Every solo game developer arrives at the same wall. The systems work, the loop is fun, and the game looks like placeholder art, because art is the one part of game development that does not get faster when you get better at programming.
In 2026 there is an obvious answer to that, and Max Shawabkeh declined it. “I decided to try remixing public-domain historical art instead.”
Worlds Upon The Wind is out on Steam after about 18 months of development, and its look comes from 1600s Japanese woodblock prints.
What the game is
It is a deckbuilder, and — unusually — one with nothing to kill. “Since I’ve always preferred making non-violent games,” Shawabkeh says, and the result is a game about restoration and balance rather than combat.
The core mechanic is matching glyphs to essence slots. Glyph cards carry essence icons; slots are filled with glyphs whose essence matches. What those slots do is where it gets interesting: setting up farms, connecting cities to the capital, countering natural disasters, choosing scouting actions. It is the deckbuilder grammar — draw, play, improve the deck — pointed at infrastructure and recovery instead of damage numbers.
The repository describes it as “a peaceful roguelite deckbuilder about resettling a shattered world,” which is a better one-line pitch than most funded games manage.
How the art was actually made
This is the part worth studying, because it is a reproducible method rather than a stylistic preference.
Static illustrations are whole woodblock prints, recoloured to the game’s palette and edited in Photoshop — mostly, revealingly, with the Clone Stamp tool. That is the honest detail: remixing historical art at production scale is largely patient cloning and retouching, not clever filtering.
The procedurally generated map is cut from pieces of a 1600s travel guide by Hishikawa Moronobu, following an approach by K. M. Alexander, with the pieces coloured to indicate material layers. Using a period travel guide as the tile source for a procedural map is a genuinely elegant idea: a travel guide is already a set of modular depictions of places, drawn to be legible at small size and to tile conceptually. The source material was pre-adapted to the job four hundred years before the job existed.
Shaders do the work that the prints cannot. A fragment shader applies colours and textures to the sprites; a vertex shader animates trees and rivers to suggest wind or rushing water. Woodblock prints are static by nature, and ukiyo-e has a whole visual vocabulary for motion — stylised water, bent grass, driven rain — that is drawn rather than moving. Displacing those drawn forms with a vertex shader animates the convention rather than faking physical movement, which is why it reads as the same artwork breathing rather than as a cutout being wobbled.
Where the prints ran out, he drew: the 200-plus structures were partly drawn from scratch in a matching style, as were the UI, the relic icons and the animal companions. That is the real cost of the approach, and the reason it is not a shortcut.
The engineering
It is built in Godot, mostly GDScript, with the map generation system ported to C++ through GDExtension — the standard and correct shape for a Godot project that hits a performance wall in one subsystem. Shawabkeh previously worked in Unreal Engine.
And the licensing closes the loop: the game is open source and released into the public domain, with code and assets on GitHub. The repository max99x/wutw-public is CC0-1.0 and carries 244 stars since being created on 12 September 2026.
Think about what that means in combination. He took public-domain art, made a game from it, and put the result back into the public domain under the most permissive instrument available. The provenance chain is coherent from end to end, which is not a claim many games built on borrowed visual culture can make.
Why this matters beyond one game
The public-domain route is being treated, in 2026, as the ethical alternative to generated art. This is a worked example of what it actually costs: Photoshop retouching at scale, 200 hand-drawn structures to fill the gaps, shader work to add the motion the source cannot provide, and a scholarly dependency on somebody else’s four-hundred-year-old book. It is not cheaper than generating. It is slower, and it produces something with a traceable lineage and a coherent visual logic, because every element came out of one historical hand.
The shortest version of the argument is the game’s own licence file.
Sources
- Crafting a Non-Violent Post-Apocalyptic Deckbuilder Inspired by Japanese Woodblock Prints — 80 Level
- max99x/wutw-public on GitHub
- Godot GDExtension documentation
- CC0 1.0 Universal