Independent game studio

Amber Screen

A small independent studio making narrative games. Our games are Lines of Mercy and Time & Tension.

Amber Screen logo: a glowing amber monitor showing a fern frond.

Our games

Lines of Mercy key art: a warm amber desk lamp, a beige CRT monitor and a radio on a dark desk, with a night courtyard visible through the window.
Key art for Lines of Mercy.

Lines of Mercy

Night shift at the desk. Reports, requests and radio calls arrive one after another, and there is never enough of anything to answer them all. In Lines of Mercy you run the paperwork of a 1990s aid hospital, and every decision you sign off lands on someone.

It is a narrative management game: the story is told through the desk, the files, the phone and the choices you make between them.

  • Genre Narrative management
  • Setting A 1990s aid hospital, seen from one desk
  • Engine Godot
  • Developer Amber Screen
  • Status In development
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Visit linesofmercy.com

Time & Tension key art: an exploded watch movement, Caliber 47, above the words TIME & TENSION.
Key art for Time & Tension.

Time & Tension

An apprentice joins an old master's watch shop in the Vallée de Joux. In Time & Tension you learn the trade bench by bench: repairs, commissions, customers and deadlines, in a present-day world of fine watchmaking.

Alongside the game runs The Time & Tension Journal, a horology magazine with news, technique and history, also readable inside the game.

  • Genre Management
  • Setting A watch shop in the Vallée de Joux, today
  • Platform PC
  • Status In development
Sand & Ink logo: the words SAND and INK in sepia serif on old map paper, joined by a dotted route line with a Land Rover on top.
Logo for Sand & Ink.

Sand & Ink

The 1950s. A young surveyor, a Land Rover and a blank sheet of paper. In Sand & Ink you cross desert, gravel and mountains to record who each village and well answers to, drawing the map yourself as you go.

  • Genre Driving survival and mapping
  • Setting A lightly fictionalised 1950s desert coast
  • Engine Godot
  • Status In early development

The studio

Amber Screen is a small independent studio, making Lines of Mercy in the Godot engine, Time & Tension, and now Sand & Ink.

A note on the art

The art in Lines of Mercy is AI-assisted. It is directed and curated by the developer, who decides what is made, chooses what is kept and shapes how it is used. The game itself is built by a small team in Godot.