It’s been about a year since the last IGWTF interview and I couldn’t be happier to get back to writing about indie games. I’ve always loved this world: the creativity, the weird experiments, the passion behind every project. And honestly, there’s no better time than now to talk about it, the indie scene is on fire.
Friedemann was incredibly kind to accept this interview to share something about his new game “Slots & Daggers” and what came out of it is a mix of insight, humor, and genuine love for making games!
Let’s dive in!
Could you introduce yourself and share what motivated you to make Slots & Daggers?
Hi, I’m Friedemann, an indie game developer based in Berlin, Germany. I’ve been making indie games for almost 10 years now, starting with Superflight and ISLANDERS, two games I made with friends from university who I co-founded the independent studio GrizzlyGames with. I then went on to make Pizza Possum, a collaboration with my good friend Thomas van den Berg (Kingdom series, Cloud Gardens) and Raw Fury. I’m always motivated by new challenges, so after Pizza Possum, I decided to try and make a solo project, forcing myself to take on aspects of game development I hadn’t focused on as much in my previous collaborations. This endeavour became SUMMERHOUSE, an atmospheric building game which feels like my most personal project so far. SUMMERHOUSE did really well (350.000+ units sold) and was a very important game for me because it gave me a lot of confidence in my creative intuition.
Immediately after the release of SUMMERHOUSE I started working on another personal project, focusing on my upbringing on a farm. However, after half a year of working on that game, I got stuck on some design aspects of it and was looking for a way to take my mind off it for a while, to come back with a fresh perspective later on. I had thought about gambling and casino-style mechanics, and how they have inspired very successful recent titles like Balatro or Vampire Survivors. There was a meme that stuck with me, which called indie games “thinly disguised slot machines”. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, especially since these games don’t require you to invest money on an ongoing basis, so I thought it would be fun to make a mini-game that is an actual slot machine. It felt like the polar opposite of what I’d been doing with SUMMERHOUSE (and the farm game), so I thought it would be the perfect palette cleanser.
Originally the idea was to make this slot machine game (which became Slots & Daggers as alert readers might have guessed) very quickly, in about six weeks. I really enjoyed the spontaneity of the game and the prototypes were immediately very fun to play, so I decided to flash out the project a little further and give myself half a year to turn it into a full game. So really, Slots & Daggers started as a way to distract my mind from my main project at the time. Something just feels satisfying about working on something you’re not meant to be working on. There’s this saying about a stolen apple tasting better than one you’ve bought and I think that same feeling applies here: Making Slots & Daggers felt a bit like stealing an apple and I think you can feel that energy in the game!
Looking at your previous game Summerhouse, what lessons or ideas did you carry into Slots & Daggers?
The biggest lesson I took from Summerhouse was to trust my gut. The longer I make games (and other creative work) the more I believe in the power of intuition. Of course those intuitive choices end up being filtered through lots of layers of rationality and logic, but I think a lot of our best ideas happen when we go with what feels right, even if we can’t immediately explain why that is. SUMMERHOUSE was based in a strong feeling of awe and adventure I get from looking at old, slightly run-down buildings. Slots & Daggers and the whole feel of its world is based on a quote from the book “Notes from the Shadowed City” by Jeffrey Alan Love. In the book there’s a drawing of a strange knight holding a cup of coffee and a cigarette, with the words “In the mornings the masked swordsmen gather at the cafe for coffee and cigarettes.” printed next to it. I thought the world that is implied in the existence of knights, coffee and cigarettes is just great and I wanted to make a game set in that world. One of the first things I made for Slots & Daggers was the cigarette that is burning on the table next to the slot machine you’re playing. That doesn’t make any sense from a production perspective, but it felt right and seemed important. SUMMERHOUSE taught me to listen to that feeling and I think it makes Slots & Daggers feel alive and unique and personal.
The music for the game happened in a very similar way. Somehow, sleazy old school hip hop beats felt like the correct mood for Slots & Daggers, even though that’s such a bizarre choice for a game about fighting Goblins and Eggs on a fantasy slot machine. I wanted the soundtrack to have its own distinct character though, so I went looking for a unique element that could become sort of a trademark sound for the game. At the time, the Timothee Chalamet movie about Bob Dylan was playing in theatres and in it, there’s this great moment where somebody starts playing a really loud drawbar organ chord during the recording of Like A Rolling Stone and it makes the whole song. I love that song so I went home and tried adding a vintage jazz organ to the soundtrack and for some reason that felt perfect. So now, every song in Slots & Daggers features this vintage jazz organ sound and it’s the first thing you hear when you first open the game and the music starts playing!
What was the hardest part of marrying randomness (slots) with player agency / strategy (combat)?
Balancing Slots & Daggers was incredibly difficult for me and I’m still not sure I’ve got it fully down. I’ll probably be fine tuning this until way after the game has released, just because it’s so tricky to get just right. The hardest aspect for me was giving players the sense that sometimes, you get lucky and it feels like you’re almost breaking the game. In those runs, you make it further than you should have and it feels really fun and rewarding. However, it’s important that you don’t get to just repeat that over and over again, because that would quickly make the game boring and actually break it.
How do you balance luck vs skill in the game, so that players feel both rewarded and challenged?
Most aspects of the game are slightly randomised so you can get good at them, but you can’t just learn them by heart. For example: some items require a skill check of the player. The bow and arrow weapon has a little crosshairs jittering over the screen and the player has to stop it as close as possible to the bulls-eye for maximum damage. This skill check works at a slightly different speed every time and moves in unexpected ways so that players won’t ever get to a point where they get it right 100% of the time. The same thing is true for stopping the wheels of the slot machine: I tried to balance the speed they spin at, so that players can try to get the symbols they want, but won’t always succeed.
