Red Rooster: Ex-Disco Elysium Team Summer Eternal Reveals Physics-Driven RPG

Red Rooster, the debut RPG from the ex-Disco Elysium developers at Croatian cooperative Summer Eternal, was announced today through a 500-page anthology that doubles as its design document. Red Rooster is built in Unreal Engine as a 3D third-person RPG set in the tri-partite river city of Arta-Tantor. Players take the role of an inmate arson investigator who, with an opiate-addicted mathematician and a nunchaku-wielding bus driver, chases a serial arsonist at a fire station run by his own brother.

Summer Eternal is the worker cooperative formed in 2024 by Disco Elysium writer and world-builder Argo Tuulik, who is directing Red Rooster, and principal writer Dora Klindžić. Other veteran ZA/UM staff on the team include Anastasia Ivanova, Michael Oswell, Aleksandar Gavrilović (secretary of the Croatian Game Development Alliance), and Lenval Brown, the voice of Disco Elysium’s Harry Du Bois.

The studio calls Red Rooster “an incendiary, physics-driven RPG combining the best of cerebral, worldbuilding-rich RPGs with the genetics of physics-driven immersive sims.” It is using the Summer Eternal Anthology, a 500-page book that doubles as a treatise on the games industry and labor, as both announcement and pitch. Buyers of the book become members of the Summer Eternal Players Non-Profit, which owns 5% of the studio and gets a vote on governance and on how 5% of Red Rooster’s profits are spent.

The game itself is not out yet. It is “nearing the end of pre-production” with an internal playable tech demo, and Summer Eternal says it is 3-4 years from release, contingent on closing the rest of its funding. The studio is targeting a “double-A production budget” comparable to Sandfall Interactive’s Expedition 33, the 2025 turn-based RPG the studio names as its budget reference.

How to back it today

The anthology comes in two paid editions and includes a free studio membership:

The premise: Redrick Roost, a white-collar inmate serving time for gross criminal negligence after a malfunctioning “auto-meditation” headset he endorsed left thousands catatonic. A week before his parole hearing, a government spook recruits him to infiltrate the local fire station run by his brother and identify the serial arsonist working among their ranks. His companion is Dr Astrid Albers, a mathematician whose opium addiction is forcing her into state-supervised rehab. Rico, a nunchaku-wielding truth-activist bus driver, joins them as the third party member.

Red Rooster leans hard on its physics. Every object in the world has weight, fragility, and elasticity, and a “simplified but realistic real-time fire simulation” lets you start, spread, and respond to blazes across surfaces. Arta-Tantor is a “fractalized border archipelago,” with borders that criss-cross streets and bisect buildings. The psychological layer is “The Coop,” a vacuum-shop interior where competing Rooster-selves vie for control of Redrick. They include a pathological gambler, an Overkompensaaator who wears sunglasses indoors, and a Rooster-Raconteur who cannot stop debating people. Repressing one is a dice-driven encounter, much like Disco Elysium’s Thought Cabinet.

Influences named by the studio include Planescape: Torment, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, Baldur’s Gate 3, Half-Life: Alyx, Exanima, and Arcanum. Outside-fiction references include Ted Chiang, John Steinbeck, Better Call Saul, Fargo, and Fringe.

The post-Disco Elysium studio map

Summer Eternal is one of at least three studios to grow out of the original Disco Elysium team’s split:

Our read: Summer Eternal is the most ambitious of the four in scope. A 3D Unreal Engine physics-driven RPG with a player-owned 5% stake is a bigger swing than the other post-Disco studios. It is also the furthest from shipping: 3-4 years out, funding not closed, and a 500-page book doing the work a Steam page or vertical-slice trailer usually does. The ZA/UM path is the cautionary tale: it shipped Zero Parades in June, then laid off a large chunk of its remaining staff.

For indie-RPG context, our recent coverage has tracked Paper Perjury 2: Shadow of Justice announced for 2028, the Project Zomboid 81,544-player peak 13 years into early access, and How to Fish hitting 10 million players in 2 months – three indie projects that took unusually long or hit unusually hard. Red Rooster’s funding model and pre-production timeline fit closer to the ZA/UM cautionary case than to those hits.

Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report