Wizard Garden Prototype

That cat is Drooling all over the jar!
A friendly cat watches in awe.
Frog House.

Inspiration

Wizard Garden started with Sea Monkeys, ant farms and doll houses: the wonder of a tiny civilization living inside a container on a shelf. I wanted the feeling of keeping something small alive while giant children loom over the glass, shaping the fate of the wizards inside without ever meaning to. Add the tension of a strategy game and you have a survival story told at the scale of a jar.

What it does

You keep a jar of wizards alive on a kid's bedroom table. Ants get tipped in through the lid, wasps fly in over the rim, and the Kid reaches in with his finger. Your only resource is your population: to get stronger you merge two wizards into one, so every upgrade costs you a body. Two of a color level up; two base colors combine into a specialist that changes what the jar can do (Greens summon, Oranges charge the perk spell, Purples charge the Escape). Eight days of escalating waves, perk cards between them, mana as your score, and a Wisest Wizard who tells you what you are missing. Fill the purple Escape spell and the wizards break the glass; lose your last wizard and the garden is lost.

How we built it

I leaned into Claude on this one: every session was a conversation, from the design document and hand-drawn art through to tuning the last wave. I drew the wizards, the ants, the cards and the Kid; Claude built the jar in three.js, the merge economy, the waves and the interface, and kept a build log of every session as we went. The early builds I used Phaser and love the results but realized how threejs solved a lot of problems with some interface issues.

Challenges we ran into

It is easy to get lost in a loop of self-questioning when you can change anything in minutes. Early builds had been promising but certainly didn't hit.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Building on the previous competition entry meant I could dive straight into development, and it was kind of amazing to see it working right away. I am proud that merging carries the whole game: it is the upgrade, the currency and the risk in a single drag. I laugh a lot while making games this game was no acceptation. I appreciate all my peers who had been willing to give me such great feedback and help me push this project forward.

What we learned

Always learning. I've had this idea in my head lately that if it's not an A it's an F. I think that kind of stuck with me through this as I did so many iterations of the game. It's come a long way since the start. It was a push to keep improving things to the end.

What's next for Wizard Garden Prototype

Mana becomes a building resource that allows you to build special buildings and teach wizards new skills and the garden keeps growing between sessions. I have a whole cozy building system that didn't get built into this version. New levels and abilities to combine jars will be a lot of fun. I had a whole system of musical dance routines the wizards could do to impress one of the kids. I still wanted to produce a fuzzy ball for the cat that it'd play with, hopefully next build.