Published 2026-09-04
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.
A slot machine is one of the most refined pieces of interaction design ever built. It is also, in its usual form, a machine for taking money from people who cannot afford to lose it. Those two sentences are both true, and the second one is the reason nobody builds games out of the first.
I wanted to know what was left if you took the money out.
Strip the cabinet and the casino and you have three things: a pull, a wait, and a result you did not choose. The wait is short enough to keep you present and long enough to matter. The result is legible in a quarter of a second, so you always know whether you won before you know why.
That is a beautiful loop. The problem is not the loop, it is what it is attached to. Attach it to a bank account and you get a predatory machine. Attach it to something else, and it is just very good pacing.
In REELS the reels decide what your weapons fire at. That is the whole substitution. You are not spinning for coins, you are spinning for targets, and the spin happens while things in the pit are trying to kill you.
That one change moves the tension from before the fight to inside it. In most roguelites the randomness is resolved in a shop or a card draft, in a quiet moment where you can think. Here the draw keeps happening while you are being hunted, and a bad row is something you have to survive rather than something you can reroll.
I expected the hard problem to be balance. It was not. It was legibility.
When the reels only paid coins, a player could ignore them. When they started deciding what the weapons hit, players needed to read three symbols, understand what they meant together, and react, all in about two seconds. Most of the development time went into that: symbol shapes that read at a glance, a spin duration that is long enough to see and short enough not to annoy, and charms that change one rule each rather than five.
The charms are the part I would defend hardest. A charm never hands you more damage. It rewrites a rule of the spin: what counts as a match, what a symbol pays, what happens when the reels disagree. Numbers stack into noise. Rules stack into stories, and a run you can describe to someone afterwards is a run worth having.
There is no currency in REELS. Nothing to buy, no chips, no loot boxes, no ads, no energy. There is a free trial, what you earn in it stays yours, and one purchase unlocks the rest permanently.
That is partly ethics and partly self-interest. A game whose central image is a slot machine has to be unimpeachable about money, or the image eats the game. The first question anyone asks is whether this is gambling. The only good answer is a game where there is nothing to gamble.
If you want to see what nine seconds of it looks like, the game is on the App Store, and there is a trial.