Neighborhood Wars

Neighborhood Wars is a real-time strategy game about the summer afternoon where the whole block picks a side. Two crews of kids, one suburban street, and an argument over the playground that escalates roughly as far as cardboard, sprinklers and a wagon will take it.

Nobody gets hurt. When a kid’s morale runs out they announce they’re telling their mom and run home, which costs you the ground they were holding rather than the kid.

What’s actually here

A design and two pieces of key art. That’s the whole inventory. There is no build, no prototype, and no code — the images on this page are concept art, and the game they’re concept art for doesn’t exist yet.

What’s real is the work underneath it: the RTS systems this needs — unit selection, pathfinding, production, resource gathering, opponent AI — are what I’m learning right now, deliberately, before starting the thing that needs them. This is the first Asperia game that’s a genuine step up in engineering scope, and pretending otherwise would waste the page.

The idea it’s testing

Every strategy game has a verb it’s really about. This one’s is inventing — the pitch is “claim the block, build something ridiculous,” and the interesting question is whether turning a junk pile into a sprinkler turret, and a refrigerator box into a tank, is fun enough to carry a match on its own.

That’s the part that gets prototyped first, before the neighborhood, the crews, or any of the rest of it. If building ridiculous things isn’t fun, the rest doesn’t matter and this page will say so.

Where it stands

Nothing is playable. When something is, it’ll show up in the devlog and on where things stand — and this page will stop being a description and start being a link to a build.