*blows dust* Good Lord There's So Many Moths In Here

Good afternoon folks!

First of all, sorry I kind of dipped for... checks notes... the entire year, but it's been a bit of a rough one. I won't get into all that, but suffice it to say it has been a year focused more on survival than on creativity & forward momentum.

I'm now in a better place to get back up on the horse, so to speak, & as such I'm going to attempt to be better at writing up my thoughts & progress here again, at least monthly, ideally weekly, but that will all depend on energy levels & actual progress achieved.

I've been splitting my time recently between game development & audiobook narration - the latter proving to be quite a burgeoning market, so long as you're willing to work for potentially nothing. It's a fun gig & I've got two books out already that you can check out here and here should you be so inclined. I've also got one more that's just pending approval & a further 9 yet to be read, so plenty to keep me busy, which honestly is about as important as the potential earnings. I haven't done so yet, but I'll likely also add a page to this site for my audiobook/VO stuff too, rather than starting up a whole other website just for that. Stuff can be two things, after all. Keep an eye out if you're at all interested in hearing about that!

Now that I've managed to sink my teeth into development again, I've dredged up one of my older ideas, spruced it up a little & honestly think it could be something of a winner. Some of you may be familiar with the game Luck Be A Landlord - a very simple game of deckbuilding within a slot machine. Essentially, you have to pay your rent via a slot machine in your flat, & every time you spin, you get to add another symbol. The symbols then form synergies & earn you more money. Your task is then to ensure you earn enough money to pay your rent before the time limit & your eventual eviction.

The ending to the game, such as it is, has you turn the slot machine on your landlord somehow & murder them, thus granting you ownership of your flat, due to some in-universe duelling property laws, no doubt. That aspect of the game is what interested me most with regard to making my own & so many months ago I made a very tiny prototype to see how easy it is to make a slot machine mechanic. That then sat there ignored until about last week when I pulled it up & breathed a bit more life into it.

The idea for my game, which at present I'm calling SlotCrawler, is similar to LBAL, in that you have a weird, magical slot machine, however in my case the slot machine is full of knives & death.

You explore a dungeon, murder its inhabitants, loot their corpses & treasure chests, then fight a boss & descend further. Fairly simple concept, but also a pretty good base to build a reasonably challenging roguelite from. The plan is to have 4 levels per run, each with its own boss, as well as somewhere in the region of 5 playable 'classes' to choose from, such as Paladin, Rogue, Warlock etc. Each of these will then have a different selection of tokens in their machine to roll around, & much like LBAL, these tokens will synergise & interact with each other in order to hurt, heal, shield or explode, depending on the types. Your job is to build a 'deck' of symbols that work well together & can see you through the difficult boss fights & beat your arch nemesis on the final level.

Much like a lot of my ideas - if I can get it to play & feel how it plays & feels in my head, I'll be laughing, but that is the struggle of development!

Enjoy a little sneak peak below!