Ironhold

Ironhold portfolio

The games we make.

Action games at scale, presented as a coherent body of work. Each title carries its own setting and gameplay register; the studio's hostile-environment thematic thread runs through three of the four.

  • Key art for the fictitious title Mariner's Gauntlet: Hostile archipelago, third-person action register, cinematic dark obsidian-and-ember key art, non-human subject per the studio's art-direction constraint, no photoreal human face, demo only

    Third-person action · Released 2024

    Mariner's Gauntlet

    The fleet is your sentence.

    Hostile archipelago

  • Key art for the fictitious title Steeltide: Flooded coastal city, tactical action register, cinematic dark obsidian-and-ember key art, non-human subject per the studio's art-direction constraint, no photoreal human face, demo only

    Tactical action · In development

    Steeltide

    The tide is the level designer.

    Flooded coastal city

  • Key art for the fictitious title Trenchwatch: Abyssal trench frontier, first-person tactical register, cinematic dark obsidian-and-ember key art, non-human subject per the studio's art-direction constraint, no photoreal human face, demo only

    First-person tactical · In production

    Trenchwatch

    The frontier is the deep.

    Abyssal trench frontier

  • Key art for the fictitious title Northcrest: Alpine winter siege, third-person action register, cinematic dark obsidian-and-ember key art, non-human subject per the studio's art-direction constraint, no photoreal human face, demo only

    Third-person action · In development

    Northcrest

    Hold the line until the thaw.

    Alpine winter siege

RampStack

Built by the RampStack trinity

How Ironhold was built

The four-stage workup behind this corporate portfolio demo, summarized. Generalized and pattern-level; no named competitors. The full Format A spec and the verification log live in the operated-side run record.

Stage 01

Basano · competitor review

  • The AAA-adjacent action studio field clusters in a fairly narrow register at the chrome layer: dark-mode-first sites where the chrome composes and the game key art carries the saturation and the energy. The home opens with a single cinematic full-bleed shot; the titles strip presents the studio's portfolio at scale; the studio page presents the team, the craft, and the workplace; the careers page is the conversion surface for the AAA talent funnel; the press page collects interviews and the studio's voice on its own work.
  • The position the field leaves on the table is not a position the field neglects; it is a register the showcase engine had not yet practised. Every one of the 11 shipped demos before Ironhold sat outside Bold Confident. The standout this build targets is the register itself: a cinematic full-bleed hero with the title's key art carrying saturation and motion-implied composition, type at scale and confidence, a dark ground with a single high-energy accent that the chrome uses sparingly. Bold means visually committed, not loud-for-loud's-sake; the chrome restraint (the Editorial Restrained composition secondary) is what keeps the studio brand from tipping into the single-IP saturation that belongs to a game-title demo.
  • Structural standouts the field consistently leaves available cluster on the titles portfolio and the careers surface. First, a title detail page that treats each game with the gravity of a small monograph (key-art hero, tagline, short pitch, gameplay register named, the team's relationship to it). Second, a careers surface that names the studio's hiring posture and what the studio expects of itself as a workplace, in the studio's own voice rather than as a recruiting pitch. Third, a studio page that presents the team without fabricated headshots, the way an editorial publication presents its masthead.
  • Voice standouts the field leaves available cluster on craft-and-scale pride without arrogance. The field leans toward two voice failure modes: hype-marketing cliche on the one side, corporate-flat blandness on the other. A studio voice that names what it built, who built it, and how it was made, in plain confident sentences, reads as bold without performing it.
  • Honesty signals available to a new entrant cluster on disclosure. The field traditionally surfaces review-aggregator scores, sales numbers, awards lists, and selected press quotes. A studio that does not surface scraped or fabricated review aggregates, that names its press coverage at the source-level rather than as a score, and that says when a title is in development versus shipped, signals editorial discipline at a register the field has not always practised.

