Juniper Dev on YouTube is hosting her first official (and very serious) game jam. Unfortunately, the timing isn’t great for me and I’m not in a position where I can participate. So instead of competing, I’m conceptualizing the game here without actually developing it.
This is a design exercise, not a development one. I do this kind of thing somewhat regularly. It keeps the design muscle working even when I can’t commit build time. If you want the full reasoning behind that, I covered it here: How I Practice Game Design Without Stopping Development.
The theme is “spin to win.” Good theme, in my opinion. It’s open ended enough that a lot of different ideas are possible.
The Core Idea: Wheel of Fortune Meets Balatro
My best idea was a Wheel of Fortune meets Balatro.
Different zones of the wheel add, subtract, multiply, or divide your point value. You spin, the wheel lands on a zone, and your points change based on what it hit.
The Balatro angle is what happens between spins. You spend points to modify the wheel. Increase the amount a zone gains. Decrease the amount a zone takes away. Add different events like the Wheel of Fortune bankrupt space (with the name changed for obvious reasons).
The wheel is the build. How you shape it across a run is where the actual decisions live.
The Story: Spin to Sin
One judging criteria is “seriousness,” which is a running bit throughout Juniper Dev’s jam.
So I came up with a small story using it. God versus the devil, each wagering the souls of humans. The wheel adds souls to a pot. You can’t get much more serious than wagering the eternal damnation of all humanity on a wheel spin.
It also led me to a title: Spin to Sin. Clever, I think.
What Would Need More Thought
The idea is decent. But there are still things that would need to be worked out before any of it gets built. Here’s my initial list.
Modifying the Wheel
How slices get added or adjusted is the biggest challenge.
Say you start with 4 zones, each at 25%. Adding a new section makes 5 zones, each at 20%. Then expanding one particular zone “adds” a new zone, so that zone becomes 2/6 and the remaining 4 zones each sit at 1/6.
It’s not a perfect system. If there was a “reduce a zone” effect, how would I halve the distance while keeping the section count reasonable? Halving repeatedly scales the number of sections quickly.
Percentage based sections could be another option. I’m not sure how that works mathematically just yet.
You get the idea. The open problem is the how of adding and adjusting zones.
The Wager
What exactly are the points? Are they separate from souls? How does the wager system actually work? Is the wager even worth having? Would it be better to just “win” a number of souls without a wager system at all?
For simplicity of the jam specifically, I would probably skip the wager system and use an arbitrary point value.
But if I developed this further, the wager system is the more interesting direction. It gives the game urgency. It adds tension and a reason for the player to keep playing, especially with a progressing story attached.
Final Thoughts on Spin to Sin
Overall, I think this is a decent idea. I’m bummed I’m not in a better place to prototype it. At some point in the future I probably will.
It’s interesting enough that I wanted to document it and see if people would be interested. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
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