Borcore
How a studio talked itself out of writing the design document first.
In 2019 two contract engineers finished a mobile title they had spent eleven months on. It shipped on the promised date. It ran clean. Almost nobody played past the second level.
The design document had been signed off by four people, and not one of them had held a controller while doing it. By the time anyone did, the schedule had no room left, so the last quarter went on polishing a loop that did not work. Nobody was to blame. The order of the work was.
They started Borcore to run it backwards. Build the smallest thing somebody can actually play. Put it in front of people who owe you nothing. Write the document afterwards, if it still needs writing.
The studio is six people, four of them full-time, working in Unity and Unreal from Wakefield. It ships to Steam, Switch, PS5, Xbox and mobile, and it has carried other studios' code through platform certification more often than it has written a codebase from scratch. Borcore is run by Ronald Group Limited.
No gambling work. No loot-box economies. Nothing designed to charge a child for being impatient. That position has cost two contracts, and it would cost two more.
Every figure is a floor, not an estimate. Scope moves it, and the written quote is what counts. Tick anything you want costing and it carries through to the form below.
Figures exclude VAT. Day rates are billed in whole days. Nothing starts before a signed written scope.
Playable prototype
One mechanic, built properly, running on the hardware it is meant for. Enough to test with strangers and stop guessing.
Included
- Vertical slice on target hardware
- Two rounds of playtesting with people outside the team
- Written findings, not a slide deck
- Project files and source handed over
Full production
Design through certification. Borcore runs the milestone schedule, reports against it every fortnight, and hands over the source at the end.
Included
- Fortnightly playable milestone builds
- Art, engineering and audio production
- Store pages and platform submission
- Full handover of source, assets and pipeline
Co-development
A Borcore engineer inside your team, on your board, in your standup. Useful when the problem is capacity rather than direction.
Included
- Your tooling, your repo, your process
- Gameplay, tools or engine work
- Weekly written note to your producer
- Two weeks' notice either way
Console porting
Switch, PS5 and Xbox. The price covers the certification passes, including the ones that come back failed.
Included
- Input, storage and lifecycle rework
- Frame-rate and memory budget to platform spec
- Certification submission and resubmission
- Achievement and trophy plumbing
Game art & 3D pipeline
Characters, environments, and the tooling that stops artists exporting assets by hand at eleven at night.
Included
- Modelling, texturing and rigging
- Automated import and LOD generation
- Style sheet your own artists can follow
- Source files, not just exports
Performance audit
Frame budget, memory, load times. You get a written report with the profiler captures attached and a ranked list of what to fix.
Included
- Capture on your worst target device
- CPU, GPU and memory breakdown
- Ranked fix list with rough effort against each
- An hour on a call walking your team through it
Software builds
Tools, backends and internal software for clients who are not making games at all. The same engineers, a quieter brief.
Included
- Discovery and a written specification
- Build, test and deployment
- Documentation your own staff can read
- Thirty days of support after go-live
Four stages. The unpleasant news arrives at stage two, which is the only stage where it is still cheap.
Scoping call
Forty-five minutes on a video call, no charge and no slide deck. The studio asks what the game is for and who is meant to keep playing it after week one.
Written scope
A fixed price against dated milestones, back within five working days. If the budget will not reach something shippable, you hear it here rather than in month nine.
Build
A playable build every fortnight, on the target hardware. When a fortnight produces nothing worth playing, the note says exactly that and explains why.
Handover
Source, assets, project files and the build pipeline. Two weeks of support after the final milestone, included in the price rather than invoiced afterwards.
Borcore does not sell retainers it cannot fill, and it will say when a job belongs with a bigger studio. Wakefield is a small enough town for that to matter.
Book the scoping call
Forty-five minutes, no charge, no deck. Or ask for the written quote and Borcore sends figures instead of a conversation.
