mostly with myself. It is not a complete design bible, and plenty is still undecided, but it gives the work a shape beyond whatever I am building that week.
Since a mod is what pulled me into game development, I would like Project Curtain to support mods one day. That is why it is built to be data-driven, with its content defined in data rather than hard-coded. It also helps me as a solo developer: adding content later is mostly a matter of adding data, not writing new code.
AFTERMATH
The myth does not end with Ragnarök. The old world burns, a reborn earth rises from the sea, and the survivors begin anew.
That is the part I am making. Where you step into the sandals of someone that had already lost their purpose, and now also their world. Project Curtain is about rebuilding. How is up to you; raise a shelter, shape a settlement, or just built aquaducts.
Now, we set sail for Mount Vesuvius.
Game ENGINE
Unreal Engine 5.7
Game STATUS
Early development
STUDIO DOGS