A painting of Willow Creek, a small Wyoming town at dusk. On a hill stands a brick school; one upstairs window is lit, and a figure stands inside it.

✦ Independent game studio · Cheyenne, Wyoming ✦

Worlds worth losing sleep over.

We’re Hayden-Fisher Technologies. Our debut, PENCILS DOWN™, is out now on Steam, and we’re ready to bring it to PlayStation®5.

Enter Room 44

Willow Creek Consolidated School District · Room 44 · Spring term, 1999

PENCILS DOWN^™

A standardized test that knows you.

Analog horror exam roguelike · Out now on Steam

1999. Room 44.
One sitting.

Wager 1–5 confidence chips on every answer. Erasers are your lives. And when the proctor walks the rows: pencils down.

Willow Creek Consolidated School District Form 44-A

PENCILS DOWN, in one page.

The game: An analog horror exam roguelike. It’s 1999 and you’re in Room 44: forty-four questions, one sitting. Wager confidence chips on every answer, guard your erasers, and stop writing when the proctor walks the rows.
The hook: The exam studies you back. From Section C onward, questions are generated live from how you took the test. There is no wiki.
Content: 44-question sittings drawn from 400+ period-accurate questions · 3 exam forms · 5 endings · School Store upgrades that help and hurt.
Status: Out now on Steam since September 4, 2026. Update 1.10.17 shipped; the next update lands this Halloween.
Proposal: PlayStation®5 · PlayStation®Store, worldwide · Q3 2027, a back-to-school launch with a Halloween push · US$6.99
Audience: Horror and psychological-horror fans (16–34) · roguelite and risk-strategy players (18–34) · millennials who took ’90s standardized tests (30–45) · friend groups and streamers.
For fans of: The Exit 8 · Buckshot Roulette · Balatro · Inscryption
The IP: Willow Creek Consolidated School District: a fictional town with its own lore, with room for sequels, a short film, comics, a tabletop game and merchandise.
The studio: Hayden-Fisher Technologies, Inc., Cheyenne, Wyoming. Founders’ credits include tools and pipelines for ELDEN RING and Dark Souls overhaul mods (3.4M+ creator views) and pipeline engineering for Cartoon Network Studios and Atomic Cartoons.

Willow Creek Consolidated, after hours

Room 44 is always being watched.

In-game question: the chalkboard has been rewritten since the break. What does it say now? — In-game, Section C: “The chalkboard has been rewritten since the break. What does it say now?”

The hook

The exam studies you back.

From Section C onward, questions are generated live from how you actually took the test. There is nothing to look up. There is no wiki. There is only what you remember.

Which of your earlier answers was a guess?
How many times have you erased?
What did the chalkboard say during the break?

A
Confidence wagers

Bet 1–5 chips on every answer. Win them back, or lose them.
B
Erasers are lives

Questions printed in red ink put an eraser at stake.
C
Heard, never seen

When the proctor walks the rows, stop working. Keep writing and it notices.
D
Three forms. Five endings.

Standard, Honors Track, and the District Protocol, where question 45 of 44 is waiting.

Why it matters

Everyone remembers the test.
Nobody expects it to remember them.

PENCILS DOWN rests on four things that are hard to manufacture and easy to explain.

A stack of marked exam papers and a red pencil under a desk lamp

A premise everyone already owns.

Almost everyone has sat a standardized test. The dread is pre-installed; the game only has to turn it up.

A hook that fits in one sentence.

Rules everyone already knows, plus dread everyone already feels. An identity people get immediately, and a pitch that fits on a Store tile.

Built to be watched.

One player sits the exam while friends shout answers and share the jumpscares. Creators found it on their own, solo and in groups.

Concept art of Willow Creek at night, the school's one lit window

A world, not a level.

Willow Creek already has a history inside the game, and players who unlock its Local History questions are asking what the town even is.

Track record, not a promise

Shipped. And still shipping.

Sept 4, 2026 V1 live on Steam
On Steam’s New Releases list on launch day, with a 20% launch discount.
Update 1.10.17 First content update
More varied questions, and modules that equip like study aids.
Halloween 2026 The next update
Lands this Halloween.
Q3 2027 · proposed PlayStation®5
Back-to-school launch, Halloween push.

Steam's New Releases list on September 4, 2026, with PENCILS DOWN in it — Launch day, September 4, 2026.

Released: September 4, 2026
Price: US$6.99
Developer & publisher: Hayden-Fisher Technologies
Tags: Horror · Psychological Horror · Trivia · Roguelite

View on Steam →

Players and creators showed up.

“This is a crazy mix of genres that somehow works flawlessly.”
Steam user review

The IP

We didn’t just make a game.
We made Willow Creek.

Willow Creek Consolidated School District is where PENCILS DOWN takes place. It already has lore, and players who unlock its Local History questions are asking what Willow Creek even is. That curiosity is the opening.

Painted map of Willow Creek: the creek, main street, church, water tower, grain elevator, bus depot, cemetery and, circled in red ink, the school on the hill. — Willow Creek Consolidated School District, 1999

Poster mockup: Willow Creek, Room 44 is still in session — **Film**Not “PENCILS DOWN: The Movie.” A short film set in Willow Creek.

Comic cover mockup: Willow Creek No. 1, a PENCILS DOWN story — **Comics**Willow Creek #1: a story from the same world, not a retelling.

