Hi. I’m Luis, and for the past few months I’ve been quietly building a wrestling booking simulator out of a one-person studio — me, my computer, and an embarrassing amount of old PPVs and wrestling documentaries running in the background.
This is the first devlog. I want to use it to tell you what REIGN is, why I’m making it, where we are right now, and how to follow along if any of this sounds like your kind of thing.
Why I started this
I grew up on wrestling. The promos, the slow-burn rivalries, the moment a heel turns and the building loses its mind. I also grew up on wrestling games — and somewhere along the way I realized the part I loved most was never the in-ring controls. It was the idea of running a promotion. Picking the matchup. Setting up the upset. Hiding the heel from the crowd until you absolutely needed him. Knowing that on a Monday night, 8,000 people are going to walk into a building and you’ve got to make them care.
The sims that already exist do parts of this beautifully — I’ve put more hours than I’d like to admit into some of them. But every time I played one I’d hit the same wall: booking is a spreadsheet, and the match itself is a wall of text I read like a recap, not like a director. I kept thinking: I want to feel the show happen.
So I started building it.
What REIGN actually is
REIGN is a wrestling booking sim where you run a promotion. You sign talent. You write storylines. You build rivalries beat by beat. You produce weekly TV shows and PPVs while seven rival companies do the same thing on their own calendars, signing wrestlers out from under you, beating your ratings, throwing curveballs.
The thing I’m most excited about — and the part that makes REIGN look different from everything else in the genre — is that the game has 3 levels of simulation. The first one im pushing is Card Mode. Every minute of every match generates an animated trading card. A 3D snapshot of the actual arena. The move that landed. A headline like COUNTERED!, 1… 2… NO!, BOTCH!. Cards spawn from the side of the TV monitor, flip, grow, and stack as your show unfolds. Like the wrestling Topps cards I collect now a days, generated live, on the fly, from the match the engine just simulated.
It’s not a fighting game. It’s not a spreadsheet. It’s something I genuinely haven’t seen anyone do with wrestling before, and that’s why I’m building it.
Where we are right now
This is a solo project, so progress is steady — not fast. Here’s what’s actually working today:
- A match engine: damage states, position tracking, momentum, spirit gauge, priority chains, ~25 event types per match
- A roster layer with 358 wrestlers across 8 companies — each with full stats, personalities, contracts, motivations
- A storyline system that moves arcs through Setup → Escalation → Payoff, driven by crowd heat and audience investment
- A live rival universe — seven other promotions running their own shows every week, signing talent, generating ratings, and feeding you a weekly Industry Report
- An inbox that feels alive: your scout pings you about a free agent, your road agent flags fatigue, talent relations chases a renewal before another company beats you to it
- Card Mode in active development — the visual layer coming together piece by piece
There’s also a lot of placeholder, a lot of rough edges, and plenty of “this works but it needs another pass.” That’s the nature of building solo. I’d rather show you the real shape of the game than hide it behind a polished trailer.
Where this is going
Right now REIGN is one person’s passion project. But that’s not the ceiling — it’s the foundation. The plan is to take this all the way: polish the presentation, ship a Steam demo, build a community around it, and eventually release a real, full product the wrestling sim community actually deserves.
The roadmap (which I’m publishing alongside this devlog) shows the next stretch: more poses for Card Mode, deeper post-show debriefs, proper PPV spectacle, a real Career layer, cross-promotional storylines, audio pass. I’m not putting a date on a release — solo dev works on quality, not on calendars — but it’s getting closer every week.
Come along
If any of this sounds like the wrestling sim you’ve been waiting for, the best thing you can do is follow the devlogs. I’ll be writing one regularly — what got built, what broke, what I learned, what’s coming. No PR speak. No roadmap that lies to you. Just the actual journey of building this thing in public.
Thanks for being here at the start.
— Luis