Four wizards. One arena. One very angry ball. Wizards is a spiritual successor to the four-player arena classic Warlords: hold your corner, deflect what's coming, and outlast everyone else.
Your shield sweeps around your position in a tight arc, and that arc is the whole game. Read the ball's angle, commit early, and send it back harder than it came. Every deflection is tracked to the wizard who made it, so when the ball finally lands, everyone knows whose fault it was.
Every mage also carries a spellbook. Five spells turn a clean rally into a scramble: Fireball, Ice Bolt, Pentacle, Shield and Ball Duplication. Protect your library, break theirs, and be the last wizard standing. Empty slots fill with AI wizards drawn from five distinct combat personalities.
Development
Wizards began in 2017 as a multiplayer prototype on Unity 5 and UNET. In 2026 I rebuilt it on Unity 6: new Steam netcode on my Fishagon.Steamworks wrapper, a reworked spell system and a rebuilt AI.
Host-Authoritative Steam Netcode
Custom binary-serialized messages over Steam P2P, no third-party netcode library
Clients send shield angle, spell casts and eliminations; the host validates and rebroadcasts
Ball state streamed at 20 Hz and smoothed on clients
Warlords-Style Ball Physics
Bounces reflect the pre-collision velocity at a constant speed
Where the ball hits the shield steers its return, and shields only deflect from the front
Deflection Attribution & Spell Rewards
The ball remembers the last wizard to touch it
Destroying a library shelf earns that wizard a spell page, synced by the host
AI Personalities
Five ScriptableObject profiles: Aggressive, Chaotic, Defensive, Rookie and Veteran
Each tunes reaction time, aim error, miss chance, ball prediction, aggression and casting rate
Spell choice weighted by threat and available targets, with a visible spellbook flip before each cast
Shared Match Spawner
Offline and online matches place human players first and fill the rest with AI