A hand-painted roguelike deckbuilder

XALLI

A journey through the Five Suns.

Cross a dying world of sand and storm, build a deck bound to the old lineages, and face the gods of the Aztec sky — painted stroke by stroke in the language of the ancient codices.

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Enter the Codex ↓

Mobile · English & Español

The Art

A war painted on amate paper

Every battle in Xalli takes place inside a living codex. Enemies, storms and rivers are drawn the way the tlacuilo scribes drew them five centuries ago — flat, bold, outlined in ink.

Battlefields are folios of bark paper. Intents are telegraphed with painted glyphs. Bosses announce themselves the way omens do: a moon glyph, a jaguar claw, a wall of wind. The world outside combat — the map, the events, the people you meet — is rendered in oil, like the memory of a place the codex only sketches.

No interface noise, no floating numbers without a brush behind them. If it is on screen, it was painted for that moment.

A combat folio: amate paper battlefield with painted dunes, agave and cacti in the codex style
Folio VII — the desert crossing

The Lineages

Three lineages. One deck.

Cards belong to bloodlines. Commit to one and its old powers wake at every threshold — or weave lineages together and pay the price in focus. Tap a lineage to see its cards and keystone.

The Deck

Cards painted one at a time

Every card is its own small folio — attack, guard, curse and relic, each with a hand-painted face. Hover or tap a card to draw it from the fan.

Six of dozens. The rest you earn on the road.

The Gods

They know you are coming

Each act ends before a god, and no two ask the same question of your deck. Choose a sun.

The World Outside

Painted in oil, remembered in ink

Between the fights, the codex opens onto a wider world — merchants, lodges, omens and bone-sellers, each a painting you step into.

The Run

Short runs, long consequences

Three acts to the storm

Branching map routes through jungle, lake, desert and mountain — every node a painted choice.

Outnumbered by design

Fights against two and three enemies at once, each with their own telegraphed intent glyph.

Relics, weapons, curses

Equipment that changes how your cards behave — and cursed cards you will regret earning.

Events with teeth

Merchants, omens and ambushes written for this world, in English and Mexican Spanish.

Xalli key art — an Aztec temple at sunset

The Archive

From zero to a living codex

Xalli didn't begin as an Aztec game. It began blue, generic and nameless — then got repainted, screen by screen, for two years.

  1. Early prototype with blue UI

    The first prototype

    Blue UI, a car called the Duster, a generic survival event. No Aztecs in sight — just the bones of a roguelike.

  2. Deckbuilder cards with debug overlays

    Cards, held together with debug lines

    The deckbuilder comes online — still wrapped in wireframes and a borrowed frontier hero.

  3. Inking a tzompantli on a lightpad
    Tzompantli, inked on a lightpad
    Painting storm waves on a pen display
    Storm studies on the tablet
    Faction glyphs in Photoshop
    Faction glyphs in Photoshop
    Brush and ink glyph studies on paper
    Brush & ink glyph studies

    Made by hand

    Ink on paper, brush on a lightpad, pigment on a pen display — most glyphs were drawn by hand long before they became pixels.

  4. Map screen, early
    Map screen, second pass
    Map screen, third pass
    Map screen, latest

    The map, redrawn

    Pass after pass at the same screen — from footprints on bark paper to a folded codex folio.

  5. A real market photograph beside the finished painted market in the game's art style

    From a photo to a painted world

    A real market photograph (left), repainted into the finished world you fight through (right).