Wildhand

Problem

A poker-hand roguelike deckbuilder needs its core loop — build a hand, play or discard, beat the target — to feel good before anything else gets built on it. Wildhand is a desktop prototype built to surface that felt moment fast, in LÖVE rather than a browser stack, keeping the test rails dependency-free.

Approach

LÖVE 11.5 and pure Lua, with the rules engine holding zero love.* calls so every mechanic is testable headless through love . --test. The ante-1 gauntlet is playable end to end: deal eight cards, click up to five, play or discard against an escalating target, win or bust with a replay. 59 tests are green, backed by a frame-by-frame visual pass that caught three layout defects the test suite alone missed.

Currently building: seeing it played, the owner's verdict was blunt — "pretty much a direct copy of Balatro's first round," since the chip-and-mult table and ante-1 targets were inherited unchanged from the design doc's placeholder tuning. That's now a tracked, blocking issue: original numbers and a signature mechanic that changes how a hand gets built, before the quirk system, shop, or ante progression go in.

Outcome

It runs locally; the repo is private. The core loop works; the game becoming its own game, and not Balatro's, is the current gate.