Wizard School Dropout - Be Mage Do Crime (Preview 9: 10/31/25 - Earth Spells)

[Rickton]

Excited to announce the initial release of my new roguelike, Wizard School Dropout! Available for Windows and Linux, currently for free:
https://weirdfellows.itch.io/wizard-school-dropout

You left wizard school in disgrace. Cast out of magical society, you have only one option to pay off your exorbitant student loans: crime.

Using the unlicensed but probably mostly safe portal generator you found in a mysteriously abandoned tower, go on heists where you infiltrate and steal from the rich and powerful.

Wizard School Dropout is a magic-focused, turn-based traditional roguelike featuring lots of environmental interaction and spell combinations for a wide variety of playstyles. Do you want to go in loud, blowing holes in the walls with fireballs and incinerating everyone who stands in your way, teleport into and out of safety, or just waltz in and use mind powers to make the guards forget you were even there?

Features

• Magic-focused gameplay with a wide variety of spells that can be upgraded and customized.
• Large amount of environmental interactions and effects. Light furniture on fire, freeze water to walk across it, spill all sorts of dangerous chemicals on the floor.
• Short heists and "dungeons" within a longer-term game: "coffeebreak" style gameplay mixed with a longer campaign.
• Varied playstyles. Blast everyone who stands in your way or sneak through in magical darkness. Terrify guards away or freeze them solid, Turn your enemies against each other or summon powerful creatures to do your bidding for you.
• Customize and upgrade your wizard tower and recruit people and monsters to follow you on missions or perform jobs in the tower.

Other Things You Can Do

• Study magic books, artifacts, or materials in order to improve your spells and gain new abilities
• Become corrupted by forbidden knowledge and curses, or addicted to vampire blood
• Increase your magic power through insights gained from dreams
• Smoke hookah with and befriend chill wizards
• Trade secrets with cats
• Manufacture and sell magical drugs to decadent nobles, or harvest blood from monsters or other wizards to sell to vampires
• Start a cult
• Build an army of automatons and golems.

Current Status
The game is fully playable and winnable at this point, but still in development and much more content is planned.

Currently features five magic types: Air, Death, Earth, Fire, and Water, and four location types: Wizard's Towers and Corrupted Towers (with variants for each magic type), Mansions, and Vampire Crypts.

UPDATE 3/1/25: Air magic is now available!
UPDATE 5/1/25: Mansions have been added as a location type, and the faction system has been expanded!
UPDATE 5/30/25: Your tower can now be repaired, and new rooms built.
UPDATE 8/1/25: Added level 4 spells, overhauled and expanded corruption system and item enchantments/curses, added Wizard Tower Ruins map type, and more.
UPDATE 9/1/25: Added recruitment of permanent residents at your wizards tower who can follow you into battle or work jobs at the tower for various bonuses.
Update 10/1/25: Added the ability to take and ransom prisoners, expanding resident morale, added multiple floors to home tower, and allowed managing follower equipment.
Update 10/31/25: Added Earth spells, changes to learning recipes, mechanical recipes and workshop, buildable automatons, and basically nothing Halloween-themed despite the release date.

Screenshots

[markemus]

This game looks really cool! Congratulations on your release.

[markemus]

I got an error trying to run it on Linux:

"dlopen(): error loading libfuse.so.2

AppImages require FUSE to run."

I was able to fix it by installing fuse, which apparently comes standard on most distros. I'm on Xubuntu.

In the "How does... 'Time' work?" dialogue, it says that vampires are seen outside during the day. I'm assuming that's a typo since another tooltip says the opposite.

I had a fun time playing and of course died opening a coffin before I managed to find any useful loot. My debt is worse than ever. Very enjoyable game, thanks for sharing!

[Rickton]

AppImages are supposed to be nearly universal for Linux, but I guess Linux wouldn't be Linux if there weren't edge cases haha. Glad you were able to get it working!

Thanks for pointing out the vampire thing, I'll fix that.

[getter77]

Looks to be full of potential and primed to realize it to boot---good to see you back at it!   

[aimexpress]

I've played it before, it's quite fun.

[helendam]

I've played it before, it's quite fun.

me too

[Rickton]

A major update to WSD today with Preview 3, the Air arcana is now available! It features a variety of air and electricity spells. Air-themed wizard towers are now available as a potential location, and added air and electric based items, creatures, and enchantments.

If you haven't played Wizard School Dropout yet, now's a great time to try it! https://weirdfellows.itch.io/wizard-school-dropout





In addition to air spells, there have been quite a few QoL and content changes as well, full changelog available here: https://weirdfellows.itch.io/wizard-school-dropout/devlog/894372/release-preview-3-electric-feel

And here's the list of air spells available:

[sabrina]

What specific mechanics or consequences are tied to becoming corrupted by forbidden knowledge or addicted to vampire blood, and how do they impact gameplay long-term?

[Rickton]

Currently, there are "corruption" values that are tied to specific magic types. As your corruption value increases, your power with that magic type usually increases, but you also acquire some downsides.
For example, the death corruption "Necrosis" makes your max HP decrease and you are more vulnerable to Rot damage (a damage type that undead are extra susceptible to).
It's on my list to expand and deepen this system though. So rather than just being flat modifiers corruption will cause you to gain mutations, some helpful, some harmful.

