About Perpolita

Perpolita is mainly just me, with the help of family, friends, and testers. I make the games in the evenings and on weekends, around a full-time software job. It's primarily for fun, both in making the games and experiences, and for the player enjoying something worth their time and attention.

Games and experiences worth someone's time, made to be shared. The work is mostly deciding: what gets built, what's good enough, what gets cut, and what a player should never be asked to put up with.

The name

Perpolita is Latin for "thoroughly polished." It's also the name of a snail, Perpolita hammonis, smaller than a shirt button, with a shell like wet glass. My mark is that shell, drawn from the actual geometry of how one grows, and a shell grows by adding at its edge without changing shape. The ambition is the shell, not the pace.

What I believe

Mostly it comes down to respecting your time, your attention, and your money. Everything below is a way of saying that more precisely.

• Finished games. Everything I ship is complete when you buy it: an ending, a stated playtime, and no microtransactions. Nothing gets carved out of a game to sell back to you. If I ever charge for something extra, it will be a real addition, priced against its own size.
• Fair by design. My games never work against you: no dark patterns, no punishing you for the fun of it, and nothing made worse in order to sell you a way out. What that means in practice is set per game. Semblature's version is its fairness covenant.
• No one is locked out. The game is one fixed thing; the ways through it aren't. In Semblature the ending is reachable by anyone, hints are free and unlimited and never marked against you, and the harder road is there for whoever goes looking for it. There is no difficulty menu to guess at before you understand the game.
• Accessible from day one. Colour is never the only channel, motion and flashing have toggles at launch, and text scales without breaking the layout. These aren't patches; they're requirements.
• You know what you're buying. I say plainly what a game is, how long, how hard, and what it asks of you, before you pay. If a game is meant to be demanding, I say so. The failure isn't difficulty; it's surprise.
• Honest about how it's made. Where AI tools touch anything you see, or the copy that sells it, I disclose it plainly and specifically: per game, itemised, kept current. Semblature's disclosure is at semblature.com/ai.html. The copy on this site is drafted with an AI assistant and edited by me.

Now making

Semblature: A Deduction Game, a single-player deduction game for PC. Wishlist it on Steam.

Elsewhere

The devlog is the best record of what's actually happening. For anything else, get in touch.