This guy just sold me on his game with the health bar alone

Regularly takes damage.

Ever heard of Mirklurk: Every Step Matters? Nope, me neither. That is, until a video from its solo dev called "Rethinking the health bar" came across my desk. The dev in question is Mattias Myde, and he's revolutionising this oldest of videogame building blocks by converting it from a simple resource pool into a sort of quasi-Battleship arrangement, where your weapons do damage patterns, not numbers, and enemy health pools become big maps of tiles, just waiting to be cleared.