On a moment to moment basis, there’s always a bit of luck involved in what symbols you roll and how much damage they do, but on a larger scale, deciding which symbols to buy, how to upgrade them and what power ups to use at which point adds a lot of strategy to the game to make sure players feel agency over what’s happening.
What tools, engines, or frameworks did you rely on heavily during development?
Slots & Daggers is made in Unity. For drawing the sprites, I used a combination of Photoshop, aseprite and Pixquare (on my iPad). Aseprite and Pixquare are fantastic, they are so fun to work with! I hadn’t really made much pixel art before and I absolutely loved working with these tools.
The game uses a pretty wild mix of 2D and 3D, pixel art hardliners will be disgusted by the amount of mixels (pixel art at different resolutions), and perspective distortion in the game! I wanted everything in Slots & Daggers to feel very physical, so I decided to use a 3D scene with a perspective camera, rather than the typical orthographic mode that’s used on classic pixel art games. To add even more 3D-feel, most of the pixel art sprites cast shadows rendered by Unity’s lighting system, rather than hand drawn shadows. The 3D models in the game, for example the cocktail glass on the table, are all made in Blender (I absolutely love Blender, how incredible is it that we get to have this program for free!)
Sounds and music play a big part in how Slots & Daggers feels. I produced all the music in Logic Pro, which I’ve grown to really like for its limitations. I used to make music and sounds in Steinberg’s Cubase, which offers so much more control and technical detail over the workflow, but over time, I’ve discovered that having less options tends to make me more inventive. So these days I try to look for tools with tight limitations and then try to work creatively within them. The sounds are made mixing together samples from different sound libraries, many of them coming from a bunch of Boom SFX packs.
To integrate the sounds into Unity I used FMOD which I only learned about on Pizza Possum. It’s amazing and I love it dearly.
Approximately how long has the development taken so far, and which phases were the most difficult?
It’s been pretty much exactly 6 months since I built the first prototype for Slots & Daggers and the game is very close to being done, so it’s going to be a half year development cycle. Overall, I really enjoyed working on this game and no part of it felt like a huge struggle which I’m quite surprised by, given how much of this has been unfamiliar territory for me. My previous games haven’t included very numbers-based mechanics, the only exception being ISLANDERS with it’s building scores and on that game, my friend Jonas Tyroller was responsible for most of the design and balancing on those systems. When it came to tweaking the values for Slots & Daggers’ mechanics, I definitely needed a bit of time to figure out how to approach that and it took quite a lot of playtesting with my publisher to get to a point where I was happy with the balancing, so that was probably the biggest challenge.
Another aspect that took a surprising amount of time was localisation. Slots & Daggers uses pixel art fonts, some of which are quite stylised. Finding versions and replacements for those fonts that work in Chinese, Korean, Spanish etc… and integrating them into the game was a lot more difficult than I had anticipated.
Also: I’m never making another game with an “&” (ampersand) in the project name. Jesus almighty, there were so many weird technical issues with that, I’m getting annoyed just typing this…
How important is community engagement to you, and how are you building a community around the game ?
I mostly engage with players on social media and on the Steam forums and I don’t necessarily believe that close communication with players makes my games better. Some developers are amazing at that and their games really benefit from it, but with my more intuitive and atmosphere-based approach to design, I think it’s important to have confidence in your own vision and execute on that without too much input from the outside. I wonder if I will regret that on a game as mechanics driven as Slots & Daggers, but for now it seems to have worked. Players really enjoyed the demo so I’m optimistic about the full game!
As developers talking to our communities I think we sometimes forget that only a tiny, very particular minority of players is actually talking back to us. People in the forums and Discord servers are often very engaged fans, but somebody who plays the game without ever even realising that a Steam community hub exists can have just as deep of a connection to it! I’ve always been more of the latter type of player, so it’s important to me to make games for them as well as my more outspoken audience, so I try to hit a balance between listening to what people are saying, but also making decisions from a personal place that I hope will connect on a more emotional level to people out there.
HowToMarketAGame.com argues that demos are one of the most powerful marketing levers a dev can pull. Would you say demos have been among your most effective strategies? And, since we love asking questions others don’t… how many wishlists is Slots & Daggers sitting at right now?
Demos are great in my experience! They give you a chance to trial some of the games aspects of the game before the full release, help building anticipation and can be incredibly motivating as a developer. However, they have become such a default way of marketing games these days that they don’t guarantee huge wishlist or marketing impact any longer. Two or three years ago, Steam Next Fests used to drive a lot of engagement to pretty much everyone who was participating in them, now you have to do a lot of work to make people even see your demo amongst the hundreds of others on there.
HowToMarketAGame: https://howtomarketagame.com/2025/08/26/the-demo-effect-from-7000-wishlists-to-42000/
For Slots & Daggers, the demo has been a big success though. We’ve already hit 3x the CCU (people playing the demo at the same time) as with the SUMMERHOUSE demo and the Next Fest hasn’t even started yet. It’s also been so great to see people enjoy the game which has soothed my anxiety around the balancing and game mechanics a lot. As for wishlists, we’re at almost 40k now which I’m very happy with! (It’s never enough though with us developers, so please go wishlist Slots & Daggers if you haven’t yet, it genuinely makes a massive difference)
What else?
I wanna say a big thanks to IGWTF for this interview! It’s quite rare to see long-form interviews these day, but I think they’re an incredible resource. Much of my design philosophy is based on tiny snippets from obscure interviews I’ve read years ago that have struck a nerve in me and developed into something bigger over time. That quote about knights and cigarettes which inspired the whole world of Slots & Daggers is a perfect example of this sort of thing.
Creative communities like the indie game scene rely so much on this sort of work being done, but it tends to get less credit than the primary work of making games (or songs, paintings, books, whatever) so I’m incredibly grateful for the people doing it!
