Unlicensed Wizardry

an unlicensed wizard
a summoned monster
wizard and pet monster
Reddit stats (like the users karma) that increase the power of in game spells
Battle screen WIP
Wizard hub screen
PVP matchmaking
Inventory screen

Inspiration

The game is largely inspired by Reddit memes, subs, antics and slang. The idea was to create a Reddit game that borrows users' stats/ karma/ achievements, etc to impact the gameplay, and to have an unbalanced, chaotic kind of game with a lot of experimentation and embedded easter eggs/ memes and subtle (or not so subtle) Reddit references. I wanted to keep the hooks more intrinsic fueled rather than relying too much on extrinsic rewards - these tend to be a bit short-lived.

What it does

Unlicensed Wizardry is a PvP wizard-battler built entirely on Devvit using Phaser. Players create a wizard, join one of 7 guilds (Elementalist, Lunar, Necromancer, Gambit, Sage, Battle Mage, Menace), and equip up to 5 spells and some gear. The battles automatically play out, players have no option but to watch their demise or victory unfold.

Beyond PvP, there's a full PvE layer: a "Slay" system with 9 areas and 100+ illustrated creatures to hunt for loot, guild boss ladders, a gacha-style Spell-O-Matic vending machine, and summon posts where beating a creature spawns a real Reddit post other players can fight — with royalties paid to whoever summoned it. Reddit karma and account age even scale certain spells' power directly.

How we built it

Initially designed in Figma and on paper, followed by AI tools such as Claude for coding and Midjourney for generating images. Every decision was human, many parts were hand optimised/ written and this was oe of the most fun parts because you get into the flow.

Technical: Phaser 4 client in a Devvit-hosted iframe, talking to a Hono server over a small JSON API, with Redis for persistence. The heart of it is simulateBattle() in src/shared — a fully deterministic, seeded battle engine shared between client and server, so the server can run it authoritatively (coins/rewards can't be spoofed) and the client just replays the same event log as animation. Everything is data-driven: spells, items, creatures, guild bosses all resolve through the same handful of battle "kinds" (damage/stun/heal/shield/lifesteal/chaos), so adding new content is additive, not special-cased.

Challenges we ran into

Trying to build a game in a month is insane, switching ideas one and a half weeks in was a little extra too. There's a bunch of spells that do rather unusual things, which required quite a bit of extra stuff worked into the battle system on top of the core mechanics, but I think this was well worth it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Designing and generating hundreds of monsters from sketchy sometimes 10 second hand drawings. The huge amount of work done over the month.

What we learned

Trying to balance/ create a system with levelling up curves, elemental types is a lot more difficult than expected. Had never used phaser or devit, actually, it's my first actual game so there's a lot of learning involved.

What's next for Unlicensed Wizardry

Continue to improve the system - while still keeping a slight imbalance. Adding sfx, visual spell effects, and improving the wizard/creature/ UI images most of all. From here on in it would be great to have some community input to help with balancing the game, ideas for spells, gear, creatures and reddit inspired environments etc.