Wolf Interactive has had a website since 2023.
That sentence makes the site sound considerably more organised than the reality.
The original site did exactly what I needed it to do. It gave me somewhere to put development notes, Unreal Engine tutorials, screenshots, project updates and whatever else I happened to be working on at the time. Alpha RPG lived there. Project Protofodder lived there. Open Rails eventually joined it. More recently, the first development log for the cyber-security project that would become TRACEWAKE appeared there too.
WordPress was never really the project.
It was the shelf the projects sat on.
And for quite a while, that was enough.
The problem with outgrowing the shelf
The catalyst for finally rebuilding Wolf Interactive was TRACEWAKE.
As the project developed, its visual identity became considerably stronger. Aurelius, Ghostline, the simulated workstation interface, the darker operational aesthetic and the project presentation itself were all beginning to feel deliberate.
That created a slightly awkward problem.
I could build a dedicated TRACEWAKE page that looked the way I wanted, send somebody to wolfinteractive.tech/tracewake/, and then have them click back to the studio website and land in a fairly standard WordPress layout.
That contrast was becoming difficult to ignore.
The Wolf Interactive site needed to feel like it belonged to the same studio as the work it was presenting.
Not identical to TRACEWAKE. Wolf Interactive needed its own identity.
But deliberate.
Starting with the wolf
There were a few things I did not want to lose.
The wolf head was staying.
The quote was staying:
“The return that you get out of something is equal to the effort you put into it.”
And the old development history was staying.
The new visual direction became something I started referring to as Lone Ridge.
Near-black charcoal backgrounds. Icy cyan used carefully rather than sprayed across the interface. Silver and grey around the Wolf identity. A mountain-night atmosphere behind the hero rather than a generic technology grid.
The hierarchy mattered too.
The quote comes first. Wolf Interactive comes second. The atmosphere supports both.
The homepage became much more restrained than the projects it links to. TRACEWAKE can have its blue Aurelius screens and red Ghostline operations. Wolf Interactive itself needed to remain neutral enough that future projects can live beside it without every page looking like part of the same game.
This was not just a reskin
It would have been easy to install a new WordPress theme, move some widgets around and call the job finished.
That was not particularly appealing.
The simpler answer was to remove the CMS entirely.
The replacement site is deliberately boring underneath:
- semantic HTML
- CSS
- a small amount of JavaScript
- no content database
- no public admin interface
- no framework
- no externally hosted fonts
- no CMS runtime required to serve a page
That means the public website has considerably less machinery running simply to display content.
The Dev Logs are files. The tutorials are files. The project pages are files.
The browser asks for a page and the server gives it one.
There is something quite satisfying about that.
Preserving the old site instead of pretending it never happened
The dangerous part of a rebuild is deciding the old material looks dated and quietly throwing it away.
I did the opposite.
The WordPress export was audited before the replacement site was built around it.
The migration preserved:
- 13 published posts
- 4 published pages
- the original publication dates
- categories and tags
- the media library used by the published content
- old project screenshots
- Unreal Engine tutorials
- previous project journals
- the original Wolf Interactive site history
More than 200 media files ultimately made it into the static asset library.
Even the wonderfully minimal original Under Construction page survived.
It would have been very easy to remove it because it serves no practical purpose in 2026.
That is precisely why I kept it.
It is part of the trail.
The new Archive section now treats those early pages as historical records instead of embarrassing debris somebody forgot to delete. The old /under-construction/ address still works too, now redirecting into its preserved archive page.
Dev Logs and tutorials got different doors
One thing I wanted the new site to communicate much more clearly was that the development journal is not a bolt-on blog.
It is part of Wolf Interactive.
The old WordPress Blog mixed project updates, tutorials and everything else into the same general stream. The rebuild separates those jobs.
Dev Logs are now organised by project, with individual readable URLs and previous/next navigation. TRACEWAKE has its own development trail. Open Rails has its own trail. Protofodder and Alpha RPG remain visible rather than being pushed out of sight by whatever happens to be newest.
Tutorials now live in a separate knowledge base because somebody looking for an Unreal Engine solution is doing something different from somebody reading a development journal.
The homepage also surfaces the latest Dev Log so the studio always has a visible pulse.
TRACEWAKE finally has somewhere to live
The rebuild also created a proper Projects area.
TRACEWAKE is the current flagship, so it gets a dedicated project page built around genuine screenshots from the game rather than generic promotional artwork.
The hero introduces both sides of the project. Aurelius demonstrates the defensive workstation and investigation environment. Ghostline shows the offensive side of the same broader incident space.
Below that, older projects remain part of the studio record.
The point was never to create a portfolio where the only projects visible are the ones I still consider impressive.
Projects teach you things.
Some of those lessons are exactly why the next project exists.
The contact form was the last moving part
The old WordPress site used a traditional plugin-backed contact form.
Removing WordPress meant replacing that final functional dependency without rebuilding an entire CMS just to send an email.
The new site keeps the public side static and adds one deliberately small PHP mail endpoint. Messages are validated server-side and sent through authenticated SMTP from wolf@wolfinteractive.tech.
The live production test delivered successfully, and the visitor's submitted email address is carried in the Reply-To header so replying from the Wolf mailbox goes back to the person who sent the enquiry.
No database. No file uploads. No public administration panel.
One moving part because that particular part actually needs to move.
The invisible work
A lot of the rebuild is not particularly screenshot-friendly.
Hundreds of old URLs needed somewhere sensible to go.
The production migration carries more than 400 redirect targets so links to old WordPress posts do not simply disappear when the CMS is removed.
The final site also includes:
- a branded custom 404 page
- canonical URLs
- a sitemap
- robots metadata
- compression and caching rules
- security headers
- a restrictive Content Security Policy
- retired WordPress administration endpoints
- keyboard and reduced-motion support
- responsive layouts extending from mobile through wide 4K displays
Before deployment, the automated QA pass checked 24 HTML pages, 455 internal links, 255 local assets and 430 redirect targets without finding a missing internal target.
The custom 404, the legacy /under-construction/ redirect and the contact system were then tested again on the live Hostinger deployment.
The goal throughout the rebuild has been simple:
If the website does not need a moving part, do not give it one.
Then WordPress became a ghost
Cutover itself produced one last amusing reminder that websites do not exist in just one place.
The WordPress files were gone and the new site was live, but for a short while different cache layers were still capable of serving the old homepage. A desktop browser might see Lone Ridge while a phone briefly summoned 2023 again until the Hostinger cache was cleared and the new version propagated.
For a few minutes, Wolf Interactive existed in two eras depending on which cache answered first.
Then the old one finally disappeared.
One site, several years of experiments
The part I like most about the finished structure is that the new website does not feel as though Wolf Interactive suddenly appeared in 2026.
The old work is still there.
The slightly awkward early writing is still there.
The old screenshots are still there.
The Unreal tutorials are still there.
The projects I moved on from are still there.
TRACEWAKE now sits at the front of the workshop, but it did not appear from nowhere.
The archive behind it matters.
Wolf Interactive has changed considerably since the original site appeared in 2023.
The website finally reflects that.
Without deleting the evidence.