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Time to learn a new platform! The IGT is going nowhere. Still no communication from Basic Fun! And their lack of paying developers on time… well, I’m not going there again. It’s a constant reminder to never buy a product they’re associated with! Apparently their philosophy is “Customers! Who needs em!”..  So… I’m developing for a cube now. Along with a multitude of other projects, more business side of the house than games, but thats another page! If you run a daycare, check out our new Daycare Management System, Wylari.com. So…Back in 2021… I saw a Kickstarter for this cool little cube with display screens alllll the way around it. I thought it was an interesting idea, but didn’t think much more about it at the time. Fast-forward to the other day. As usual, I was bored and looking for something new to do. I’d been designing a dungeon crawler for Android among other games, but I was already getting discouraged by the thought of releasing another game into a market where it would probably get buried and never see the light of day without dumping thousands into marketing that I don’t have. Then I came across another post about that cube. The WoWCube. And naturally, my first thought was: *Could I build the dungeon crawler for this thing?* Apparently, yes. I’ve started working on **Just One Floor Deeper**, a dungeon-crawling RPG designed specifically around the WoWCube’s 24 screens and its very unusual controls. Right now we’re working entirely with the emulator—the actual cube won’t even be delivered until later today—but so far, it’s going surprisingly well! Instead of a traditional controller, the WoWCube itself becomes the controller. You can tilt it, rotate it, tap the screens, and physically twist sections of the cube. Designing a game around those interactions instead of buttons, sticks, a mouse, or a touchscreen is a completely different experience. The basic gameplay takes some inspiration from Minesweeper. You explore a dungeon one cell at a time, with clues warning you about what may be lurking nearby. But instead of simply avoiding mines, you’re searching for monsters, treasure, events, equipment, and eventually the stairs leading deeper. Early dungeon floors are being designed around the cube’s **24 screens**, but because apparently I can’t leave well enough alone, I’m already designing much larger **96-cell dungeon floors** with rooms, corridors, walls, dead ends, and multiple paths through them. 😁 The hardware limitations have actually been one of the most interesting parts. There’s very little storage available for save data, the interface has to work across tiny individual screens, and almost everything I normally take for granted when designing a game has to be reconsidered. It’s a very different kind of development challenge. Right now I’m still in the early stages: getting the core dungeon system working, figuring out how exploration should feel, and experimenting with how much information the player should be able to see. The real test comes later today when the actual hardware shows up and I find out how well all these emulator ideas translate to holding and twisting the real thing. But I think there’s something genuinely fun here. And really… Just One Floor Deeper. What’s the worst that could happen? And now that I have a new platform, and a new project, and a ton of new ideas……. you know where that goes!

Back into it.. with a little AI assist.. I’m back to working on some game dev, but sadly it won’t be for the IGT. Basic Fun! still hasn’t made any contact with us developers, and the fate of the IGT store is still way up in the air until they make a decision. It’s sad because we have a lot of games ready to go for it, if they’d only let us publish them. I’m beginning to think they just don’t care about it… or the customers who spent $1,000 on one of these. Sorry guys! If we had a way to get our games onto the store, we absolutely would. Your support was amazing, and we really appreciate every one of you. Anyways, I’m back at the keyboard. In the meantime, I’ve developed an entire integrated website for Dungeons & Dragons with all sorts of amazing tools! If you play, check out https://thedmstoolkit.com! A lot of the tools are completely free—you just need to sign up for an account or sign in with your Patreon or Google account. There are also subscription-based AI tools that far outnumber the free ones. Since I have to pay for AI usage, that’s what the subscription helps cover. It’s coming along quite well, and we’ve already picked up a few subscribers! After seeing a post on Facebook last week, getting into a few arguments defending a guy who chose to use AI for some game art, and then playing his game for a bit, it got me wanting to revisit some old projects. One of my favorite games of all time is Best Fiends.  