This article originally ran in Back Alley Games Issue 19, September 2025

In programmer Nick Kalita’s world, Mavis Beacon teaches magic.

Wordlock, Kalita’s top-down, illustrated dungeon crawler, merges the word-based combat of Typing of the Dead (WOW Entertainment, 1999) with the frantic pace of Enter the Gungeon (Dodge Roll, 2016).

Players control a “Word Warlock,” a robed figure who fights by conjuring the arcane using a keyboard, vanquishing them by sheer force of their words per minute.

“The gameplay consists of players having to navigate levels, dodge enemies, and physically spell out their spells with their keyboard in order to eliminate enemies,” Kalita said. “As a result, the game is constantly bouncing between two different states of play.”

Contrary to the simplicity of the premise, Wordlock has a group of ever-changing mechanics that take the typing game genre as far as it can go.

Word Warlocks must contend with curses that force them to mash keys to escape or change their letters into directional arrows, among other effects.

The visuals and sounds come courtesy of composer and artist Will Carlson, and taken alongside the novel gameplay, the finished project is a truly unique experience.

“Will jumped onto making all the music and creating new art a couple of months into the project,” Kalita said. “His work injected a huge amount of personality into the experience, and he’s totally aligned on the mission statement that everything needs to relate to typing.”

Kalita, for his part, is the game’s lead programmer and developer, a role he both came to late and one he fills as a hobby in addition to his day job.

After taking a game development course in his senior year, he became addicted to the medium, spending more “overkill time” on the course than he ever had before. However, after graduation, life got in the way.

“I fell into the classic trap of always talking about making games without actually doing much of the sort for years,” he said.

But, in 2024, Kalita decided that if he wanted to pursue game development, he just had to go and do it, otherwise he never would. He embraced the idea of failure and strived to program every day in an effort to get better and enrich his day-to-day life.

“I’m a hobbyist and have zero credentials on this subject, but if someone is reading this and can resonate with the feeling of really wanting to start a craft or skill, I highly encourage you to sit down and write a series of tiny goals you can pursue over the course of the next 2-4 weeks,” he said.

Kalita continued: “My first goal was literally just to open Godot every day for a week and learn something new.”

That goal led directly to Wordlock, which Kalita began as a project to learn how to implement state machines in Godot. After falling in love with the concept of following the fun in the game’s design, it spiraled into the yearlong project it is today.

“While the game has always been about spelling your spells, the actual mechanics of how that plays has completely changed many times,” he said.

In fact, Kalita’s whole approach to development is centered on this constant state of change, something he attributed to Balatro developer LocalThunk and Stardew Valley’s ConcernedApe.

LocalThunk’s approach taught Kalita that the feedback of playtesters may lead to the feeling of “wasted work” if key features aren’t testing well, but that listening to your audience makes a project better and refines your skills as a developer.

He applied that advice to Wordlock, which was originally a much slower-paced exploration game where players would experiment with different word combinations to unlock new spells.

“On paper that sounded super fun and engaging, but once it was built it was clear that it wasn’t working and players were falling back to typing the same word over and over again,” Kalita said. “Looking at you, fireball.”

Wordlock isn’t finished yet, and given the developer’s approach, it’s likely to change many more times before players can buy it on Steam, an inevitability that has been one of Kalita’s goals for a while.

“I want someone with no personal connection to me to discover, purchase, and ultimately enjoy playing the game,” he said. “The idea of a complete stranger somewhere else in the world enjoying something I created is incredibly exciting and motivating.”

Wishlist Wordlock on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3584330/Wordlock/