// The art

A hand-painted roguelike deckbuilder

A deck-building roguelike, two years in the painting: every card, every enemy, every event.

Flat colour, heavy outline, glyph vocabulary — the codex look.

Why it looks like that

Xalli is a roguelike deckbuilding game set in Aztec mythology, painted by hand in the style of the ancient codices.

Mexica manuscripts have a specific visual grammar: flat colour, a heavy confident outline, figures shown in profile, and a glyph vocabulary that carries meaning rather than decoration. Xalli follows that grammar instead of the airbrushed fantasy look most deckbuilders default to.

What is actually hand-painted

• Every card in the game has its own painting.
• Every enemy has painted idle and special-attack animation.
• Every event has its own illustration.
• Status icons, glyphs and map nodes are drawn in the same vocabulary.

The main page has a making-of section with the timeline, from the first sketches through to the current art.

The game underneath

Art aside, it is a roguelike deckbuilder in the Slay the Spire lineage: turn-based card combat, telegraphed enemy intents, relics and a branching map — plus five lineages, cooking between fights, faction totems, and fights against several enemies at once.

Questions

Is there an indie deckbuilder with hand-drawn art?
Xalli is one — every card, enemy and event is painted by hand in the style of the ancient Aztec codices, with flat colour and heavy outlines rather than the usual airbrushed fantasy art.

Can I see the process?
Yes — the main page at playxalli.com has a making-of section with a timeline of the art from the earliest sketches to the current pass.

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