Asperia Games

Asperia Games is Ambitious Concepts, working solo. Three projects so far, in two very different registers — a PICO-8 arcade game you can finish in five minutes, a pixel-art runner, and a strategy simulation that plays out over weeks.

They have more in common than the scale suggests. Each one puts you in a system that's under load, shows you part of it, and makes you commit before you can see the rest. In LOGFIRE that's a log feed moving faster than you can read. In Soldiers of Wealth it's a market that moves while your decisions are still resolving. The genre changes; the question doesn't.

How this gets made

Small, finished things, built with whatever fits the idea rather than whatever's standard — PICO-8 and Lua for the arcade work, Love2D for Coin Run, plain web technology for the strategy layer. The constraint is usually chosen on purpose: PICO-8's 128×128 screen is what made LOGFIRE a game about reading rather than a game about looking.

Work in progress gets written up in the devlog, including the decisions that turned out to be wrong. That's most of what makes the writing worth doing.

Elsewhere

• Lexaloffle BBS — PICO-8 cartridges

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