Not because of the story or anything—I just love the gameplay. For those who haven’t played it, but have played Match-3 games, it’s similar… except it’s a drag-to-match game. You have your board full of pieces, you select one, then drag across neighboring matching pieces to connect as many as you can before releasing them. Years ago, I started developing one called Ruby’s Rubies. Same drag-to-match style, but with a lot of extra mechanics that Best Fiends didn’t have that made mine even more fun. It was probably about 70% coded (minus the actual level design), and then… I moved on to something else. It was really a project I built just to prove to myself that I could code something like that completely by hand. I did, so the goal was accomplished. Well… it was also written in a really old version of Unity, with a bunch of assets and libraries that definitely do not want to play nicely with the latest versions anymore. So what do I do? Well, for The DM’s Toolkit, I built that almost exclusively with AI. Very little of it was actually hand-coded, and it taught me a lot—both what to do and what not to do when working with AI. Then I thought… why not put it to work in Unity? Unity has its own AI plan, but it gives you a little bit of usage and then absolutely devours credits. I already pay about $100 a month for Claude, so I found a way to link my Claude subscription into Unity. At first, I was just going to have it help fix my old code and update the outdated third-party libraries. Then I thought… “What the hell… let’s just start over from scratch and have AI build it.” So that’s exactly what I’m doing. I’m probably editing around 25% of the code by hand, while Claude is writing the other 75%, and honestly it’s doing an amazing job. All of the graphics I’m using right now are from the old version—various assets I’ve drawn myself over the years, along with some third-party packs I’ve collected. Now, as I wrap up for the night, I have a working game board. Pieces fall into place properly. Blocks, walls, cages, chains, collectible drops… even a built-in level editor. It’s coming along quite nicely. I still don’t know if I’ll actually publish this or not, but it’s been a lot of fun seeing it come together again. One thing I keep seeing from a lot of indie devs online (especially on Facebook) is, “AI sucks. Your game sucks if you use AI. Using AI means you can’t do anything yourself.” Bah. It just feels like the latest trendy bandwagon to jump on: “I hate AI.” Personally, why wouldn’t I use a tool that helps me accomplish my goals in a fraction of the time? Sure, I can code everything by hand. I’ve been doing exactly that for over 20 years. AI can do a lot of it too… and it can do it a whole lot faster. It’s funny because this reminds me of when Unity and Unreal first started becoming popular. Back then it was, “If you use Unity, you suck. You can’t do it yourself.” I’d already been doing it myself for years. It took me a while to realize that Unity wasn’t replacing my skills—it was helping me create faster instead of making me build my own engine for the seventeenth time. I see AI the same way. Besides in 10 years 90% of the games will be written with AI, because that’s just how it will be.. and not a single person will care. In 10 years someone will release a game with a note that NO AI was used and the world will go WOW! Look what he did!  like its something new and special.. AI is a tool, it’s not going anywhere. Embrace it..  Anyways, I’m going to get back to work, finish a few more things tonight, and see where I end up. But hey… I’m coding games again! Whether they ever make it to the published world or not remains to be seen…

Well… this has been fun. NOT As most people know by now, Arcade1Up was acquired by BasicFun! on December 4th or 5th. And since that acquisition? Most of us developers working on the Infinity Game Table have had almost zero contact with anyone at BasicFun!. You’d think there’d be a transition. A point of contact. A liaison. An email. Someone to answer questions. Nope. Not a word. Just absolute DEAD SILENCE. So… here’s the story. The “we finally got paid”… kind of story I’ve got no problem putting this out there. Honestly, I hope someone from BasicFun! reads this—because this whole experience has been miserable. So feel free to share this post in hopes that they will see it and someone will send me a takedown notice.. it would at least be another point of contact! lol Maybe some people at Arcade1Up had advance notice of the acquisition. If they did, it didn’t make its way to us. We found out secondhand… and then got the “it’s been great working with you guys” messages from the A1Up folks we’d been working closely with for several years now. And I just want to say this clearly: Dave, James — you guys  and your teams were amazing. THANK YOU! We pushed sometimes (ok… a lot), but that’s what we do. And you and your teams always delivered. Seriously—thank you. December → February: waiting for… anything December 5th: acquisition happens. For most of us devs, the holidays are a peak sales season. Q4 was looking solid. I was personally expecting around a $3,500 check in February. Not life-changing money—but enough to: pay some bills invest back into development maybe grab some new assets (…but mostly bills 😅) Then… nothing January comes and goes. No statements. No updates. No payments. February 4th—we finally hear something: an email asking for banking details. Awesome. After two months, we finally hear