Backalley Bets

Systems Designer / Project Manager

In a dystopian future where gambling has been made illegal across the united states, find yourself on the knives' edge in this tense gambling / management sim experience. This project gave me the opportunity to design and playtest a new card-gambling game on paper. There are currently fledgling plans to continue work on this project in the fall of 2024.

For this project I participated as lead designer as well as producer and playtester. 

Amongst my contributions to the design of Backalley Bets, what I was proudest of was the creation of the game's signature betting game, "Scales". 

Forged over the course of a long late-night playtesting session with some friends, I wanted to create a game that felt scrappy and like it leaned in the favor of players willing to make big bets. The result is a unique game that feels right at home in our game's dystopian setting, something that you could imagine playing with a scrappy deck of mismatched cards, 

The hardest part came next however, creating an AI behavior tree for the game's opponents to use when making decisions. It took many more games of "Scales" to understand all of the decision points I needed to consider to create the two behavior trees in the finished game.