Articles

The Big Bang for computer roleplaying games occurs in 1974 with the release of the Dungeons and Dragons tabletop role-playing game. Almost immediately, wherever computers exist, coders started writing computer roleplaying games….

RPGs are a strange conceit, a party of adventurers, usually in a fantastical but semi-medieval setting working together to fight monsters and get loot. This often involves delving into implausibly deep dungeons,…

Citizen Sleeper is a sci-fi, story-based game released in 2022 by developer Jump Over The Age. It manages to be an engaging narrative game with relatively little art or complicated game mechanics….

Koen Witters is the developer of RPG Playground, a tool that lets you create and share RPGs - no programming required. After working in the mobile games industry for several years programming…

Conversation is a large part of most RPGs. Information about the game world is communicated through conversation; the progress of quests, learning about the worlds background and stories of all sorts. Most…

Constraints encourage creativity. If you’ve never heard this expressed before you might think it sounds wrong or if you’re feeling generous; counter intuitive. But it’s true. If you feel blocked or frustrated…

I’ve seen the numbers; they tell a clear story and it doesn’t have a happy ending. The average person who wants to make a game doesn’t. Only a fraction of aspiring gamedevs…

JRPGs communicate with the player via textboxes. From the contents of a chest at end of a dungeon to the ominious words of the games antagonist; it’s the humble textbox that delivers…

Writing dialog for games should be easy. Most game conversations are simple exchanges. No tricky game code is needed, it’s just two or more people speaking one at a time. By making…

It’s no secret I’m interested in how games model conversation. It’s an interesting challenge on several fronts; you need to consider how content creators author conversations, how the user experience plays out…

Action RPGs give the player realtime control over game characters. This is most noticeable in regards to movement and combat. The term action rpg gets used more often when speaking about console…

This is the seventh article in a series that takes the RPG from the “How to Make an RPG” project and adds a little more polish to one element. In the previous…

This is the sixth article in a series that takes the final mini-RPG from the “How to Make an RPG” project and adds a little more polish to one element. In the…

This is the fifth article in a series that takes the RPG from the “How to Make an RPG” project and adds a little more polish to one element. In the previous…

This is the fourth article in a series that takes the RPG from the “How to Make an RPG” project and adds a little more polish to one element. In the previous…

Combat in an action RPG aka ARPG seems simple; avoid enemy attacks while dishing out your own but even a simple system is made up of many design decisions! In this article…

This is the third article in a series that takes the RPG from the “How to Make an RPG” project and adds a little more polish to one element. In the previous…

It’s hard to find high quality free art for your games. The How to Make an RPG book comes with a nice selection of art but it’s definitely lacking in the undead…

The How to Make an RPG book teaches you how to make three different small RPGs. The first RPG, called “Dungeon”, tasks the player with escaping a dungeon after being captured. Once…

This is the second article in a series that takes the final RPG code from the “How to Make an RPG” project and adds a little more polish to one element. The…

You’ve got three main options when it comes to procuring game art: - Make it yourself

The book “How to Make an RPG” shows you step-by-step how to make three fully featured RPGs. In this article we’ll add a little polish the dialog code that’s used in the…

In the previous article we used the How to Make an RPG game code to build a simple conversation engine like Never Winter Nights. The conversation we implemented was quite basic, in…

In a previous article we looked at the Never Winter Nights conversation system and broke it down a little. In this article we’ll implement a similar system using one of the [How…

A major component of RPG games is talking to people, uncovering motives, accepting quests, learning secrets and talking your way out of tricky situations. But natural language is a hard problem. When…

The How to Make an RPG book uses Lua. Lua is a popular programming language that’s used widely in the game industry. It’s often embedded in a host program. For games the…

Do you find it hard to know where to start when developing a character? People are deep, there’s usually a lot going on. How do you map out inner motivations for your…

Do you use random numbers in your game? Then you’re probably using them in a naive way! Read this article and learn about the psychology of how humans perceive random numbers. Armed…

Deus Ex is one of the best western RPGs. It’s deeply influenced by Ultima Underworld and System Shock but takes place in the near future. Player agency in the world is valued…

Everyone loves finding interesting quests; they drive change in the world and progress the game. To make quests manageable there are few points to consider. A player can actively manage about three…

How are games put together at a high level? How do they work? When starting out, it can be frustrating trying to find the answers to these questions. Game programming articles dive…

RPGs provide different players with different experiences according to their playstyle. When designing an RPG it’s important to remember two things: One: not everybody is the same as you. Two: Not everyone…

Game design is enjoyable. It’s freeing to grab a coffee and brainstorm a million awesome sounding game ideas. This is a good, healthy and necessary thing to do in the early design…

Breaking games into genres is a fool’s errand; the delineations are unclear and they’re constantly shifting. Video games swap and invent new mechanics with each release. Look at the latest versions of…

It’s very easy to describe source control to a game developer. Source control is like a save system for your code. But it’s the best most comprehensive save system ever created. Saving…

