In January 2025, the solo developer of immersive shooter Fortune’s Run announced that development of the game was going on an indefinite pause due to her being sent to prison. While Dizzie never gave clear details of the situation, she said it was a result of her having “lived a very different life” and been “a very violent person” in the years before she became a game developer, a fact which had caught up with her in the form of a three-year sentence that represented “the consequences of [her] actions.” Well, after just over a year, Dizzie has posted a new update to Steam saying a parole board has released her, and she’s back to work on the extremely well-received Early Access game.
“Good news, everyone!” Dizzie writes, “I am writing this Steam post with a computer and not dictating it over the jail phone!”
In the developer’s usual exuberant style, she subtitled the post “Dizzie is liberated from prison following an anti-climactic resolution to the season 1 finale cliffhanger.” As for why she’s out so early, that’s somewhat harder to parse, so I’ll just paste:
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. Hurray! 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
playmake the GAAAAAME.
Dizzie says she’s now living in a halfway house, and since former co-developer Arachne is no longer part of the team (she had quit before all this), there’s a lot of logistical work to be done to get back on top of Fortune’s Run‘s development. “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,” Dizzie writes. “It’s time to be a responsible adult and not spend months developing soldering minigames so that you all actually get to see a 1.0.”
The plan is to get a new build of the retro-styled boomer-shooter-meets-immersive-sim out in six months, with a proper numbered release after a year, but these are estimates given that she’s only “been out 72 hours; still getting adjusted here.”
During her time in prison, the Canadian developer claimed that “cops discharged a fire extinguisher in [her] mouth and forced [her] to swallow,” and that she spent over six months in “reception,” meaning she didn’t have access to the regular jail facilities such as rehab, psychiatry, education or work. “All there is to do is fight and get high and I’ve been doing both,” she wrote in a transcribed update. “It brought back every bad things about me I had worked past.”
Apparently Dizzie also wrote a roguelike in C++ on paper while in prison, and is weighing up whether it merits a release:
The concept for the game is that you are a parasitic mushroom that can infest corpses and you can disemember 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. 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.
Obviously there will be some who will question the tacit support of Dizzie, but this is the horrible, broken system working as well as it’s able to: She was caught, tried, convicted and imprisoned, has served her time, and is now looking toward rehabilitation. There’s no point in any of the justice system unless we afford everyone the right to fix up their life and move on.
