Guide
Enemy AI State Machine Design: A Practical Guide for Roguelikes
Your enemy needs to detect the player, chase, attack, and flee. A simple if-else chain works for two or three states, but as behaviors grow — boss phase tr
Jun 28, 2026
Battle Patterns6 live guides
Battle Patterns
Combat pacing, risk, stagger, and enemy behavior.
Guide
Session Tension Curve Design: Controlling Player Emotion as a System
Your difficulty curve looks correct on paper. Enemies get tougher as rooms progress, bosses spike at the end — yet players report feeling nothing. After th
Jun 28, 2026
GuideFeatured
Combat Loop Pacing: Designing Tension-Relief Cycles for Roguelike Encounters
You built a difficulty curve. Rooms get harder. Bosses scale. And yet players say every fight feels the same. Health bars drop, tension spikes for a moment
Jun 27, 2026
Guide
Combat Risk/Reward Tuning Gates — How Spelunky, Hades, and Dead Cells Make Players Choose to Suffer
A structural pattern for roguelike difficulty scaling that treats risk-reward as tunable gates, not a single difficulty slider
Jun 27, 2026
Guide
The Interrupt Meta — How Stagger, Priority, and Cancel Windows Create Combat Depth
A pattern for making combat feel like rock-paper-scissors instead of a DPS race
Jun 27, 2026
Guide
Status Effect Propagation Architecture — How Chain Lightning, Contagion, and Freeze-Shatter Work in Games
A data-driven pattern for spatial status effect spread that prevents infinite loops and frame spikes
Jun 27, 2026