REELS · Notes from the pit
Design notes and devlogs from a one person game. One note a day, and never filler: nothing goes up without a number, a decision or a mistake worth reading.
The line between difficult and unfair is almost always a telegraph. Here is the whole warning system of REELS read out of the source: the 1.7 second poster that freezes the toll clock, the ground marker primitive written at 01:37 on 18 August 2026, the four attacks that use it with their exact delays, and the one bug class that quietly breaks every telegraph in a game.
2026-09-26
Most endless modes are the main mode with the ending taken out. REELS went the other way. Here is the whole subtraction list read out of the source, the two days in August 2026 when the mode was inverted, why the soul quota now lives only here, and the invisible clock that still runs behind a mode that shows you no clock at all.
2026-09-25
Permadeath is not a punishment, it is an accounting rule, and every roguelite answers it with a ledger. Here is the whole ledger from REELS, read out of the source: what a death deletes, what it keeps, the exact formula that pays you afterwards, the two hours on 15 August 2026 when no run could die at all, and the common charm that buys one reprieve.
2026-09-24
REELS ships seven slot machines, and each one rewrites a different rule of the draw. Here are all seven with the real numbers printed on their cards, why the four original ones shipped with the exact values they were born with on 12 August 2026, and the one place where a machine was caught making the game lie to the player.
2026-09-22
REELS runs on a fixed palette of nine swatches, drawn on 12 August 2026 and never repainted since. On 15 August I put the seven pits side by side and found seven shades of black. Here is the whole audit with its real hex values, what raising the floor cost the beasts, and a measurement I ran this morning that found one pair still failing.
2026-09-18
The near miss is the oldest trick in the slot machine industry, and REELS has one: the reel that broke your pair lights up red for 0.6 seconds, on about 52 percent of spins. Here is why I kept it, what the game prints next to it that no casino machine would ever print, and where the line between variable reward and gambling actually falls.
2026-09-17
On 17 August I gave REELS a route instead of a corridor. Three doors at every toll, the plain one always offered. Then I spent two more days fixing what the doors said: engine vocabulary the player could not read, and one door that was strictly free. Here are the four bargains with their real numbers, and why exactly one of them is allowed to stay vague.
2026-09-16
A build is not your gear list, it is the set of rules your run plays by. REELS has 61 charms for 6 slots, offers exactly 3 at a time, weights the symbol you already have by three, and charges 40 then 80 then 160 to see another hand. Here is what each of those numbers is for, for anyone meeting the word for the first time.
2026-09-15
Every toll warden in REELS switches behaviour under 50 percent health, and for months nothing on screen announced it. On 18 August I painted them red, erased eight identities, and started over. Here is the threshold that lives in one place, the two colour values that failed, and what phase two actually changes for all eleven wardens.
2026-09-14
REELS shipped with a five page tutorial where every figure checked out against the engine. It still left new players guessing how you win, because the win condition had changed four days earlier and nobody told the tutorial. Here is the audit, the iPhone SE truncation that made it worse, and the three step first descent that replaced it.
2026-09-12
REELS had 51 charms and 28 of them said times something. The machine itself, the thing the game is named after, was not a place you could build. Here is the day the spin got a vocabulary, what the six hands are, and why the blank reel stopped being dead weight.
2026-09-10
Apple lists the whole game at 8.6 MB and not one byte of it is a recording. The twelve effects, the out of tune waltz, the combat track and the five second countdown are all formulas evaluated the first time you hear them. Here is the recipe for each, with the numbers, and the three crashes it cost.
2026-09-08
The reels in REELS drop on a clock and no button spins them again. The draft between floors can be rerolled, for a price that doubles. Here is why the two rules are opposite, and the reward I got wrong twice in August.
2026-09-07
The word points at one program written in 1980 and a nine-point definition written by developers in 2008. Here is what survives of it in 2026, and how my own game scores against all nine.
2026-09-06
Eleven roguelikes on the App Store for less than five dollars, ordered by which one I would buy first, with prices, ratings and last update dates checked by hand on 5 September 2026.
2026-09-05
A slot machine is a variable reward system made ugly by the stake. Remove the money, keep the variance, and you have a combat system.
2026-09-04
The toll in REELS grows geometrically. Every time I touched the growth rate I was not balancing the game, I was replacing it.
2026-09-04
A seed only guarantees what nothing else has been allowed to touch. Here is how REELS derives its daily seed, and the two rules that keep the promise honest.
2026-09-04