v4v · operator notes

who's writing this

op is one guy. that's me. i make the game, i made the satire site you came in from, i'm typing this. asleepius games is the company name. there is no studio. there is no team. just op, the game, and a website that pretends to be a corporation so people will look at the game.

op is not good at marketing and would like nobody to ever expect that to change. that's not a bit, it's just the situation. the website is the marketing. the page you're on now is not the marketing. these are different things on purpose.

about your expectations, real quick

you came in from a corporate parody site that was loud and animated and yelling things at you. that builds up a reaction in the head. you scroll over here and your head wants the next thing to be the punchline, or the reveal, or the part where it turns out the game is some genre-defining whatever and the satire was building up to that.

it isn't. that would be op doing the same thing he just made fun of, and op noticed that's a really easy hole to fall into, so he is choosing not to.

the remedy is: this page is going to be flat. there are no headlines. nothing here is "first ever" or "never before seen" or "redefining the genre." the game is a game. it has things in it. some of those things are unusual. op is not going to tell you they're unusual because if he does that you'll get insecure about whether he's still doing the bit. he's not. he's just listing what's in the game.

if that sounds boring, leave. that's fine. op didn't make this for everyone. op made this for the kind of person who reads through a list of mechanics and goes "huh, ok" and then tries the demo. if you're not that person, no hard feelings, the door's right there.

the marketing situation, kept short

solo dev. no marketing budget. game is mid by every flashy metric and op knows it. there is no version of the world where op makes a normal trailer and a normal post and the game finds the people who'd actually like it. that path is closed. op tried.

what op did instead is build a satirical company called vibratur and use it as bait. people land on vibratur because it's loud and absurd, they laugh or get annoyed or both, and then a small subset of them find their way over here. that's the whole funnel. there isn't more to it.

op is aware this is dumb. it's just what was available.

v4v — what op is actually promising at the wallet

v4v stands for value for value. the short version is: the marketing on the other side of this site uses every cheap trick op could think of to get your eyeballs. this side, the side where you might give op money, uses zero tricks. that's the whole arrangement.

op didn't pick this because it's ethical. op picked it because he was tired of having to decide, every minute of every day, whether the next thing he posted online was honest or a tactic. drawing a line at the wallet was the only way he could stop having that argument with himself. it's a personal line. it's not a moral one. other people draw it elsewhere. fine.

these are the rules every product on the v4v registry follows. op tried to keep them short. they got slightly longer.

1. nothing is sold before it's made. if it's not done, it's not on the registry. pre-orders allowed only on platforms whose pre-order policy is just "there's a refund button" (currently steam).
2. no subscriptions. ever. one purchase, one product. you keep it.
3. no DLC, no season passes, no upsells in checkout. when you pay, you stop paying. future content, if any, is included or it isn't shipped.
4. total price stated upfront. nothing "starts at." nothing has tiers. the price you see is the price.
5. what it isn't is on the page. limitations are listed next to the buy button, in plain language. not buried in a faq.
6. no urgency manipulation in op's voice. no countdowns, no "only 3 left," no fake scarcity. storefront sales (steam discounts, etc.) are fine because the discount is real and op didn't frame it.
7. refunds, no questions. steam's standard refund policy on the game. for the wallpaper pack, email op and ask for $2 back, op sends $2 back. op won't ask why.
8. no data harvested for marketing. no email list, no tracking pixel, no retargeting, no "customer journey." you bought a thing, you have the thing, that's the relationship.

if op ever breaks any of these, please call him on it in public. op would rather be embarrassed in public than quietly drift.

the game — what's actually in it

this is the part the rest of the page exists to lead up to. the game is called sky scaffold. it's a 2d pixel-art game, a hybrid of industrial management, auto-resolved card combat, and dispatch / expedition logistics. you build a small outpost on the edge of an inhabited region of space and try not to die. the genre tone is beige dystopia with cosmic horror edges. it is slow.

below is a flat list of what's in the game. it's not curated for excitement. some of these are unusual, some aren't. op isn't going to mark which is which.

build / produce loop

you place buildings, route conveyors, run production chains. assemblers consume inputs and emit outputs. power and storage gate everything. if you don't have the inputs, things stop. that's the antagonist most of the time.

