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Five Years in the Apocalypse
August 11, 2026
On August 11th, 2021, I uploaded version 0.1.0 of APOCALYPSE FRAME to itch.io.
I had been working on a fully different game when someone tipped me off to LUMEN (in no small part because of the tag-based design1 on top of very fast tactics). I had been trying to finally cross Xenoblade Chronicles X off of my list that summer and writing a game heavily inspired by it seemed like a fun little thing to do to take a break so I spent a month or so writing it.
As someone living in the USA in early-mid 2021, for some reason I was thinking a lot about how when governments are content to let obvious, naked problems fester and hope that things go back to normal without doing anything, they leave themselves vulnerable to shithead opportunists who are more than happy to take drastic, horrific action in pursuit of esoteric goals and personal status. Anyway, in light of that antiquated, unfamiliar idea2, I slapped together something that was in many ways an anxious, frustrated scream and a hope for something better. Maybe not a realistic one, but at least a cathartic one. Or something.
After playing one or two test sessions, I more or less permanently shelved the other game I was writing, because APOCALYPSE FRAME hit so much better and provided so much more juice relative to the squeeze. Soon I’d be constantly iterating on it. That original version was heavily indebted to core LUMEN and especially the original LIGHT because I hadn’t yet figured out that adherence to SRDs was a fake idea and you can actually just write anything, but especially as I dug more into Armored Core for inspiration on how to make things feel more “mech”-ish, it started to diverge hard in several key ways. A conversation with a (now unfortunately departed) friend about what would make it a “normal game” instead of a “temporary game” gave me some ideas and inspiration points (especially XCOM) that would establish the overarching game loops that distinguish it a lot from its peers. I pushed those ideas in a few different directions and over time, as I dropped some ideas/plans/etc and picked up some others, the game really came into its own. It even got a cover once I figured out how to mess around with stock images in GIMP and bought a solid font for it! Has to be the best 20 bucks or so I ever spent.
I’ve been consistently surprised by positive the response to it was - obviously I didn’t think it was bad but even from the getgo it did surprisingly well relative to the experiences some folks have related. I’m still a little taken aback by its continued presence in sales. A few lucky media appearances, a few appearances in key bundles, and it was well and truly off to the races, even before its mid-2022 expansion release, The Infected World; early 2023 v1.0 release; and early 2024 physical release. Especially looking back from 2026 it seems unreal that a game that wasn’t properly crowdfunded, eventually had all of 3 (that’s right, only three, the cover and two interior, go through the book and count ’em) illustrations, borderline looks like it could have been laid out in MS word, and didn’t have a physical release for a few years would hit as well as it did3. So if you contributed to that, I appreciate that very much. I like to think it pushes against a lot of the accepted wisdom of what you “need” to do for something to succeed.
5 years is a long time. Longer than some folks’ tenure in the scene, which has been a weird thing to find out over time. Now, obviously I’ve sharpened quite a bit as a game designer, writer, and visual designer since v1.0’s release, much less v0.1.0. So over time I’ve always been leery about how it would continue to hold up - there’s a few key things about it I’d do differently, were I to make it now, and LUMEN itself has marched right on in the meantime to 2.0 and even 3.0. To this day I occasionally hear about people playing it for the first time and having a great time, though, and that always makes me very happy. My hope is that in the future I can provide a version of it that fully realizes what I thought the game could be when I first saw it play out for the first time4, but I’m also more than happy to find out that it still works for folks who haven’t been staring into the abyss.
Thanks for 5 years, Aces. May we all claim a better future in 5 more, and 5 more, and 5 more.
This is consistently funny to me in hindsight because it’s the thing I’m most critical of in the game’s design. ↩︎
Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Resemblance to actual events or places is coincidental. ↩︎
As of this post, ~525 people have bought the digital base game directly (which is to say, buying the game through its page and not a bundle) across itch and DTRPG combined. If you’re among those people, thank you very much. The Infected World and Ballad of Industrial Gods also did pretty well: to give you some idea, they’ve sold a number of copies online roughly equivalent to Valiant Horizon (160ish) and NULL_SPACE (100ish), respectively. If I were a smarter person I’d be milking this thing to the gills. ↩︎
This is my way of saying that 2nd edition is in development. More details to follow in the weeks to come. ↩︎