Fully-Custom Recent / Featured Posts Slider

First off, searching pulled up a million plugins, most of which I’ve tried. Second, yes I’ve googled this.
I’m surprised I haven’t found a simple tutorial on this so hoping the community can point me in the right direction.

I want to have a slider on my client’s page that will grab a few recent posts and play them (slider or fade), preferably with some small navigation dots but honestly that doesn’t even matter.

Tried too many plugins to count – literally – and they didn’t display right, were over-blated and required premium features, etc.
What I want is a tutorial that will show me how I can simply format a query into a slider. I just need to throw the title and excerpt into a DIV and loop them with auto-play.

Click here to see what I’m talking about. Pretty simple.

I’m good with HTML but my CSS and JS still have a long way to go.
Could anyone point me in the right direction?
Thanks so much!