Fortune's Run Dev Wrote a Whole Game on Paper in Prison

"The concept for the game is that you are a parasitic mushroom that can infest corpses and you can dismember defeated enemies and graft their pieces onto yourself as an equipment mechanic. It simulates the fluid density of eyeballs. I had a lot of spare time."

That's a quote from Dizzie, the solo developer behind the cult Early Access immersive sim Fortune's Run, describing a roguelike she wrote entirely in C++ on paper while serving time in a Canadian prison. Not pseudocode. Not design notes. A full game, complete with what she describes as "a distance-field based sliced voxel openGL renderer that I also wrote on paper at 3 AM in a prison cell." She's weighing up whether it's worth releasing. I hope she does, because that description alone is more creative than half the pitches I see come out of established studios.

Dizzie posted a new update to Fortune's Run's Steam page confirming that a parole board has reviewed her case and granted her release after roughly a year of a three-year sentence. "Good news, everyone!" she writes. "I am writing this Steam post with a computer and not dictating it over the jail phone!" The post was written from a halfway house, and she'd been out for about 72 hours at the time.

Back in January 2025, Dizzie announced that development of Fortune's Run was going on indefinite pause. She was upfront about the reason: a conviction stemming from violence in her past, before she became a game developer. "I was a very violent person and I hurt a lot of people in my life," she wrote at the time. The three-year sentence, she said, represented "the consequences of my actions."

Back to the game

Her time inside sounds bleak. In a transcribed update posted during her sentence, Dizzie described spending over six months in "reception" without access to regular jail facilities like rehab, psychiatry, or education. She alleged that "cops discharged a fire extinguisher in my mouth and forced me to swallow," and said the environment brought back "every bad thing about me I had worked past."

Now free, Dizzie faces a different kind of challenge: getting Fortune's Run to 1.0 essentially solo. Former co-developer Arachne left the project after a mishandled surgical procedure in 2024, and while Dizzie downplays the production impact ("she was not doing anything production critical"), there's still content to cut and reorganise. Another developer, Kim, is working a day job to keep the project financially viable. "Please go tell Kim she is awesome and that I love her," Dizzie writes. "She may be the only reason why you're getting another update to this stupid game."

The plan is to get a new build out in six months, with a full 1.0 release targeted at twelve months. That includes completing story-critical levels, re-releasing the demo club level with new features, building the final level, and potentially adding two side missions she's "soft-cutting" to keep the workload realistic. VR support and netcode polish are possibilities if the 1.0 sells well enough. These are estimates from someone who's been free for three days, so take them accordingly.

Fortune's Run has a passionate following for good reason. It blends retro-styled boomer shooter combat with immersive sim design in a way that very few games attempt, let alone pull off in Early Access from a tiny team. The fact that its developer hand-wrote an entire second game in C++ on prison paper, renderer and all, tells you something about the kind of person making it. Whether that roguelike ever ships or not, Fortune's Run getting a real shot at 1.0 is one of the better indie comeback stories I've seen in a while. Kim's keeping the lights on, Dizzie's back at a keyboard, and the game's Steam reviews are still sitting at Very Positive.