Between 2022 and 2024 PC Gamer’s Ted Litchfield wrote about Fortune’s Run six times. “It’s like the Jedi Knight 4 we never got,” he wrote in September 2022 about the stylish immersive sim which, like Gloomwood, doubles as an impactful boomer shooter and even has a basketball minigame. It was definitely among the most interesting early access games on Steam for a while, but that abruptly ceased to be the case when its sole developer Dizzie went to jail.
What for? We don’t know, but at the time Dizzie provided a bit of context: “I’ve been sentenced to prison for the next three years. It’s a long story, but I’ve lived a very different life before I was a game developer, and I wasn’t living very well. My case is about five years old now, I have been going through the legal process the whole time I’ve been working on this.”
Anyway, long story short: Dizzie is now out of jail, and development has resumed, but it’s not exactly smooth sailing.
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“To keep it succinct, after a year of getting gaslit by transphobic morons who convinced themselves that I, I quote, real words from my real file, ‘have failed to acquire a single competency aiming to attain sobriety’, the parole board reviewed my case and instantly kicked my ass out of jail,” Dizzie wrote in a lengthy new Steam post.
The post goes on to list some of the difficulties of resuming development, the first being that Dizzie is currently “stuck in a halfway house”. That and other complications aside, there is a plan. “My initial impression of the next steps will be to complete the drafts of the missing story critical levels, re-release the demo club level with the new features (since it’s actually up next in the storyline), do the final level and cap off a 1.0 for commercial reasons after which I would like to add the two planned side-missions that I am soft-cutting so that I’m giving myself a reasonable workload.”
The post continues: “I don’t want to promise anything at this stage, I’m still evaluating, but I am very certain that the next release will be 12 months from now. I’m aiming to have something by 6 months, ideally! That would be the best. Again, I’ve been out 72 hours; still getting adjusted here.”
It’s worth reading Dizzie’s full post. While Fortune’s Run has been on ice for over a year for obvious reasons, productivity endured in prison: “I wrote a roguelike in C++ on paper while I was in jail.”
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If you haven’t played or heard of Fortune’s Run, Ted has written that it’s well-worth playing already. “Fortune’s Run is a game with that immersive sim, Thief/Deus Ex DNA, but running at 1.5x speed. Instead of methodical crouch walking and nonlethal takedowning (though you can play it that way if you really want), it encourages frantic, speedy, efficient room clearing like a first person Hotline Miami or Superhot stripped of the slow-mo.”
