We’re all familiar with the idea of a health bar. You have a bar full of points and every time you get hit you lose some of them. When your points run out it’s game over. Health bars have been a staple in videogames for decades now, and for good reason. They provide a quick […]

Lots of game have unique, hand drawn animations for every character. You can create some really awesome animations this way, but you also need a pretty big animation budget. The total number of animations you’ll need is the number of characters times the number of animated actions, so just 10 characters each with 10 actions […]

Games are really complex. They often have hundreds of moving parts that interact with each other in subtle and surprising ways. “Subtractive Design” is one way of coping with this complexity. The idea is you first throw a bunch of different ideas into your game just to see what sticks. You then steadily subtract the […]

The first major update for Patch Quest is now available! This video will run you through the changes: You just need to open Patch Quest and the update will automatically download. If you don’t have Patch Quest yet, you can download it here. Have a question? Want to comment? Head over to the forums. I’d love […]

Suppose we’re playing a game of chess. Your pawn is at E2 and you want to move it to E4, so you pick it up and put it on that square. E2 is a legal position and so is E4. But, technically speaking, the space between those points is not a legal position. When you […]

In a lot of games the various enemy types are all very similar. They might have different amounts of HP or move slightly differently but in general they’re often more or less the same. In Patch Quest I wanted to make sure that every creature is mechanically unique, rather than a re-skinned or re-statted copy […]