Stage 02

Krine · positioning

Position
Bold-confident, editorial-restrained AAA-adjacent action studio. The studio chrome is composed and dark-mode-first; the game key art carries the saturation and energy. Cinematic full-bleed hero, four fictitious titles as a coherent body of work, the team as a typographic masthead (no headshots), careers as the load-bearing conversion surface, multi-column-sitemap footer. Bold Confident leads with Editorial Restrained as composition secondary; pure Bold Confident and Vibrant Saturated rejected to leave headroom for the upcoming game-title demo; Documentary Honest and Technical Precise secondaries considered and rejected per the brief. Vertical anti-patterns from the gaming and entertainment vertical file (Clinical Trustworthy, Rugged Utilitarian outside sim, Luxe Considered in mass gaming) confirmed not selected. Selected via the creative-brief-selector skill; full brief at progress/corporate-portfolio-ironhold-brief.md. First portfolio entry in Bold Confident; first portfolio entry in the corporate-portfolio shape. The brief takes the first Rule 4 WARN override in the framework's history (full-bleed-image-with-overlay hero; canonical AAA-studio treatment; four shipped matches but no archetype-family share so Rule 5 does not block; override justified because the new archetype carries the shape into a completely different visual reading).
Archetype
bold-confident-aaa-game-studio
Voice
Bold, cinematic, confident. Craft-and-scale pride without arrogance. Third-person where the studio speaks; first-person plural in deeper studio surfaces. Plain confident sentences. Names what is there. No hype-marketing cliche (no legendary, no iconic, no epic, no unforgettable, no next-level, no breakthrough). No corporate-flat blandness either.

Stage 03

Tholo · build plan

home

  • creative-brief-selector
  • competitor-experience-audit
  • vertical-site-conventions
  • landing-page-copy
  • information-architecture
  • frontend-component-build
  • seo-onpage

titles

  • frontend-component-build
  • information-architecture

title detail (dynamic)

  • creative-brief-selector
  • frontend-component-build
  • landing-page-copy
  • seo-onpage

studio

  • landing-page-copy
  • frontend-component-build

careers

  • landing-page-copy
  • frontend-component-build

workup

  • landing-page-copy
  • frontend-component-build

Stage 04

Basano · verification

Holds(13)

  • Heading hierarchy holds across all six pages: exactly one H1 per page, H2 / H3 sequence with no skipped levels.
  • Language declaration, semantic landmark structure (header, main with id=main-content, footer, nav with aria-label), and the skip-navigation link via ShowcaseMetaLayer are all present and correctly wired across the microsite.
  • JSON-LD Organization on the layout with Brand subOrganization for Ironhold; CreativeWork on the layout. BreadcrumbList on every non-home page. ItemList on home and titles pages. VideoGame schema on every title detail page with name, genre, platforms, and publisher reference; no fabricated aggregateRating. AboutPage on the studio page.
  • Hero zone carries the full-bleed-image-with-overlay shape per the brief's Rule 4 WARN override: a single cinematic full-bleed key-art frame of the marquee title (Mariner's Gauntlet) fills the hero on first paint with a lower-left overlay block (status / register micro-label, title at extra-large Inter Tight 800 with negative tracking, tagline, short pitch, Explore-the-title primary CTA in Ember plus View-all-games secondary). No carousel of multiple key-art frames cycling.
  • Titles portfolio strip renders the four fictitious titles (Mariner's Gauntlet, Steeltide, Trenchwatch, Northcrest) as a coherent body of work with consistent card anatomy: key-art tile, register and status micro-label, title in Inter Tight display, tagline, setting line in Ember micro-label. Same anatomy across all four cards so the portfolio reads as one studio's output.
  • Title detail pages render the monograph anatomy with KEY ART ONLY per the brief's 3A key-art-only decision: a full-width key-art frame at top with the title at extra-large Inter Tight 800 and tagline; the pitch paragraphs in Inter body at 18 pixels with 1.7 line-height; specs and credits in a four-cell dl (register, setting, status with year, platforms); game director credit linking to the studio masthead; demo-only Wishlist / View-on-storefront conversion CTA per the title's status. No in-game-capture image slots anywhere in the build.
  • Studio page renders the team as a typographic masthead organized by discipline (Leadership, Engineering, Art, Design, Production, Audio, QA, Operations) with role-and-name listings and NO headshots. 35 representative names from a stated 62-person studio; the gap between representative and total is named in copy as deliberate convention (roster-not-personality).
  • Careers page renders 10 fictitious open roles by discipline, each with a one-paragraph description in the studio's voice and a demo-only Apply button labelled in Ember.
  • Press band (home only, no standalone press page per the brief's 3A press decision) renders 3 brief source-and-date lines for fictitious publications. No fabricated review scores, no fabricated pull quotes, no real-outlet names. The publication names do not echo any real gaming-press outlet.
  • Bold-confident-cinematic register held: dark-mode-first Obsidian (#0b0d11) page ground; Slate (#1a1f2a) and Iron (#2a3140) secondary surfaces; Steel and Ash and Bone as the type-color stack; Ember (#d4503a) as the single high-energy accent used sparingly on CTAs, demo-only labels, and key-art frame highlights. Inter Tight (700 and 800) for display and the wordmark; Inter (400 and 500) for body and chrome. Brand wordmark in Inter Tight 800 uppercase at tracking-[-0.02em] (negative tracking; the first negative-tracked wordmark in the portfolio; tight and dense). The register reads cinematic-bold rather than restrained-in-dark-mode: type at scale (hero overlay at 48 to 64 px on dark, page H1 at 56 to 72 px), full-bleed key art carrying saturation, Ember marking active points only.
  • Footer renders the multi-column-sitemap shape: brand column plus five link columns (Games, Studio, Careers, Community, Legal). Studio-corporate breadth; distinct from FitFirst's parts-retail commerce-deep multi-column footer (same structural shape, different content). Demo-only labels in Ember on Community and Legal placeholders. Footer chrome convention applied (no outer margin; inner padding absorbs the spacing; the dark footer ground sits flush against the dark page above).
  • Honesty contract held throughout: no fabricated human faces anywhere (studio band and studio page are typographic with no headshots). All 35 team names and all 4 title names vetted against the brief's exclusion lists (gaming, film, industry figures for team names; high-resemblance-risk franchises for title names: Halo, Destiny, Call of Duty, Apex, Cyberpunk, Doom, Gears of War, Battlefield, Valorant, Overwatch, Diablo, The Last of Us, Uncharted, Dark Souls, Elden Ring, God of War, Horizon, Ghost of Tsushima, Spider-Man, Death Stranding, Metal Gear, Alan Wake, Control, Mass Effect, Dragon Age). Non-human key-art constraint stated in every Image alt and in the thumbnail alt so Phase 3B inherits it. Demo-only labelling in Ember on every interactive surface.
  • SITE_SHAPES enum extended to twelve shapes with corporate-portfolio added as the canonical shape for studio/agency/firm corporate-presence sites. SITE_SHAPE_LABELS updated. The showcase-index shape filter picks up the new shape.

