Last January, the lead developer of very good immersive sim shooter Fortune’s Run revealed that she was going to prison for three years, having been convicted of an unspecified violent crime several years prior. The game’s early access development was put on hold as a consequence. A parole board has since reviewed Dizzie’s case, however, and granted her release after roughly a year in the clink. She’s now keen to start working on Fortune’s Run once more.

The Steam post (via PCGamer) announcing all this was written in a halfway house, a week or so ago. It very much suggests a person still coming down to Earth, with some sharp words for the people who celebrated her incarceration.

“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,” it reads. “The system works! This experience has been strictly negative and pretty much convinced me that nobody in this country is serious about anything, but let us not linger on that. That was so last year, and it’s time to play make the GAAAAAME.”

It’s obviously hard to know what to make of Dizzie’s situation without getting more details about her conviction, but she hasn’t sought to dodge responsibility in her previous posts, writing that “I was a very violent person and I hurt a lot of people in my life.” Speaking as somebody who’s never had to deal with addiction, or serve any jailtime, I’m happy to hear she’s made some kind of recovery, and I hope the same is true for the people she hurt.

Fortune Run’s other contributors include Arachne, who left game development after recovering from a mishandled surgical procedure in 2024. “To be totally frank, she was not doing anything production critical,” Dizzie writes, “so it’ll be fine, but I need to re-organize the dates and figure out how to cut the content she was responsible for so that I can turn this into a release that I can both QA and make at the same time. It’s time to be a responsible adult and not spend months developing soldering mini-games so that you all actually get to see a 1.0.”

Dizzie is also being supported by another developer, Kim, who is “working a day job to make sure that we can actually get to 1.0 without me becoming homeless”. The post adds: “Please go tell Kim she is awesome and that I love her, she may be the only reason why you’re getting another update to this stupid game. She still wants to make content and we’re looking at that.”

More immediately, Dizzie’s hope is “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”. She may also add “two planned side-missions that I am soft-cutting so that I’m giving myself a reasonable workload”, and polish off the game’s WIP netcode, if the 1.0 version sells well enough to justify further development.

Dizzie also mentions some possible Fortune’s Run VR challenges, but nothing is guaranteed. “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,” she writes. “I’m aiming to have something by 6 months, ideally! That would be the best.”

Fortune’s Run aside, Dizzie is working on a comic in her spare time, which she plans to release as a Patreon reward. She also says in passing that she wrote a whole roguelike in C++ on paper while imprisoned, which may or may not ever see release. “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,” explains the Steam post. “It simulates the fluid density of eyeballs. I had a lot of spare time. Did I mention that it has a distance-field based sliced voxel openGL renderer that I also wrote on paper at 3 AM in a prison cell? It’s been an interesting year.”