Vaporware EX

It's 199X. Lose the suit, put on a hoodie, and ship something great.

Vaporware EX is a comfy 16-bit game dev simulator full of neon-infused nostalgia. It isn't about running a games empire. It's about the people who actually make the games. Assemble your team of four developers, craft games one feature at a time, squash bugs before the publisher notices, and climb from your first game jam win to Game of the Century. It's a love letter to a time when everything still had to fit on a cartridge.

There are no genre checklists here. You build every game as a stack of features: start with the foundations, choose your core mechanics, fill their side slots, and keep going until the deadline runs out. Mix feature packs to make hybrids nobody's tried yet. Want an edutainment racer with a save system and RPG levelling? Nobody's stopping you. Find one of 26 hidden combos and you get bonus content.

Every feature has a chance of breaking something. Track down bugs in a fast minigame that looks different for each discipline: code, art, sound and design. Or ship with them and hope the reviewers don't notice. (They notice.)

Your engine carries over from game to game. Research era-appropriate tech across Graphics, Audio, AI and Gameplay, from sprite layering to A* navigation. Buy the studio hardware that unlocks the next breakthrough. A better engine raises the ceiling on what every future game can be.

Name your programmer, designer, artist and sound designer, and give them a look. As they ship games, they climb a five-tier career ladder from Junior to Director, picking up perks and specializations along the way.

Every game needs a publisher, and every publisher has quirks: Movie Tie-In Houses, Shareware Distributors, a Superstitious Exec or two. Negotiate the content you'll promise, the deadline and the revenue split, then live with the consequences when the launch report comes in.

Win 12 escalating awards, from Regional Game Jam Winner to Game of the Century. Each one opens new doors: new feature packs, AA and AAA publishers, and eventually the freedom to publish your games yourself.

• Fully gamepad compatible. Be the game developer you were always destined to be, whether from your desk or comfy on the couch.

• Jam out! A fully stocked soundtrack of vaporwave and future funk, lovingly provided by Nightfall Collective.

• Discover hidden combos. Some mechanics work better together, and finding the right pairings earns your game bonus content.

• Take some time to reflect. Every release comes with a post-mortem and launch report showing exactly what you got right, and what could be better.

Vaporware EX is made by Seraphine Software, a one-person studio founded by a former AAA developer who worked on Age of Empires IV, Avowed, Grounded, The Outer Worlds 2 and Prison Architect.