Tabletop game mockup with wager chips, erasers, answer sheets and a proctor pawn — **Tabletop**Translate the mechanic, not just the logo. Wager chips, guard erasers, pencils down.

Proctor plush mockup with an official plush tag — **Merch**Shirts, plush, exam booklets, pins, a soundtrack.

Merchandise mockup: a Form 44-A exam booklet, pencils, pins, a hall pass and a soundtrack vinyl — **Collectibles**Form 44-A booklet, pencils, pins, hall pass, vinyl.

Room 44

01NowThe game
PENCILS DOWN, live on Steam and updating, with PlayStation®5 proposed for Q3 2027.
02NextThe world
Sequels and new stories inside Willow Creek Consolidated: other students, other years, the district itself.
03BeyondBeyond games
A short film, comics, a tabletop game, merchandise and a soundtrack. Each one translates the mechanic, not just the logo.

We made the first piece of something.

From Isaac Fisher’s talk “Your game can be more than a game,” Glitch AI Gaming Festival, September 2026.

The PlayStation®5 edition · Our proposal

Dread you can feel.
Fear you can share.

PENCILS DOWN is a game about paying attention, and a game people love to watch. On PS5, DualSense™ and Tempest 3D AudioTech put the proctor in the room, and Share Play puts your friends in the seat beside you.

A student's hand frozen mid-answer, pencil hovering over an answer sheet, as a tall shadow falls across the desk

DualSense™ adaptive triggers

Pencils down means pencils down.

When the proctor walks the rows, the adaptive triggers lock. You physically can’t keep writing, even if you try.

From a student's seat: empty rows of desks under one fluorescent light, and the long shadow of an unseen figure stretching up the aisle

Tempest 3D AudioTech · haptics · speaker

Heard, never seen.

The proctor is never shown. 3D audio tells you which row it’s in, its footsteps come through the grips, and the PA crackles from the controller speaker.

Three friends in separate dark rooms, each lit by a screen, reacting to the same scare at once

Share Play

Sit the exam together.

Friends join the session online: one player takes the test while the others help answer, point things out and share the jumpscares, just as creators already play it.

Watch group play

A graded answer sheet with a gold star and a silver star sticker, a pencil and an eraser beside it

Trophies

A full Trophy set.

Three exam forms, five endings and secrets to uncover. A sample of what we have in mind:

Question 45 of 44Find the question that shouldn’t exist.
Pencils DownStop working every time the proctor passes.
Red InkSurvive a red-ink question with one eraser left.
Honor RollPass all three examination forms.

Where: PlayStation®Store, worldwide
When: Q3 2027; Back-to-school launch, Halloween push
Price: US$6.99

Who it’s for

Horror and psychological-horror fans16–34
Roguelite and risk-strategy players18–34
Millennials who took ’90s standardized tests30–45
Friend groups and streamers playing together

For fans of The Exit 8, Buckshot Roulette, Balatro and Inscryption.

The team

Small team.
Serious track record.

Painted illustration of the studio at night: a corkboard of proctor sketches and red string, one monitor showing Room 44, another showing a map of Willow Creek, and the prairie sky through an arched window. — The studio after hours (illustration).

Co-CEO & Co-Founder

Isaac Fisher

Game developer, software engineer and technical artist for 7+ years.

Games: Tools & pipeline engineering for FromSoftware overhaul mods: ELDEN RING: The Convergence, Graceborne, The Garden of Eyes and Dark Souls: Archthrones.
Television: ML pipeline tools for Cartoon Network Studios (The Amazing World of Gumball) and an ML storyboard search engine for Atomic Cartoons (Molly of Denali, Peabody & Emmy Award winner, PBS KIDS).
Training: Full-stack Unity HVAC training game for Hercules Industries (SCORM-compliant), plus custom Unity tools for art and assets.
Film & VFX: Senior compositor on Blanca, an award-winning short screened at the Beverly Hills and Sactown festivals; VFX for Armstrong Air.
Community: Runs the Ayee LittleBigPlanet channel, supported by Media Molecule, Sumo Digital and Tarsier; built tools for a 10M+ level private LBP server.
Studio: Co-creator of PENCILS DOWN and Willow Creek.

Co-CEO & Co-Founder

Michael Hayden

Full-stack architect and engineering leader behind the studio’s production systems.

Engineering: Architect of encrypted, on-prem infrastructure backed by AWS S3 for oil & gas clients, and of production-grade systems built to deploy to any cloud.
Industry: Engineering experience at SAS, the analytics software company, and Swell Energy, the home solar and battery provider.
Pipelines: Dockerized build and deployment pipelines, monitoring and cloud-agnostic infrastructure that keep shipped software running around the clock.
Leadership: Chief Technology Officer at CEC Greenhouse, LLC, a youth-led company in Fort Collins, Colorado.
Studio: Co-founder of Hayden-Fisher Technologies, the studio behind PENCILS DOWN.
Writing: Co-author of Vector Databases: 609 pages, 37 chapters and 25 Dockerized labs across Chroma, Qdrant, Weaviate, Milvus and pgvector.

3.4M+

views on creator videos of the mods Isaac built tools and pipelines for. The Convergence was also featured by IGN, Kotaku and GameSpot.

Engineering DNA

We build the tools other teams ship with.

Isaac’s open-source tooling works directly on FromSoftware’s proprietary formats, and is credited by the teams behind The Convergence and Dark Souls: Archthrones.