MathMon Quest: A Math RPG I Built for My Kids

The Problem

My kids are homeschooled, and our house runs analog. No iPads, movies only on the weekend, the computer is for school and not much else. For a couple of years they have used XtraMath, which is a genuinely great program. The problem was never that they could not do the work. It was that they did exactly as much as the day required and not one second more. The moment the timer let them off the hook, they were gone.

They did not need the help. I wanted to give them a reason to keep going anyway, to make math something they chose to come back to instead of something they endured.

There is also a specific kind of joy in watching your kids play with something you made. A fort, a tree house, a game. That was part of the why from the start.

Why Pokemon

When I went looking for a hook, Pokemon was the obvious one. It was everywhere when I was a kid and somehow it is bigger now. Mine live on the outskirts of it. They collect cards, trade with the neighbors, and sell them off the same table as their lemonade stand. All of that actually happens on our street. It feels like the 90s again.

It was also a world I knew intimately. I grew up on these games and understood exactly why the loop pulled you back in. So the idea came quickly: take what the games already reward, fast recall and quick decisions, and make that the thing my kids get rewarded for. Blend their math practice into a real game where the answers have consequences.

What MathMon Quest Is

MathMon Quest is an original creature catching RPG. You play a young trainer who explores a pixel world, walks through towns and grass and caves, finds creatures in the wild, and battles trainers and gym leaders along the way.

The difference is the battle system. You never choose an attack. You answer math. Speed and accuracy of recall decide who lands the hit and how hard. Answer fast and correct and your creature strikes hard and always connects. Hesitate and the enemy gets the upper hand. Miss and you take the hit. It turns fluency into a skill you can feel rather than a test you sit through.

The world itself is the math journey. You start in addition and travel outward through subtraction, multiplication, and division, with a gym standing between you and each new power. Meadow Town and Sumwood Trail for addition. Minus Marsh and Difference Cave for subtraction. Factor Farm, Product Peaks, Quotient Coast, and the Division Dojo from there. The creatures are original too, like Embercub, Leafloo, and Aquabbit, so none of it leans on anyone else's characters.

Behind it sits a question bank of 1,355 problems across twelve tiers, from beginning addition all the way to expanded division. I built the whole thing with Claude Code, which meant that as a designer I could ship a real, playable game instead of a prototype that only lived in my head.

The Design

A few decisions mattered more than the rest.

Fluency, not punishment. Losing should never feel like failing. When a kid gets one wrong, the game does not send them backward. It plateaus, holding them in the current tier and serving the same level of facts until they are genuinely ready to move on. The message is never "you failed." It is "you are not quite there yet, get up and try again."

Progress you earn, not progress you are handed. Beating a gym does not automatically unlock the next operation. The game watches for real fluency first, accuracy and speed and consistency over time. A kid can win the gym and still hear that their creature wants a little more practice before learning the next power. It keeps the reward honest and the difficulty matched to where they actually are.

Sneaky math everywhere. I added a coin and shopping system so the kids can save up to buy items for their own house in the game. Which is, of course, another math problem in disguise. They have to work out how many monsters they need to beat to afford the TV they want. They think they are decorating. They are doing word problems.

The Moment I Knew

The real test was the first time they played. I gave no instructions on purpose, because I wanted to see how they would approach it cold. They sat down and just knew what to do. Within minutes they were leveling up and tearing through everything I had built.

Then the questions started. Can I have my own house? Can I go to the other land yet? I want to fight another boss. I want to see my MathMon guy. Can I dress differently?

For a designer, that is the whole job in one sitting. Zero onboarding, and a roadmap being written in real time by the people actually using it. I got back to work fast, because the last thing I wanted was to lose that momentum.

Where It Is Now

It is part of the daily rhythm. They still do their XtraMath, and then they get to play MathMon. Both of them love it. I got the core mechanics right early, which means the work now is the fun part: expanding the world, adding creatures, building the next gym, and chasing the things they keep asking for. They are already dreaming up worlds I have not built yet. That is exactly where I hoped this would land.

What I Learned

The instinct here is the same one that runs through the rest of my work. Find the real problem, which in this case was motivation and not ability. Design for the person actually in front of you, watch how they behave instead of how you assumed they would, and build forgiveness into the system so people want to keep going rather than feeling punished for being human.

I just happened to get to do it for the two people I care about most, and watch them play with something I made.

Selected Work

Play It Yourself

MathMon Quest is live and still growing. If you want to feel the loop for yourself, grab a creature, answer a few questions, and see how fast you can take down the first gym, you can play MathMon Quest here. Bring a kid if you have one nearby. They will probably beat you.