from the new company. There’s hope. Then… Nothing. Emails go unanswered. Days turn into weeks. We follow up—still nothing. By mid-February, people are getting frustrated. And honestly, how could they not be? Some of us were expecting a few thousand dollars. Some devs were expecting $10K+. That’s not small money. “Payments soon”… except not really Eventually, we get an update: I have received confirmation that the team working on the statements expects to complete them this week and send them to you. Payment will be processed shortly thereafter. Relief, right? Nope. Weeks pass. Still nothing. Still no real contact—just someone in accounts payable who clearly isn’t meant to be the point person for a bunch of frustrated developers. Honestly, I felt bad for them. They were getting flooded with emails that shouldn’t have been their responsibility. Meanwhile, the rest of the company? Dead silent. Fine. I’ll get your attention myself. At this point, I figured… okay. Let’s try something else. I pulled together about 20 email addresses from people at BasicFun! via LinkedIn and sent a message out. Surely that would get a response. It didn’t. Still silence. So I did what any developer would do… …I wrote a script. Yep. An email script that sent the same message every hour, on the hour, asking for updates. And finally— We got a response. Payments were coming. They were “finishing things up.” 60 days late… and still incomplete Fast forward to about 60 days past when payments should’ve been made… We finally get paid. Kind of. One month’s worth of sales. That’s it. We also finally get another contact at the company—again, someone in finance. Not really who we need, but at this point, we’ll take anything. Personally, I’m still missing about $1,600. For me, that’s a lot. For others?They’re missing $6,000+. And the response? Basically:They’re only handling their portion and not taking responsibility for anything prior tied to Arcade1Up. Which leaves all of us… yep… right back where we started. So where does that leave us? Honestly? We don’t know. Financially or development-wise. We don’t have: a liaison direction clarity or even the ability to publish new content We’re just… sitting here. Waiting. Trying to figure out if this whole thing is over—or if something’s eventually going to move forward. Final thoughts (for now) This has been, without question, the worst experience I’ve had dealing with a company like this. The lack of communication.The delays in payment.The complete absence of structure or support. It’s been rough. But i will give them props for one thing. The lack of communication has been impressively consistent! And as much as I hate to say it, right now—I’m not expecting things to improve anytime soon. If anything changes, I’ll update this. Until then… We’re back to waiting. And silence. And more silence.. And expecting that amazing lack of communication! Again.

So, where have we been? Yeah… it’s been a while. About nine months. And I know that’s a long stretch without updates, so let’s just be straight about it. As most of you have probably seen, Arcade1Up was acquired by Basic Fun!. Normally, that kind of change is exciting — new leadership, new direction, new opportunities. Right now though, we’re in a bit of a holding pattern. Since the transition, those of us developing for the IGT/B platform haven’t had a way to publish new content, and communication has been minimal at best. We don’t yet have any clear contacts at Basic Fun! or any real guidance on what the future looks like for third-party developers, just silence. So at the moment, everything is paused. But here’s the part I think people deserve to know: The projects I’ve been working on over the past year? They weren’t delayed. They weren’t abandoned. They were finished — and ready to release. They didn’t go live because they weren’t approved for publishing. Not due to bugs or broken builds — just internal decisions that didn’t go our way or are not agreed with. But that’s a whole different story and I raised a stink, trust me.  That’s been the reality behind the silence. Not a lack of progress — just a lack of a path forward. And yeah, that’s been frustrating. Extremely frustrating. Because I know what’s sitting there. I know the time, effort, and care that went into those games — mine and others’ — and I know they would have been a great addition to the platform. The upside is this: Those projects are still ready to go and if Basic Fun! decides to open things back up and work with third-party developers, I won’t be starting from scratch. I’ll be ready to move immediately. No long wait. No “coming soon.” Just content that’s already been built and is waiting for the green light. Because despite everything, I still believe in the IGT/B. It’s genuinely fun, with a lot of untapped potential — both for developers and for players. I’m hopeful the new ownership sees that and chooses to invest in it. So yeah — things are uncertain right now. But they’re also… close. I hope. Closer than they might seem from the outside. If the door opens, we’re ready. Thanks for sticking through the quiet stretch. I’ll share more as soon as there’s something real to say.

