NoSprite

Timeline

April 5, 2026. A blank text editor and a question about what HTML5 Canvas could really do. Five weeks later, Rift Drifter was live on every major platform. Scroll the line.

  1. Apr 5, 2026 Day one

    A blank text editor

    Curiosity about what HTML5 Canvas could really do. No plan, no studio, no name. Just one afternoon with a code editor open.

  2. Apr 5 – 10 Week one

    Six rough arcade demos

    Pong, Breakout, Space Invaders, Missile Command, Asteroids, Battle Zone. All built from scratch as small experiments. Pure code, no images, no audio files. Vector geometry rendered to canvas. The constraint felt right.

  3. Apr 10 The name

    NoSprite.com goes live

    All vectors. No sprites. The four most-polished demos ship as browser games. No installs, no accounts. The studio has a domain.

  4. Apr 12 The flagship

    The asteroid demo gets a name

    Of the six, the Asteroids homage felt like it could carry a full game. Chapters. Bosses. Ships. A reactive soundtrack. It picks up a working title (Void Drifter) and stops being a demo.

  5. Apr 19 Infrastructure

    Static-only stack

    The site shape locks in: pure static on Cloudflare, no server, no runtime layer. Every page renders straight from the build. Fast, cheap, and shaped exactly like the games: no runtime dependencies it doesn't need.

  6. Late April Rename

    Void Drifter → Rift Drifter

    Going mobile changed the calculus. A mobile space shooter had already shipped under the name Void Drifter, so the working title was off the table the moment Capacitor became the plan. Rift Drifter was born as a unique title the studio could own outright. Same game, new identity.

  7. Early May Native wrappers

    iOS + Android via Capacitor

    The same canvas build, wrapped for native stores. Capacitor lets the studio ship to iOS, Android, and the web from one code path. Closed testing opens on Google Play. App Store review starts.

  8. May 8 Brand voice

    Bios drafted across every platform

    All vectors. No sprites. Pure arcade. Built for everyone. Eight social platforms get unified bios. Accessibility surfaced as a brand pillar, not a checklist item.

  9. May 11 – 12 Launch

    Rift Drifter v1.0.6 ships to all four platforms

    App Store, Google Play, browser, and itch.io, all same day. Five weeks after the start. Five phased boss fights, three weapon systems, four ships, endless wave progression, reactive synthesized audio. The flagship is live.

  10. May 13 Site v2

    Rebuild starts

    The original NoSprite.com was a single index.html. The launch made that hard to scale. Astro 6 + Tailwind 4 + Cloudflare Workers static assets. Same brand, room to breathe.

  11. May 14 In the Lab

    Iron Clash is drivable

    First-person wireframe tank combat in the spirit of Battle Zone (Atari, 1980). The dev build is already playable from the Lab page. Enemies and combat land in the coming weeks. Built live, in the open.

What's next

Iron Clash continues in the Lab. Devlogs and longer-form writeups land on the Journal. Shipping notes go out via the studio's socials.