We kept the neon and threw away the till
Jiponarel started as a rebuild of a slot machine one of us made for a game jam. It was fun for about four minutes, and then it wanted money. That moment — the exact instant a toy becomes a funnel — is what this arcade was built to avoid.
The crew
Three people in two cities. A motion designer who draws the neon, a developer who writes the vanilla JavaScript, and a writer who insists every payout table is printed in plain language before a machine goes live.
Nobody is paid by this project. It runs on a small server and an unreasonable amount of enthusiasm for reel animation timing.
The rule that shapes everything
If a mechanic only makes sense when money is attached, it does not go on the floor. Loss-chasing loops, near-miss weighting, energy timers and streak guilt all fail that test, so none of them exist here.
The arcade by the numbers
A word about simulated gambling
Free-to-play casino games occupy an awkward space. They are not gambling, because nothing of value is staked, yet they rehearse the same loop and can make that loop feel familiar and harmless. Several regulators and researchers have raised this concern, and we think they are right to.
Our response is not to pretend the risk is zero. It is to remove every mechanic that exists purely to extend a session, to publish the odds beside the machine, and to say clearly that the credit counter is a toy and nothing more.
The full commitment is written up in the fair play charter.