Official development blog

Author Archives: Kyzrati

Adjustable Difficulty

Roguelikes are notoriously difficult. In this way they’re really no different from games of old, across numerous genres, which many players were far from guaranteed of completing. It’s only today that roguelikes have become more uniquely associated with difficulty because the market around them has changed so much! There will always be an additional layer […]

Posted in Design | Tagged , , , | 10 Responses

Pricing a Roguelike

Price, funding, revenue, development costs… these are not terms traditionally associated with roguelikes. The situation has changed significantly over the past several years, though. Not only are there many more roguelikes these days, but some of them (*gasp*) even cost real money! Having made the leap from years of hobbydev to years of commercial roguelikedev, […]

Posted in Gamedev, Marketing | Tagged , , , , , | 12 Responses

Map Prefabs, in Depth

An increasingly common approach to roguelike map development today is to have content partially determined by so-called “prefabs,” with layouts which are hand-made rather than fully procedurally generated. Doing so gives a designer more control over the experience, or portions of it at least, without completely supplanting the advantages of roguelike unpredictability. Prefabs are a […]

Posted in Design, Dev Series: Procedural Maps | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Responses

Year 3 of the Cogmind

Unbelievable… I’ve been working on Cogmind for three and a half years now. Yet another year has gone by, and this time the end is very much in sight! To start off, as I did for 2014 and 2015 here’s a collage of development images from the past year: GIFs outnumbered PNGs about three-to-one, but an […]

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Improving the Hacking Experience

The terrible curse of gamedev is that it’s really hard to finish a game when there’s always something that could be better. The great thing about gamedev is that there’s always something that could be better, meaning room for more new features and content to make players happy :D The previous round of major UI […]

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