Another new indie studio has emerged from New Zealand with a turn-based tactical RPG that nods towards Jet Set Radio, Hi-Fi Rush, XCOM, and even The Warriors on PlayStation 2. If that wasn’t enough, the outfit has got the backing of one of the industry’s biggest success stories.
Today (August 20), Disc 2 Games announced its debut title, Canvas City: a delightfully colorful subversion of time-honored tropes with more than a sprinkle of real-life trends. However, the intrigue doubles when you learn about the model behind its release: it’s a publishing experiment powered by Black Salt Games, the award-winning studio behind 2023’s breakout indie hit Dredge — easily one of the best games of the year, which was effortlessly ported to iOS and Android in March.
Together, Disc 2 and Black Salt might have found the best way to strengthen the indie scene in the face of years of bad news for small-scale studios — and if Dredge is anything to go by, this follow-up could be the start of a Kiwi gaming renaissance.
Canvas City is set in a surprisingly rollerblade-first metropolis where creativity has been outlawed — art, music, and free expression have been repressed, but groups seek to fight back against the state, with more than a wink and a nod to the state of affairs around the world in 2025. It combines these defiant themes with a rebellion against traditional tactic-led RPGs, putting combat through the lens of choreography.
Play Puzzles & Games on Forbes
Each turn offers the chance to string together flips, spins, and creative combos to shape the battlefield. Crews of musicians, dancers, and performance artists replace standard ranks of fantasy units or military squads, while its soundtrack promises to shift genres depending on who’s making their move. There’ll be over a dozen recruitable characters with unique abilities and stories, offering customization to individual players’ strengths and approaches.
To help Disc 2 see its concept through, Black Salt Games is backing the studio in a shared-services structure that allows small, independent teams to stay lean while still offering resources typically out of reach for first-time developers.
Nadia Thorne, CEO for both Black Salt and Disc 2, and producer of Dredge and Canvas City, says: “Disc 2 Games came out of a simple goal: how do we give a game everything it needs while avoiding the boom-and-bust cycle of development and all that wasted learning?
“Dredge hit far bigger than we ever dreamed, but we’re happy with our small team and don’t want to compromise our approach by ballooning in size. Instead, we’ve scaled differently: we invested in a new studio and built a shared services team. That way, both we and our players get the benefit of shared knowledge across studios, while retaining all that experience through every phase of development.”
The vision already seems to be paying dividends for Disc 2, who’ll benefit from quality assurance, marketing, and operational support, even as each studio retains its own identity.
It’s a great idea, but it’s not the first time we’ve seen an arrangement like it. I covered ProbablyMonsters’ similar approach four years ago, albeit at a much bigger scale. Still, their only release to date was, er, Concord.
Still, if you can trust any young company to pull this off, it’s Black Salt. By building a network of boutique studios under a shared umbrella, it could nail the balance between new IPs, more frequent releases, and creative independence between studios. It could be the next step in a nice little revolution for New Zealand’s developers — fitting, given the themes of Canvas City.
The game’s currently in development for PC and Switch, and you can wishlist Canvas City now on Steam.
