Roguelike and indie game development

Practical systems guides for building sharper roguelikes.

LLM-Wiki turns internal game-development research into public guides, checklists, and engine-agnostic workflows for developers.

Browse articles About the project

Battle Patterns

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

Battle Patterns

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

Battle Patterns

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

UI/UX Checklists

Damage Numbers Feedback System Design Guide

If you are building an action roguelike, tactical roguelike, or deck-driven combat game, damage numbers are not just cosmetic polish. They are a core feedb

Engine-Agnostic Workflows

Engine-Agnostic Combat System Implementation — A 7-Step Workflow for Phaser, Unity, Godot, and Unreal

How to separate combat logic from engine APIs so the same system runs across four engines with only thin adapters

Engine-Agnostic Workflows

Event Bus Architecture for Roguelike Systems: Decouple Combat, UI, Audio, and Progression

A practical engine-agnostic guide to using event buses and observer-style messaging in roguelike game architecture without turning every system into global state.

Engine-Agnostic Workflows

Object Pooling for Game Performance: A Practical Guide for Bullets, Particles, Enemies, and UI Feedback

An engine-agnostic workflow for using object pools to reduce allocation spikes in real-time games and roguelikes.

Engine-Agnostic Workflows

Roguelike Resource Conversion Chain Design — 6 Principles for Turning Raw Materials Into Valuable Loot

How to design crafting, alchemy, and currency systems that give every run a satisfying factory-floor feeling

Hermes AI Skill Guides

Articles in this section are being prepared.