Oh, cool. I probably let my bad prior experience with alien taint me and didn’t even try manually pulling stuff out of the .deb file. 
That might’ve been a little less trouble, but at least I now know how things hang together.
Because I’ve started to like Aseprite at least enough to figure out the scripting model, I have a related question:
If I purchase it and extract it from the deb as you describe, does the install need to live in some specific place in order for updates to work? /usr isn’t going to wear well on my laptop. I would probably just take all the directories from usr in the .deb's archive and put them under $HOME/.local by default. Will that break updates?
Thank you again for making this and putting it out here so openly.