combat is auto-resolved with cards

you don't fight in real time. you set up a deck of battle cards before the encounter, the encounter resolves itself, you watch the result and adjust the deck. there are ship cards, support cards, and special-effect cards. it shares assets with the rest of the game but is a separate system from transport ships.

defense is separate from exploration

planet defense uses autoturrets you placed earlier and triggers when an invasion event fires. exploration uses a sector sweep system with fleet management. these are two different subsystems and they don't share much beyond the auto-battle resolver.

placing a comms relay starts an invasion timer

the comms relay is how you connect to the wider information network in the game (the dataome). once you place it, the larger systems out there know where you are. defense isn't the default state. defense is something you provoke.

no dialogue trees

npcs don't speak in branching choice menus. interaction goes through a 4x4 token grid. rows are categories like respect / wealth / hostility / relationship. each cell is a token type — gossip, threat, favor, blackmail, alliance, mercy, sixteen total. you offer one or more tokens and request one or more tokens in return. the npc accepts, rejects, or counter-offers based on personality and history.

npcs have personalities and remember things

each persistent npc has trait values (greed, loyalty, pragmatism, risk tolerance, vindictiveness, plus standard big-five-style axes) and a tree of past interactions with you. they remember what you offered, who else they heard about it from, and how it ended. gossip propagates between npcs.

npcs belong to overlapping factions

corporations, unions, ideological factions, families, gangs, religious orders, professional guilds, neighborhood collectives, species-aligned groups, class strata. one npc can be in several at once with different loyalty levels. factions disagree with each other. you don't get told their philosophies up front. you find out by paying attention.

document creation as gameplay

there's a document editor inside the game. you fill out templates (memos, reports, proposals, directives, announcements, personal notes) using tokens you've collected. the documents themselves become tokens for future social interactions. an npc shown a memo evaluates it and updates their behavior. documents propagate. you can manipulate information.

narrative is hidden by default

there is no quest log. there is no "talk to this person to start the next chapter" handhold. the larger story is delivered through rare items, found documents, npc gossip, and faction interactions. you have to put it together yourself. some of it is hostile, in the sense that the world isn't necessarily on your side.

the phantom narrative engine

some of the lore content and npc text is generated by a private ai system op runs on his own hardware. it pulls from a curated lore vault. the engine produces variations and updates that get pushed to the game over time. it is not a subscription. you don't pay for it. it's included with the game and stops costing you anything once you own the game. op runs it, op pays for the electricity, op shuts it off if it stops being useful. it does not collect data on you. the only thing it sees is in-game requests.

friction is in the interface on purpose

some interactions in this game are intentionally a little awkward. drag a document across the desktop overlay to read it. tap a phone to send a trade. open a sub-window to do a sub-thing. op understands this is the opposite of how productivity software is supposed to work. that's the point. friction in a game is texture, not failure. (the satire site jokes about "friction-as-a-service." in software that's bad. in games it's design. they aren't the same and op isn't going to pretend they are.)

aesthetic

pixel art. muted palette, mostly beige and grey. ui is presented as a faux desktop overlay. sound is sparse. pacing is slow. you will not be hyped at any point. it's not designed for hype.

scale

solo dev, two months from release at the time of writing. some of the systems above are fully in. some are partial. what's listed in the v4v registry on release day is what's in the game on release day. anything described here that doesn't make it in is op's responsibility to take off the page.

that's most of it. there is more, but the more is either small (sub-systems of the above) or speculative (op has it half-built and isn't going to claim it until it's done). this is a list, not a pitch. if any of it sounded interesting, the steam page is linked below. if not, no problem.

last thing

op doesn't want to become a marketing strategist. op doesn't want to learn the funnel. op doesn't want to optimize the cohort. that whole layer of activity is something other people are good at and op respects them for it but it's just not the life op wants to live. so op built a parody site, wrote down the rules, listed the features, and that's the marketing department.

op might be wrong about all of this. it's possible op just rationalized not doing the work. op is open to that being the answer. either way, the page exists, the game exists, and you've now read the one document that doesn't lie about either.

thanks for reading this far. honestly didn't expect you to.