The Spell of Mastery

Spell of Mastery

A turn-based fantasy strategy set in Aermia.

You command a Wizard Guild, hired by a kingdom to hold the line against an incoming invasion. Explore dungeons, defend cities from monster hordes, train spellcasters, build siege works, and pick which leaders to commit to which fronts. Inspired by Lords of Chaos, Spellcraft, X-COM, and Final Fantasy Tactics.

Status: in active long-running development. The game has a deep history and a public demo on itch.io, but the demo predates the current direction by years and is no longer representative. Updates ship as occasional devlog posts on the itch.io page; a refreshed playable build is the next public milestone. No release date yet.

Screenshots

A wizard casts a firestorm spell amid trees
A wizard summons a firestorm in the wooded passes.
Forest in dawn fog
Weather and terrain shape line of sight — fog rolls through a forest at dawn.
Winter-frozen river crossing
Seasonal change: winter freezes the river crossings and reshapes the map.

Try it

How it's built

Spell of Mastery is written in Symta, a Lisp dialect designed specifically for game development. Symta compiles ahead-of-time to a compact bytecode and a JIT-compiled x86_64 native section, giving the game C-competitive single-iteration cost on hot paths (turn resolution, pathfinding, line-of-sight) without giving up the macro system, REPL, and pattern-matching that make a Lisp pleasant to grow a long-lived codebase in.

The runtime is a 10 000-line C core (GC, JIT, SDL2/SDL_mixer FFI); the compiler, the language, and the game are about 28 000 + 60 000 lines of Symta on top. Self-hosting from the second bootstrap onward. No Unity, no Unreal, no off-the-shelf engine.

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