A deep dive into career anxieties, 10 years of board game design, discovering Vibe Coding, and evolving Hearts Extreme into an open-hand card puzzle.
Read Full Log![[DevLog #02] Hearts Extreme: Development Journey Until June](assets/devlog/devlog_02_published_boardgames.png)
Hwantastic Games is a solo indie video game studio based in South Korea.
The word “Hwantastic” is, as you might guess, a playful pun on the word “Fantastic”. I borrowed this term after seeing it used by my favorite music artist.
There is a famous Korean singer named Lee Seung Hwan, whom I have been a fan of since middle school. Beyond loving his music, I deeply admired his attitude toward his craft. He was renowned for making massive investments in album production and took immense pride in staging the largest-scale live concerts in Korea. Even in his sixties, he is still actively performing on stage, which I find incredibly inspiring. Although we work in different fields, his dedication to his work is something I constantly learn from.
The title of his 9th studio album was “Hwantastic”. I thought the name was extraordinarily witty and fun, and I made a quiet promise to myself: “If I ever start a game company one day, I’m going to name it Hwantastic Games.” Since my own given name also contains “Hwan”, I felt it was the perfect name to represent who I am.
However, lacking the technical skills to build video games entirely on my own and without the courage to quit my day job to launch a startup, I never thought I would actually get the chance to found a studio. But with the advent of the Vibe Coding era, new opportunities arose to create video games as a side passion, which eventually led to the need to incorporate an official studio entity.
Even though nearly 20 years have passed since the release of that album, amazingly no one else had registered the name, allowing me to safely secure the domain. Launching the Hwantastic Games website really made me feel like a successful fan who achieved a dream.
Having revealed my favorite singer, fellow Koreans might already be able to guess my age group! I have worked in the video game industry for over 20 years, and I have also been active as a board game designer for nearly a decade.
As a solo developer, Hwantastic Games will always strive to find the sweet spot where “games I personally want to create” and “games players will love” meet. I will do my absolute best to bring fun and memorable gaming experiences to players around the world.
