Inspiration
I wanted to create a game that I had never played before, something completely different and simple but also funny, eventually, I stumbled upon this thing which gave me an idea.
Main gameplay loop
Players are tasked with dropping horses through a massive plinko machine earning credits for touching pegs and for landing in specific hoops. The gameplay loop was based on collecting enough money for the next upgrade or character to get even more money.
Engine
Roblox Studio, Lua based programming engine, the main reason behind picking it was that I needed something easy to use and accessible to a lot of players and my sister was playing it often. I had a few different engines in mind but then I would face the problem of no players to play it or having to pay for it to be accessible, so Roblox felt like a nice starting point.
Version 0.6 (Currently in development)
After a long break from working on it (mostly due to lack of time) I came out with few fun ideas, going in this direction will require me to re-do a lot of the game and I guess for now I will only split into new versions after a major change.
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Timed dangers that would get in the way or kill the player if they stay in the plinko machine for too long one example being the hydraulic press positioned at the top of the plinko machine slowly crushing the playing field.
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Threats that would damage the player or get in the way while also having a side benefit, for example, a toxic gas cloud will poison the player damaging him over time but it will also make the stamina regenerate faster.
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Extra difficulties affecting the money multiplier at the end, the number of threats, and the speed at which the timed dangers progress.
Version 0.5
Here I experimented with ways to handle the game either by making all of it server-sided or client-sided resulting in a hybrid of both for the best user experience.
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Donation system.
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Stamina System
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Achievements.
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Quick character selection slots.
Version 0.4
This version was all about playable characters, I had an entire drawing board worth of ideas some made it into the game while others were kept on hold, managed to streamline it a lot so it would be much easier to add new ones, the ability to add special nonhorse characters also made its way into the game.
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Horses with special abilities.
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Support for mobile, PC, and console controllers.
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Rewriting the way player data is shared, transferred, and saved.
Version 0.3
I remember spending quite some time working on the music system which now can’t even function correctly as the main gimmick of it (the ability to play custom music) was sabotaged by Roblox also a lot more rewriting of the old stuff as I kept figuring out better ways to do certain actions.
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Custom loading screen (It picks landing spots at random)
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Fully fledged scoring system - Everything has sound and animations all money-related events are handled by a server and to add a little bit of tension there is a void hoop that takes all points from the current drop.
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The music system that utilizes playlists and allows players to create their own music tracks using song IDs.
Version 0.2
I had to write basic stuff like dropping system, camera movement, and playground upgrades I also had to make it save player progression pretty much the basics for a barebone game.
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Basic upgrade system.
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A saving system that should work in case of player crash/disconnection.
Version 0.1
At the beginning, you were only able to drop horses without any goal, later on, I couldn’t simply scrap it so I made it into a loading screen minigame.
- Loading screen “minigame”.
Planned features
Info panel that gets brought up whenever players click on the button that looks like a circle with “i” in it, it explains what does what on the currently visible screen.
Skippable tutorial for newcomers.
More characters with different active abilities.
Seed-based layout generation. 
Daily, weekly, or friends-only scoreboards - rated by who gained the most points in a single drop.
Donor awards - Currently the game only grants donor achievements and could use some in-game awards, nothing overpowered maybe cosmetics or special gameplay features.
Prestige system or end-game - After unlocking everything, the player doesn’t really have anything to do.