Dialog boxes are one of the staple elements of RPGs. They’re used to convey what characters are saying in the game world to the player. It’s a UI element the player is…

Develop and ship. That’s how games are made. It’s a two stage process but most never leave stage one. To release a game you must stop developing and ship. It’s hard to…

Computer science has some really rich concepts and metaphors. One idea is the concept of JIT which stands for Just-In-Time, usually in reference to compilers. The meaning is basically this; if you…

Pixar got something right. That’s undeniable. From Toy Story, Up, Wall-E they can reproducibly create wonderful movies that resonate with audiences. They’re outliers in the movie; from world creation to character to…

Own your creations. You’re making a game, it’s your vision and you should announce that. Put it on the title screen, under the title, written as “by Firstname Lastname”. It’s good for…

Video games change as technology improves and designers have new ideas but do you know the one thing that remains constant? The player. Understanding the player forever improves your ability to make…

B.F. Skinner was the founder of behavioral pyschology and this article contains some laws he discovered. I think they’re interesting in two ways when talking about game design. 1. Applied to the…

Video games are a young medium. We’ve barely started. Games haven’t settled on any final form yet. They’re still in a state of flux and maybe they always will be! As technology…

Games are complex pieces of software. Several things are usually occurring at once on the screen and they all need their state tracking. A relatively new coder trying to write a game…

Do you ever beat yourself up because you think you’re not working hard enough? Or feel you’re not reaching the quality level you desire? You’re not alone and you’re not doing yourself…

The internet is full of great resources for game developers. One of my favorites is this list of corridors from sci-fi movies. You can see the full archive at the website here:…

Guild of Dungeoneering is a game, with board game and RPG roots, that came out recently. It was created by Colm Larkin (initially) and it’s worth taking a look at,…

This is the second part of the first 30 stories I wrote to complete the Thirty Stories a Month Challenge. Hopefully by reading these you’ll realize how low the bar is, and…

You become better at what you continually do. Anyone who starts programming, is bad at programming, then they do it a lot until, as if by magic, one day they’re competent. This…

A hub world is a special level that you continually return to and has exits that lead to new game levels. In RPGs hub worlds are more than that, they’re home for…

Get an intuitive understand of sine waves and you’ll be able to add animations to your game that feel very natural and smooth. In this article we’ll see how to use waves…

In Egyptian mythology there’s a story of how the goddess Isis gained power by tricking Ra into revealing his true name. Know something’s true name you have power over it. There’s a…

Boss battles should never be boring, they should be a singularity pulling all the plot points of a game together, something the makes player question if they’re really witnessing what’s happening. A…

Let’s learn some Lua. Lua (not LUA) is an elegant language with a simple syntax. It’s widely used by games developers. Lua is easy to embed in other programs so you might…

Blank page anxiety can be a problem for all creatives! You want to make a start on your epic story but when you sit down to write, nothing happens. That’s a great…

RPGs are driven by story and setting. The world you explore, the people you meet and the way the world changes are the big appeal of RPG games. But how do you…

You’re an aspiring game developer. You want to make and release an awesome game to share with the world. This is hard. Far harder than say, writing a book. It’s an alchemic…

Final Fantasy 1 is one of the earliest games to use dialog boxes for conversation. It helped define many of the conventions we associate with RPG dialog today. RPGs display a lot…

Making an RPG is a big undertaking. A complete computer role-play game requires a lot of code and content creation. It’s easy to get fired up and inspired to start making your…

Zelda does lock and key puzzles very well and it’s worth taking a little time to see exactly how it achieves this. We can apply the ideas and techniques we discover to…

Recently I read a tweet that made me think about how games have a kind of dual nature. On one side games are a personal expression by the creators and on the…

Cultural discourse is always in a state of flux, established viewpoints try to discredit upstarts. You can see this in the satanic panic around Dungeons and Dragons were newspapers around the US…

A lot of our knowledge and beliefs are adopted uncritically and unconsciously as we grow up. If we critically examined some of these beliefs we’d immediately see them to be ludicrous. Modern…

When making your RPG, a consistent, fleshed out game-world improves the player experience and makes development easier. But where to start? This brief article will you give all the prompts you need…

Everyone loves adventures; magic crystals, orcs, world saving, the return of ancient magics, being the chosen one and so on, but isn’t there more out there? JRPGs tend to stick to fantasy…

Recently I’ve been playing Shadowrun Returns, a solid PC RPG with a cyberpunk setting. I’m nearing the end of game and my crew of cyberpunk hackers and mercenaries are trying to bring…

I’ve previously written about stats in RPGs but I avoided talking about one of the most important RPG stats; the level! Levels are such a unique stat they need examining all on…

I’m writing have written a book called How To Make an RPG. I wrote this article while mulling over the combat section; it discusses stats in JRPG games. I suggest a basic…

The Lock and Key Design Pattern takes it’s name from literal lock and key puzzles in many computer games. Take Doom for example, each level has a start and exit but usually…