AN AUTO-RICKSHAW GAME · CHENNAI
PRESS START
Meter Down is a driving game about fares, not lap times. Pick up Selvi at Thiruvanmiyur, agree a price in three seconds, and get her to T. Nagar through traffic, rain and one cow who will not move. A shift is twelve minutes. There are sixty of them.
There is no map screen. The route is one street, and Meera drew all of it: 380 pixels from the Thiruvanmiyur signal to Ranganathan Street, roughly thirty-seven metres to a pixel.
DRAG THE STRIP
SIDEWAYS
CABINET 1 OF 3
Highest fare taken in one twelve-minute shift, from 61,400 shifts driven in the beta this week.
Week to 30 August. The board splits by city, and Chennai has held the top two since June.INSERT COIN
CABINET 2 OF 3
CABINET 3 OF 3
Made in forty-eight hours for a jam at IIT Madras, kept free ever since. Arjun still gets mail from teachers in Salem who use it to explain symmetry, which is not what it was for and is better than what it was for.
Five years, one palette per sprite, nothing above 26 pixels wide. Meera Krishnan draws every character and prop in all three games on a 2015 ThinkPad in Aseprite. The auto took eleven days and forty-one frames; the chappal took an afternoon.
SHEET 04
NEON ARCADE STUDIOS
UPDATED 28 AUG 2026
Neon Arcade started in 2021 when Arjun quit a Bengaluru studio to make a game about the auto ride he took to work every day. Kolam was a jam entry. Kaapi Break paid the rent. Meter Down is the one the whole team joined for.
We make small games with a lot of Chennai in them, for people who have never been and people who never left. Everything is drawn one pixel at a time by Meera, and every track is Divya's. The studio is a Discord of 4,100 people who test builds on Thursday nights.
Shown at IGDC Hyderabad 2025, Best in Show · Day of the Devs, June 2026 · BitSummit Kyoto 2026 · Steam Next Fest, October 2026
Posted to the Discord first, every other Thursday.
Six frames. He stops you at Nandanam and reads the meter, which testers hate, correctly.
Nithya and four volunteers from the Discord finished 6,200 lines in six weeks. The signboards were the hard part.
Three seconds, one dial, no menus. Playtesters in Coimbatore finally stopped asking what to press.
Sathya rewrote the signboard renderer. Ranganathan Street was the last stretch under 60.
Lakshmi no longer despawns when you honk. She was never supposed to.
Wishlists decide whether Steam shows us to anyone. Yours is worth more than you think.