Cogmind Returns

That’s right, your favorite modular robot is powering up once again, this time as the star of a commercial project by the newly formed Grid Sage Games.

First, some history for those new to my work: Cogmind began as a game for the 2012 Seven Day Roguelike Challenge, after which it underwent a couple months of UI updates by player request, fared well in the official committee voting, and eventually went on to be voted top 7DRL in the Roguelike of the Year 2012 poll over on Ascii Dreams (see summary).

The game shares many features generally associated with traditional roguelikes, including single-player turn-based gameplay, procedural generation, fog of war, an inventory/equipment system, item identification, ASCII visuals, and, of course, permadeath.

To that the original version added a unique system of building and re-building yourself from spare parts both found and salvaged (the focus of the gameplay), along with particle effects and an animated interface enabled by the X@COM engine it’s built on. So after playing for a little while you could end up with a list of attached “parts” something like this:

Future posts will explore more of Cogmind’s original features and how they will be improved; for now I’ll just say that the new Cogmind will take the 7DRL “prototype” and expand it in multiple directions. The overall result will be an immersive robot experience with gameplay as deep or simple as your play style makes it.

Design docs are written, and coding has already begun, initially working towards this mockup:

MOCKUP!
(I’ll be looking for someone to partner with on this project to do a few sprite sheets for an optional “sprite mode,” but you’ll still be seeing some ASCII art via REXPaint)

There is no set release date (besides “2014”), but if you sign up for the newsletter (see sidebar) you’ll be notified when a playable demo is available. This blog will also be regularly updated with the latest development progress, and/or you can follow along through Facebook or Twitter, if you prefer.