A shared production.

Wands and Tomes is a deckbuilding roguelike built around two uses for a card. A player can place its pattern on the board to form boxes and gain mana, or spend mana to cast its spell against an opponent.

The interesting design problem is the relationship between those two sides. A spell’s apparent cost can change dramatically when its pattern makes mana easy to recover.

Card mechanics I contributed card functions and took part in discussions about mechanics, balance, and progression. Watching players use the cards became an important part of how I evaluated those decisions.

3D arena assets I produced selected 3D assets for the card battle arena as part of the art team.

Localization I worked on Simplified Chinese translation. This describes my contribution; it does not imply that every public build contains that localization.

The intended behavior

Boomerang was designed to be played repeatedly, as long as the player could pay its mana cost. That cost was meant to limit how much the player could do in a turn.

What players revealed

During playtests, I observed that its flexible board pattern made it unusually easy to recover the mana needed to play it again. The relationship between pattern and spell allowed repeated attacks far beyond what we had expected.

What changed in my approach

I began treating board placement and spell power as one design problem. A card’s damage and listed cost could not tell us enough on their own; we had to observe the sequences players could actually construct.

The public project credits list me as an artist alongside Eugene Oh, Tyler Lin, Junhao Teng, and Nickolas Ho. The game is directed by Kevin Hacene, with programming, sound, music, and narrative contributions from the wider team.

Full team and third-party asset credits: Wands and Tomes on itch.io .