Persistent damage to your main character is a staple in the roguelike genre. Without it every battle would be all-or-nothing: lose the entire run or continue with at full strength.

Unfortunately RTS fights are, by their very nature, pretty all or nothing.

A while back I started writing a post going through all the roguelike deckbuilder tropes, and discussing how I’m considering using (or not using) them. Turns out that was going to be a MASSIVE post, so the new plan is to discuss just one trope at a time, in an ongoing series.

Today’s post is short and sweet: just me sharing two awesome pieces of card art from Antoci Bogdan!

A couple months ago I sustained a repetitive strain injury in both my wrists, from spending too much time on technology, and too much time lifting my two small kids.

While resting, I spent a lot of time doing business research in the indie games space. Here are some of my findings:

The Unity game engine has changed it’s pricing model, and game developers everywhere are outraged.

I get why some kind of change was necessary. Unity is popular but it’s not profitable, so they need to charge their customers more.

But the exact details are bad enough that my current plan is to pause development for at least a couple weeks to see if they backtrack. If they don’t, I’m planning to restart in a new engine.

I used to think the biggest barrier to making games was coding.

It only took a few small hobby projects for me realize the truth: most games have a lot of art.

Over the years I’ve thought about what it would take to make a stand-alone game in the same genre, and dismissed the project as too big. Fans of KeyStone occasionally ask about the idea too. But yeah, “too big” I told them.

Over the last year or so my thinking on this began to change.