Hi rabbit, welcome and thanks for putting so much effort into your feedback!
I have to start by saying that
before this topic gets backburnered and filed away due to lack of feedback.
this has unfortunately already happened. (That's why I went ahead and finally implemented the
world map UI which was waiting on the backburner for a while since like many other parts of the UI it, too, would be developed based on fundamental assumptions surrounding the UI dimensions and layout.)
There simply wasn't enough feedback or desire to justify the investment. In fact, there were about as many players/followers speaking out
against a change. (And to put it in context, thousands of people, both current and potential players, were informed of this analysis and asked to comment, after which I waited a month to collect feedback from a dozen different social media platforms, so it's not like this flew under the radar or anything
)
To address your points: Aside from the design issues mentioned in the OP/analysis, Cogmind is unlike most other games in that it adheres to a traditional roguelike terminal window (
not just aesthetically but also in terms of architecture!) and therefore features like selective zooming and minimaps don't work.
I certainly agree that ideally Cogmind would have smaller grid dimensions, which is why I took this under serious consideration in the first place, though it's too late for the required changes to the game's fundamental structure that would ripple throughout the source and put it even further behind schedule.
Might it be possible to add support for menu & UI themes/color schemes? For example, I could read text on this forum's gray theme all day.
It's possible and already partially supported, though won't happen in the near term. I've written about it before
here. Not sure how far I'll go with that, and it'll likely not be until after 1.0 before I look at it again. The main thing I worry about is that development won't be sustainable indefinitely, so I have to prioritize features by importance relative to the core game... (If money weren't an issue, sure we could guarantee everything
)
About the t/m/i, note that you can press 't' 'm' and 'i' to access those, which is quicker than clicking on those small buttons. Not ideal for someone who wants to take advantage of full mouse control, of course. Since you bring it up, I'll eventually look into potential support for an alternative fullscreen mode that uses a borderless window. Most players prefer true fullscreen as opposed to windowed fullscreen, so that's what the engine was built on.
