Forest of MATH

About This Game

This is a game I made for my 8-year old who loves games, but doesn’t like to practice math. In the game, the damage dealt to enemies is a result of calculations. This means that results which are harder to compute are more beneficial to the gameplay. I was surprised that he would estimate and compute hard ones first, because it meant beating the enemies in style.

Features:

• explore the forest
• fight monsters in turn-based combat
• cast mathemagic spells
• compute damage with addition and subtraction up to 200, and multiplication up to 100
• find map scrolls to help you navigate the maze, or health upgrades to beat bosses
• collect magic digits to build your numeric spells

Is it hard?

• In the early game the enemies are weaker, and there’s more room for error.
• Later enemies have more HP and hit harder, but the player can still win with a couple of errors. Sometimes the battles can be won quickly, if the player gets lucky with digits chosen for calculations. For example, 98+98 does massive damage.
• Bosses require precise computation. Even then, make sure you collect most of the health upgrades before attacking.

What’s the Forest like?

• The map is procedurally a generated maze – different every time you start a new game.
• Monster and treasure placement is also randomised.
• Sometimes you might get map upgrades at the very start, another time you might get health upgrades instead.
• Order in which you gain the digits is also random. You might start with something easy as 2 and 6, and doing math like 26+2 or 62-2. Or you might get 8 or 9 quickly, which is more challenging, for example to compute: 83-38.