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Building the WayForward Website: A Retro-Powered Studio with a Modern Web Presence
WayForward is a legendary name in indie and retro-inspired game development. Known for titles like Shantae, River City Girls, and Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp, their portfolio spans decades — and genres. When I was brought in to build their new studio site, the challenge was clear: how do you create a sleek, modern web experience that honors such a massive, beloved legacy?
Spoiler alert: you build a Gameography.
The Mission
WayForward needed a new site that would:
Reflect their bold, colorful visual identity
Showcase both new releases and their massive back catalogue
Provide clear paths for fans, press, and business partners
Be easy for their internal team to manage and update
Handle high traffic around game announcements and releases
And most importantly — do all of that without losing the studio’s distinct voice and personality.
Design & Collaboration
The design was handled by Mike Heald at Fully Illustrated, whose work struck the perfect balance between nostalgic and modern. Bright colors, chunky UI elements, and retro flourishes gave the site plenty of character, while still keeping everything clean and readable.
The layout needed to accommodate a lot of content — games, news, media, job postings — but still feel easy to explore. As usual, Mike’s designs nailed that challenge and gave me a solid foundation to build on.
The Build
For the development side, I used my standard stack:
Nuxt 3 for the frontend
Storyblok as the CMS
Netlify for hosting and continuous deployment
Everything was built to be fast, scalable, and easy to maintain — even with a huge content base.
The Gameography
One of the most important (and unique) parts of this build was the Gameography — a custom-built archive that lets visitors explore WayForward’s entire back catalogue.
Rather than just listing titles chronologically, we created:
Filters by genre, platform, and release year
Dedicated pages for each game, with artwork, descriptions, trailers, and platform info
CMS-driven entries so WayForward’s team can add new titles or update old ones with ease
The end result is a deep, browsable archive that does justice to the sheer scope of WayForward’s work — and it’s fun to explore, whether you’re a longtime fan or someone just discovering their catalog.
Other Key Features
A News & Blog system for announcements and behind-the-scenes updates
A Careers section to help them attract new talent
Media-ready Press pages with assets and trailers
Custom-built components to match the unique look of the brand across the site
Everything is component-based and easily expandable, so the team can keep evolving the site as new games are announced and launched.
Why It Stood Out
WayForward isn’t just another game studio — they’re a part of gaming history. Working on this site meant honoring that history while giving them a future-proof platform to keep telling their story. The Gameography alone was a major technical and content challenge, but one I was really proud to solve.
Final Thoughts
WayForward’s new website is a proper home for everything they’ve built over the years — and everything still to come. It’s always satisfying to work on a project that balances fun design with technical problem-solving, and this one had both in spades.
Check out the live site here: wayforward.com
If you’ve got a deep catalogue or a growing library of games and need a way to make them shine — I’d love to help make that happen.