Systems The parts that outlive the game they were written for. Each one is a build-along tutorial that starts from the simplest thing that works, shows you the exact point where it breaks, and only then earns the more complicated version.
State Machines Every character you write starts the same way. One boolean: is_jumping. Then is_attacking. Then is_dashing, can_move, is_hurt, is_dead. Six booleans have sixty-four combinations, and you meant abou… 5 docs · updated Jul 20, 2026
Enemy AI An enemy that always knows where you are is not difficult, it is cheap. It turns to face you through a wall. It starts moving before you round the corner. Every death it hands you feels arbitrary,… 5 docs · updated Jul 21, 2026
Pathfinding Your enemy chases the player and it looks alive, right up until the player steps behind a wall. Then it presses its face into the brick and stays there. The reflex fix is A, and roughly half the ti… 6 docs · updated Jul 20, 2026
Steering & Flocking Your enemies walk in straight lines toward the player and stop dead on arrival. Twenty of them end up stacked on the same pixel. This shelf replaces that with one equation applied over and over: st… 6 docs · updated Jul 20, 2026
Boss Fights You gave the enemy ten times the health and it did not become a boss. The player still wins by holding attack and out-healing the damage, or loses to a hit that arrived with no warning — and cannot… 5 docs · updated Jul 21, 2026
Inventory Almost nobody gets an inventory right the first time, and the reason is always the same: they start from the grid of squares on screen. The squares are the last thing you should build. Start there… 4 docs · updated Jul 20, 2026
Save & Load Saving is the honest audit of your codebase. Every shortcut you took — state hidden inside a UI node, a value you can only recover by reading a sprite's position, a manager that rebuilds itself fro… 4 docs · updated Jul 20, 2026
Main Menus The menu is the first thing a stranger touches and the last thing you build. That order is why menus are usually bad. You wire a Start button, hit a paused menu that pauses itself, save settings to… 5 docs · updated Jul 20, 2026
Event Bus A coin is collected. The HUD counter should increase, an achievement should tick, a sound should play, and the tutorial popup should dismiss itself. The coin is fifteen nodes away from every one of… 3 docs · updated Jul 20, 2026