It’s been two years since I posted here… wild! I’ve been busy working at Drinkbox Studios as Lead Designer on our upcoming game, Blighted. But that’s not what this post is about. This post is about me making a small game in my spare time, called Spellatro!

The elevator pitch is that it’s Scrabble meets Balatro. If that doesn’t mean anything to you — then, it’s a minimalist, single-player, roguelike word game. It’s got 100+ passives, 10+ bosses, and a bunch of unlocks and game modes. It’s also free. I made a trailer that shows it off.

If that sounds up your alley, check it out on itch.io here! If it asks you for a password, use “BDR” (no quotes.)

I’ll describe the development of the game after the break here. If you aren’t interested in that, then have a good 2026!

Okay, so. A quick look at how the game developed over the years, why I made it, and why it took so long!

This is the earliest build I still have of it, from mid 2024. This is actually pretty far along though… there were even rougher, earlier versions. In those earlier builds, you could hold like 20 letters at once and spell words like 15 letters long. It was overwhelming and paralyzing and not fun to play. I’m glad I playtested it early, and was lucky enough to have testers that felt comfortable giving me brutally honest feedback. You can also see this version has “Cash” — at that time it had a shop, and money, and interest, and items, and other stuff ripped from Balatro.

This is near the end of 2024. By this point I had focused in a lot better on what I actually wanted out of the game. I’d removed a lot of those aforementioned things that were in Balatro, even though they work really well in Balatro and make it a more interesting game, because at the end of the day all I wanted to make was a minimalist, straightforward experience that made my dream of “roguelike word game” come true, as opposed to spending a lot of time making a carbon-copy of Balatro.

I think this is mid-2025. It’s kind of funny… one of the main reasons I made Spellatro, besides being excited about the idea, is because I wanted to make a small, bite-sized project that was just for me, where I could do whatever I wanted, and where it wouldn’t take that much time or effort to get out. I feel like if I was working on it full time, it probably could have been done in a handful of months, like maybe 4…? But at this point it’s been over a year… so what’s up with that?

Well, part of it is enjoying the process of making things, and fully exploring what the game could be — I improved the visuals, I added support for keyboard, gamepad, and touch controls — things like that, that made me feel good about what I was creating. Another part is that I’ve never made a roguelike. So it was fun learning how to design and execute these systems, but it took time. But the most impactful part is just… working full-time designing games doesn’t leave a lot of time or creative energy for coming home to design more games. There were long stretches where I didn’t work on it at all because I just didn’t have the energy for it. It turned out to be quite a slow process.

This is about the end of development, end of 2025. I’d been playtesting and refining throughout the whole of development, but I really went hardcore on that in this last phase. I ended up heavily revising many of the passives. I added a bunch of refinements that make the game more accessible and straightforward to new players, like the additions to the HUD, the ability to play a number of misspelled words without penalty, and tweaking the interface to be ideal for touch. I added the ability to unlock new passives over time, because people love meta-progression — and I added the ability to unlock everything from the start, because I am generally annoyed by meta-progression (I really appreciated being able to do this in Balatro, too.) I added sound effects, music, and even a quit button (WOAH!)

So… there you have it! It was supposed to be a fun, quick little side project I did in my spare time, but it turned into a fun, long side project that took almost 2 years! It’s obviously not super-duper polished, it’s missing features you’d probably expect from a proper release (like the ability to pause and resume runs, for instance), but as it’s free, and it’s been 2 years, I think people will understand me just calling it a day and putting it out without stuff like that (if anyone even plays it, haha!) I might continue to refine it or bugfix it, especially if people happen to play it. But more likely, I’m going to say it’s done, put it out, take a break, and get my energy back for new projects.

Thank you for reading all this! Enjoy the game if you play it, and have a very happy new year!