So, after a hiatus So, after a hiatus for a couple months, work is swiftly progressing. I just needed time away, do my job job and forget game dev for a bit. Things and decisions weigh you down and impact you greatly, and sometimes you just have to escape. But, that time is over! Progress on the mobile controller for Acros has been moving along quite fast and it’s almost done. I’ve replicated most of the functionality from in-game to JavaScript to work with the webpage that is the controller. By the time the game is done, it will be playable by up to 8 players, 4 using the table and 4 more using mobile devices. You’ll be able to play the entire game from your phone with only a couple interactions on the table to actually start the game, and when it ends. Theres still a tiny bit left, like the voting routine and then showing some kind of game over screen on the mobile device, but that’s only a couple days part time work. Once the voting is done, the game should be completely playable. So far avatar and name selection are in, displaying the round number, the generated acronym, getting the players answer with a lot of validations taking place, and the timer… That was fun, but I managed to get the timer on the mobile controller almost perfectly synced with the timer on the table. It may be like .3 seconds off, but it looks great!  I’m still tweaking things, I don’t like the acronyms it generates, and I’ve been tweaking those to make it a little more friendly… plenty of time for that though. There’s still a lot to do on the game itself, all the menus, title screen tweaks, house rules, in game pause?! Not sure how on earth I’m going to manage that one since I’d have to pause everything, even the mobile controllers… I’ll have to figure something out though. I need to see if there is a way to “pause” an interval in JS.. if I can do that it will make it a lot easier to do. A quick search provides nothing other than saying you can’t. I may just have to only allow the pause to be hit at specific times, anytime a timer isn’t running. Not perfect, because you may still have to finish your turn out entering an answer and voting.. or ya know, just walk away and let the others continue. Oh well.. figure that out later. Alright, I suppose it’s time to get back to busy!

The Time Has Come… The time has come, the replacement laptop is here, all the backups (mostly) have been restored, and what feels like hundreds of applications are reinstalled and set up. The worst part was after stealing my wife’s laptop, we realized it too was having some serious overheating issues. They sent a tech to the house, replaced the heatsinks and still ended up having to ship it in to have more repair work done. On the bright side, both laptops are now working flawlessly the way they should have from the beginning!   Unfortunately, my real job has been keeping me extremely tied down lately so not a lot of progress has been made, however I was able to get back to work on ACROS: Battle of the Wits!   The premise is simple, and (I love this part) fully voiced over by a voice some people may recognize from television; all thanks to some AI genius and people donating their voice models to be used by developers like me. The game will create a random acronym, and a category. You, the player, must decide on what that acronym stands for. Enter your answer and then wait on everyone else to finish, then vote on your favorite!   In ACROS, you can play directly on the table or scan a QR code to use your phone as the controller. The game itself is mostly done (except for options menus, etc.), it’s the mobile controller aspect that’s been taking the longest time to develop. I ran into issues with the web server asset I was using within Unity and had to reach out to its developers for some assistance. Now that we have it configured, it’s a matter of creating all of the different game scenes in an HTML format that your phone can send back to the game table. In the end, it will be a seamless integration, and this should end up as a great party game!   So far most of the basics have been implemented and I’m currently working on player customization through the webpage allowing you to enter your name and select your avatar. The next step is a simple waiting screen for the game to begin. Displaying the acronym is already done and animated, then it’s a matter of building out the logic and checks and balances to allow you to enter your response and vote on other players’ responses. Should be easy enough, it was the background processes that took extra time, sending messages back and forth between multiple phones and the table.   Overall things are progressing nicely, and this should be shaping up for a release to the testers here in the near future!!!

Stuck Waiting… Still.. So I Stole It! Waiting is one of the things I hate the most. And when the computer dies, and I have to wait on a replacement, it’s just a recipe for disaster. So far I have been physically without a computer now for close to 2 weeks..   Sure, I picked up a chromebook with an I3, but it’s no where near a replacement. The best it was good for is web browsing and some xbox cloud gaming. On the bright side, I did manage to complete Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2.. Amazing game even if the story has been done before.. Definitely recommend it! So when I bought my Alienware, (the last dell/alienware I will ever buy), I also bought the wife one. Not as powerful, but still a damn nice machine.. and it sits on her desk in a pink plaid wrap, barely getting used mored than once a week. Today, Dell finallllllly came up with a replacement system and sent me the info.. April 7th..   ANOTHER TWO WEEKS… I’m already going insane and the boredom is killing me.. So I stole hers… Currently getting it set up with the stuff I need, and had to open it up and install more ram (16gb was all it had!!!!!).. So now at least I can mess around with some stuff again.. Finally!   Have fun, I’m going to finish dinner and then finish installing packages so I can get busy!