Fails(6)

  • Intentional noindex and nofollow on the demo build (correct for a demo, flagged by the verifier across pages against a production-ready standard). Same not-a-defect-in-context the prior demos carry.
  • Canonical URL declares the production rampstack.co host while the build is served from localhost during the audit; cross-origin canonical mismatch is the localhost-vs-production artefact, not a real defect. Recurring across all pages.
  • Title tags and H1s on inner pages lean structural (Games, Studio, Careers, Workup) rather than search-keyword-aligned. Judgment item for the showcase context; a live AAA studio would target its lead title and its franchise terms explicitly.
  • Key-art placeholder imagery state (typographic SVGs over dark grounds) flagged against a production photography or illustration standard; intentional pre-imagery state. Phase 3B replaces the placeholders with cinematic key art per the brief's image-ready spine (1 hero + 4 title-strip + 4 title-detail heroes; non-human subject constraint binding; key art only, no in-game captures).
  • Logo-less type lockup; the Inter Tight 800 negative-tracked uppercase wordmark over Obsidian is the type-led placeholder this batch ships with. The logo pass is a separate per-brand later dispatch.
  • Non-marquee titles render a lighter monograph anatomy than the marquee (Mariner's Gauntlet carries four pitch paragraphs and the full credits; the others carry two or three pitch paragraphs and the same credits anatomy). Intentional for the demo's marquee-full convention.

Not assessable(6)

  • Core Web Vitals and page experience (no field data in a static-fetch audit).
  • robots.txt and XML sitemap content (single-page audit does not crawl).
  • Real titles / CMS backend integration (none in this build by design; titles, team, and roles are static modules).
  • Real careers-application backend integration (intentionally absent; Apply buttons are demo-only).
  • Real wishlist / storefront integration (intentionally absent; conversion buttons on title detail are demo-only).
  • Mobile responsiveness past basic reflow at the audit viewport (separate device captures required).
See the full workupAll business demos