There are a couple of addictive substances in the game that grant benefits when taken, but have a chance of causing withdrawal when the effects wear off. For vampire blood, after using it you're stronger, faster, and regenerate HP, but while withdrawing from it you're slower and weaker. Withdrawal isn't a permanent effect, it can be waited out or mitigated by taking more (though that will lead you right back to withdrawal again once it wears off).

[gimox]

Are spells procedurally generated, or do they follow a set progression tree? Can players modify them beyond just upgrades?

[Rickton]

They're not procedurally generated. There are a wide variety of spells in addition to your basic damage spells, some with pretty unique effects, so I think procedurally generating them would actually make things less interesting because it'd force them more into a standard framework.

Right now it's mostly set upgrades, though the framework exists to expand beyond that so it may in the future. And actually, technically that is sort of in the game already - you can find damage/healing formulas you can apply to your spells that extend those values beyond what their built-in upgrades do, but I feel like you're asking for something a bit more interesting, in line with Rift Wizard's shrines or something.

[Rickton]

I've created a couple of surveys for people who've played the game. I'd appreciate your feedback!

The first survey (and the biggest focus, at the moment) is focused on debt and item value. The next release is going to feature mansions, which have a lot of valuable-but-not-useful loot, so I'm looking to take this opportunity to rebalance the values of items and the debt, and I'm curious what people's experiences have been with them so far in play.

Debt survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScU3Jp1TMIjd_OLSj3z-_vigCyYDScOlvhJD8_0TSiw2DQDKw/viewform

The second survey is more general questions about what you like/don't like about the game so far. It's less directed, but if I see that a multiple people saying the same thing, it might give me an idea of things to focus on that I might not otherwise have thought of on my own.

General survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeZ2QNd6UilvPeeCzFhzY14dVrnB6d0W40GQ1NU7HX99mTQtA/viewform?usp=dialog

And here's some information about some new stuff! I'm currently working on adding a new location type: Mansions, full of expensive loot.

Mansions can of course be assaulted like other locations, but they're heavily guarded so that might not always be the best idea.

Instead, if you haven't managed to piss off the nobility yet, you might be able to walk right through the gate! Fancy nobles are always having each other over for parties and to show off their homes, so if you manage to get an invitation for one of them (or bribe the guards!), and you're dressed the part, you might just be allowed to wander around unimpeded!



Though you may be allowed inside, that doesn't mean you're just allowed to take whatever you want, though. If you're caught stealing, you will get a chance to put the item back, which will prevent everyone from becoming hostile towards you. This will also apply in most other situations where creatures who aren't already hostile towards you catch you stealing.



Once you've gained access to the mansion through peaceful means, there are a variety of nobles inside to talk to. Some may offer mini-quests you can do which will grant small rewards and increase your favor with the nobility, and may even lead to contacting a new faction with plenty of disposable income to throw your way...

[salimbl321]

I've played it before, it's quite fun.

Me too, I find it fun to play.

[Rickton]

Typed up a big update talking about some of the upcoming changes but did it in the browser and accidentally reloaded and lost it all, so here's a shorter, quicker post.

I'm planning to release the next version on May 1, keeping with the more-or-less tradition of releasing on the 1st of the month. (I missed April but this update ended up getting pretty big, and maybe every 2 months is a more reasonable cadence than every month anyway)

The mansions themselves are building and populating nicely, and all the dialog and mini-quests there are done. But the scope of the update got a little bigger than that. As part of developing the non-hostile interactions in the mansion and adding related factions, I ended up expanding factions in general.

Trading with factions now increases your reputation with them over time. And if you become friendly with a faction, they'll send you gifts.


What's the Dorian Club? You'll have to find that out on your own.

A new trespassing/authorized/disguise system when visiting locations has been implemented. Being friendly with a faction lets you freely walk around locations owned by that faction, although if you're seen committing any crimes they'll still become hostile. If you're neutral with them, you might be able to wear certain equipment to blend in and walk around undisturbed instead. But if you're an enemy, they'll be hostile to you no matter what.

The Wizards faction now starts neutral to you, and can be traded with. Wizard towers use the trespassing system detailed above, and as it happens your starting equipment makes you look like a wizard, letting you blend in at the towers.



Vampires can technically become friendly if you kill enough Grievers, and I did enable trading with them so you can sell them blood, but there's not really much interaction there with them yet. I'll be expanding on them in the future though.

A pretty nice technical change is coming in this update too: I've massively decreased the amount of time it takes for maps to generate. The mansion maps are bigger and more complex than the other maps so far and were taking an unacceptable amount of time to generate, so I decided to profile the map generation code and see where the slowdowns were happening.

Turns out that every time a tile was being changed, it was recalculating what the player could see. This is what we want if it happens during regular gameplay, and is not something that happens that often anyway. But when generating a new map, it doesn't need to happen since 1) we refresh the player's sight immediately when they arrive anyway, 2) the player isn't even on the new map yet so doing that is just refreshing the player's sight on the map they're about to leave, and 3) because hundreds of tiles are being changed at the same time, meaning the sight's being refreshed hundreds of times in a row!

The refresh sight code is relatively time consuming - quick enough that it's not an issue once a turn or when a tile changes in play, but doing it hundreds of times definitely adds up. I made it not do that and now all maps are generating in less than a second. Even the test code that generates 50 maps in a row to check for errors, which used to take a few minutes, now takes less than 10 seconds. So that'll make playing the game much nicer.