Three games where the player's job is direction, not execution. The clicks are never punishing. The decisions are.
Twitch reflexes, frame-perfect dodges, two hundred APM. The skill ceiling is in your fingers, not your head. You either grind your way past it or you bounce.
That's gatekeeping dressed up as gameplay. It's also boring once you're past it.
You decide where to be, who to kill, which weapon, how aggressive. The game's autonomous agent — CyberGuy, your mech, your city — handles the moment-to-moment execution. You're the tactical brain; it's the body.
The clicks are never punishing. The decisions are.
NOLTS — top-down boomer shooter. Push-forward combat, glory kills, environmental cascades. Real-time tactics in arcade drag.
MechaTank — turn-based mercenary mech combat. Plan, watch the movie, recover when the plan dies on contact. Tai Chi physics, business pressure.
Thalassocracy — sandbox civilization sim. Twelve coupled subsystems, three scales, a simulation that doesn't fake it. Every fix uncovers the next.
NOLTS runs on real physics — fire spreads, barrels chain, fear moves through a room like smoke. MechaTank's combat is mass and leverage — a charging mech can be redirected by a smaller, smarter one. Thalassocracy actually couples its systems — pollution kills your farms even though no rule explicitly says so.
The complexity lives in the engine. The interface stays clean. You feel it before you understand it, and you never have to.
Sasha, with Anand on NOLTS. Godot 4, GDScript, 2D first. PICO-8 prototypes prove mechanics; Godot becomes the real game. No publisher, no investors, no committee.
Pace is patient. The dream game is third in line on purpose — ship the first two, learn, then build it right.
Each is a Trojan horse for a way of thinking. Each ships in its own time. None of them apologize for being weird.
You're CyberGuy: the most dangerous thing in every room. Reduce the universe's evil to red mist one dad joke at a time. Real-time tactics under arcade drag.
see how it plays → next upYou command a mercenary mech company: battles won, duels survived, bills paid. Killing is business and business is booming. BRRRT.
see how it plays → the dream gameBuild across three scales: facility, city, planet. The simulation tracks everything. Every fix uncovers the next, and you can't gimmick your way out.
see how it plays →There's a quiet audience for games where the smart move beats the fast move. People who liked X-COM more than Call of Duty, SimCity more than Madden, Frozen Synapse more than its sequel. They don't get a lot of new product.
We make games for them. Three of them. Patiently.
If we're wrong, we shipped weird games we wanted to make. If we're right, we shipped weird games other people wanted to make.
NOLTS is the closest to playable. Push-forward combat, glory kills, barrel-chain cascades, four enemy archetypes, a top-hatted Victorian boss with comically tiny legs and a plasma cannon. CyberGuy is the joke; the room is the punchline.
MechaTank is next. Three perspectives — operational, tactical, strategic. Tai Chi physics. You can lose by going broke.
Thalassocracy is the dream game. Twelve coupled subsystems mapped to human biology. Jane Jacobs meets SimCity meets Factorio — gardener, not architect.