From the Grand Wizard
Made by one wizard
The short version
Wizards Advance was made by one person. I spent about 500 hours building it. I licensed the work of more than 55 artists, sound designers and toolmakers, and every one of them is named in the credits. AI helped me research, chase bugs and wrangle arcane scripting. The valley, the creatures, the spells and every decision about how it plays are mine.
It costs $20. That pays for the licences behind it and for the next stretch of the valley.
By the numbers
| People who made it | 1 |
|---|---|
| Hours of my time | about 500 |
| Game scripts written | 579 — close to 59,000 lines |
| Designers credited | more than 55, across about 100 asset packs |
| Licensed assets and tools, at list price | about $2,900 |
| AI assistance (Claude) | about $250 |
| Website builder (Lovable) | about $100 |
| Spent out of pocket | about $3,250 |
What this would usually take
A small studio starting from the same licensed assets would typically need a team of five for most of a year: around 6,000 hours of work and several hundred thousand dollars. Building all the art, animation and sound from scratch as well would run into the millions.
Those are rule-of-thumb estimates, not invoices. The point is the gap: this game exists because one person could stand on the work of many good designers, and had tools that kept the dead ends short.
About the AI
AI certainly sped up development: researching, eliminating rabbit holes, hunting bugs and wrangling arcane scripting. But it is clear this was my own creative work, and I am thankful to every asset designer, programmer and developer who helped make this vision of Wizards Advance a reality.
The music was generated with AI from lyrics, melodies and compositions I wrote and produced.
— Bryan Ogden, Grand Wizard
Who made what
Every system, world, creature, effect, icon, font and sound in the game is credited to its designer in the game's credits, which roll when the Dragon falls. Nothing in the valley is anonymous.
So — please don't crack it
A cracked copy doesn't cost a studio anything. It costs the next part of the valley. Every sale pays a licence to a designer whose work you can see and hear, and what's left pays for the road that comes after it.
A paid copy also gives you things a cracked file never can: a key, and the vault it opens — the Win, Mac and Linux builds when they land, the soundtrack files, and the members' updates from the workshop. A copy with no key can't reach any of that, and can't tell me you were here.
If $20 is genuinely out of reach right now, the theme tracks stream free for anyone, and a creator's code takes $5 off any tier. If none of that works, write to bryan@bopmesh.com — I'd rather hear from you than lose you to the dark.
Ready to set out? Pre-order for $20 · The game · The world