Wheel of Misfortune Now Feels Like a Roguelike

Back in May we brought Wheel of Misfortune to GamerFest in Dublin. It was, to put it kindly, not our crowd. The room was there for shooters, racing games, and Minecraft (so much Minecraft), and a word-puzzle game show set somewhere south of purgatory was a hard sell next to all that. But a handful of people sat down, played a round, and then played another one. A few of them followed us into the Discord afterwards and have been waiting patiently for news ever since.

This one’s for you. Sorry it took a while.

A quick reminder

Wheel of Misfortune is a roguelike game show. You spin the wheel, guess letters, and solve the puzzle on the board, and between rounds you spend what you’ve earned in the shop on artifacts, pointers, and wheel mods that change how the wheel pays out. Every run is a different build, and every build breaks the game in a slightly different way.

What was missing

The version we demoed at GamerFest worked. You spun, you guessed, you got points, you bought things. But when a spin paid out, the number just sort of… appeared. You trusted that your items had done something, and you had to take our word for it.

That’s fine for a game show. It’s not fine for a roguelike. Half the fun of a roguelike is watching your build go off–the moment in Balatro where the jokers fire one after another and the score keeps climbing past anything you thought was reasonable. If you can’t see the chain, you can’t feel clever about building it.

Watching your build work

So that’s what the last few months have mostly been about. When the wheel lands now, the game walks you through the score step by step: the wedge, then every item that touched it, in order, each one adding or multiplying on top of the last. If you’re running more than one pointer (yes, you can do that now), each pointer gets its own lines in the breakdown, and the item that just contributed pulses in your inventory so you know exactly who to thank.

And when it all lines up, it’s extremely satisfying. Land on a gold wedge, Birds of a Feather scores every gold wedge in that run, Twice is Nice scores the whole thing again, and a Pride mod on the wedge doubles its value for good so it’s even bigger next time. You watch the numbers stack up and you think “I did that.” That’s the feeling we were chasing, and it’s finally there.

A few new toys

We’ve added a lot, and I’m not going to list all of it (partly because there’s too much, and partly because some of it should be a surprise). A few favourites:

• Midas Touch – a pointer that turns whatever wedge it lands on gold (one of the three colours that wedges can be). Useful if your build likes gold. Your build probably likes gold.
• Shifter – after a spin, you get to nudge the wheel one wedge either way. Once per spin. Anyone who’s ever shouted at the TV because the wheel stopped one click short will understand why this exists.
• Wrath – one of seven wheel mods based on the Seven Deadly Sins. Wrath destroys both neighbouring wedges and scores their value. I’ll write more about the Sins in their own post, as it’s one of the design areas we’re proudest of.

1,539 answers

The other big change is the puzzles themselves. The GamerFest build had 523 answers across 6 categories, which is a lot of answers but the lack of variety in the categories was kinda wearing and many of the answers were hard to take a guess at. It now has 1,539 answers across 28 categories–80s movies, 90s movies, chart hits, food and drink, countries and capitals, and a lot more besides.

The interesting lesson from that one: every “sensible” rule we made up to keep the answers tidy (a minimum length here, a maximum word count there) quietly cut some of the best answers from the list. GHOSTBUSTERS was too short. SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND was too long. PULP FICTION fell foul of one rule or another. None of those rules made the game better, so they’re gone, and the good stuff is back in.

(The answers are also in American English now, since we’re selling the game internationally. Having lived on both sides of the Atlantic, I seem to mix and match my spelling anyways … )

See it for yourself

Here’s a look at the game with Alex’s new art in it:

As always, this is very much a team effort. Fintan did all the game design (every item, every wedge, every mean little twist). Alex did all the visuals, which you can see above and which I still can’t stop looking at. I did the engine implementation, which mostly means I’m the one who gets blamed when the wheel does something weird.

What’s next

The Steam page is coming very soon, and wishlists help us more than you’d think. In the meantime, the best place to follow along (and to tell us what’s broken) is the Discord.

And I’m genuinely curious: what’s the answer category you’d most like to see?