Nicole P.

It started with Pleroma, which I never really marketed and had a great time building anyway. Then came Fruit Hut Tycoon, and then I branched out into what became Kinetic Flux Games, where I started working on harder puzzle mechanics and the kind of games I actually wanted to play.

At some point I looked at what I’d built and thought, ok, now where do people actually go to play these? I looked at the old faithfuls, I’m sure you’ve come across a few of them yourself, and none of them felt like a place I’d want to call home. I’d also heard about developers having trouble getting paid, AI-made games getting rejected outright, and catalogs so large that nothing in them surfaces what players actually rated highly.

So I built spiced.gg.

How I got here

I spent over 20 years in the corporate world, building technologies in data centers and then in the cloud. Eventually I decided to leave the rat race and go back to exploring some of the ideas that had been rattling around in my head for years. I wanted to work on something that actually mattered in my day to day, so I set out to build an app that helps race event organizers herd all the cats on race day.

That led to a partnership building something similar. We got some real traction, but our paces on it didn’t quite match, and while I waited for that to sort itself out, my drive to keep building didn’t go anywhere. So I explored a few other ideas, and one of them was a browser game.

How I think about building

I’d rather ship something coherent than ship something fast and patch it later, and I’d rather take longer to launch a feature than launch a half version of it and call it “v1”. The parts that are hard to change once people are relying on them get settled before they ship, not after.

Games I actually love

Guild Wars 2. Last Chaos. Pokémon Go. Palworld. The legacy Final Fantasy series. Breath of the Wild. Animal Crossing. Honestly, Nintendo anything.

Away from the keyboard

When I am not banging away at the keyboard making and playing games, you can find me in the garden, measuring chemicals for my indoor hydroponics and even occasionally swinging my BRZ around a tight turn on the RallyCross course.