Stuck Waiting… Well, work has been put to a dramatic halt lately. I actually have developed three more games that are ready for release, but the powers that be aren’t sure of them right now, and so they sit on hold. They may still see the light of day eventually, only time will tell I guess. It’s extraordinarily frustrating to put that much time (and not to mention COST) into developing something for it to end up sitting on a virtual shelf, especially when you have an audience that’s calling out for more games to be added and for some more variety.  I see both sides of the argument, certain groups want to curate to make sure a market doesn’t get saturated in crap, and at the same time, that causes market stagnation with nothing new coming out causing player/user attrition because of that curation. In my opinion it just harms the overall reputation / view of a market. As long as certain requirements are met (keeping the garbage where it belongs), it should be released. Let the players decide to hate it or love it. If you’re going to spend dollars on people overseeing testing and more, and have already spent that money, why not just let it go out and recoup even a tiny amount of the cost, even if sales aren’t the greatest. The downside to this, is several ideas I was going to work on have now been put on hold because I no longer have the confidence that they will be seen as unique titles and not compared to other things that look similar, and I can not sink the time and money into something that may just get rejected. It’s not worth it, especially for someone like me that does this in their spare time. Sure if I was a larger studio with money to spare, it wouldn’t be an issue. But when I sink even $500 into a project that gets rejected, I’m never going to see that money again. It may not seem like a lot of money to some people, but to me that’s a month and half of car payments, so it’s an eye opener and makes you think twice about doing anything else. But this is a rant I could go on for days about, so I’m just going to shut up now. In the meantime I have a ton of ideas but nothing to develop them on. My lovely little alienware laptop I spent a small fortune on is sitting in a dell repair center currently because of constant crashing, lockups and worse problems. I sunk about $600 into it myself trying to correct the issues, new SSD, new ram, nothing was working (but I got some nice upgrades! 8tb of disk space!!!).. When the cpu cores are reaching 212F while sitting at idle, you have issues.. Thankfully it was still fully under warranty. I know they’ve already replaced the motherboard, they won’t tell me yet what else they’ve done. My guess is the overheating caused damage to other components..  Supposedly they should be done with it by the 20th, then shipping time back to me. Hate the waiting game especially when you spend 3k on a device, you kind of expect it to work without issue.  In the meantime, have several new ideas that should be a lot of fun, just have to wait to start development. I did pick up a chromebook with an Intel I3 in it, and got Unity installed on it, but it’s slow and difficult to work with. Maybe if I get really bored in the next week or so I’ll try messing with it. Until then, new stuff is in the works.. Just have to wait…

First off… So first, the Dice Games Megapack was finished and released to QA right before new years eve, so that one is sitting with the QA team awaiting the beta testers. Included are seven different dice games for up to 6 players, with AI players for each one. Shortly thereafter, I saw another game on Amazon.com called Jinx. It involved rolling dice and placing pieces on a grid to line up matches. Cool concept, but it needed something a bit more so that turned into BackLash! I worked a few too many evenings and nights, but I started this one on New Year’s Day and just sent it to QA early this morning. For such a short development cycle, it’s a rich but simple game. The concept remained the same, placing pieces on a grid to make a match, but was amped up with different board spaces that provide boons and penalties. In this game, to further differentiate it, I even added an option to add a third die to the rolls, if you control one of the boards rune spaces. Just to add to the replayability we added a couple of game modes to allow for a shorter game instead of the standard multi-stage playstyle. This one was definitely the quickest work I have done but doesn’t lack in design. All the bells and whistles and polish are there, like I said, I just spent way too many evenings and late nights (a 4am stopping point rings a bell) away from the family to get this one done. It had me excited, it was fun and challenging, and I wanted to finish it so I can share it with the world! Next Up… Next up will be looking at a couple more games to clone, including an interesting strategy game called Quorridor and the ever-popular Phase 10. The table needs these, and I aim to provide!