Official development blog

Author Archives: Kyzrati

The Audio Engine

Any game that wants to play more than just a few sounds, or tie sounds to the game in an interesting way, needs some kind of audio engine. This can range from something as simple as an in-house sound manager with per-sample volume controls to the powerful fully dynamic sound engine that is FMOD. FMOD […]

Posted in Dev Series: Sound Effects, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Responses

Weapon SFX

While there are many non-weapon sound effects to be heard in Cogmind, a majority still belong to gunfire, lasers, explosions, etc. Like working with particle effects, before creating and assigning them to specific weapons the planned sounds were organized into subgroups according to their properties. Many of these properties were already taken into consideration during […]

Posted in Design, Dev Series: Sound Effects | Tagged , , , , | 7 Responses

Sound in Roguelikes

Sound effects are not something you see (hear) in many traditional roguelikes. This makes sense from a developer perspective because there is often such a huge variety of content that it becomes a massive and difficult undertaking to provide sounds for everything. Adding sound effects is akin to adding high-resolution art assets–it detracts from gameplay/mechanics/content […]

Posted in Design, Dev Series: Sound Effects | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Responses

Accommodating Color Blindness

Traditional roguelikes are both at an advantage and disadvantage when it comes to accommodating color blind players. On the one hand recoloring monochrome glyphs is a fairly straightforward process; on the other a game lacking any method of adjusting colors can be difficult for some to play, more so than say a game with unique […]

Posted in Design | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Making Particles

I’ve already written about weapon particle effects, but previous posts have only focused on the results rather than the process behind their creation. Some readers would likely enjoy some elaboration on what went into that whole “week I buried myself in Cogmind scripts.” For everyone else, it’s also a thinly veiled excuse to show some […]

Posted in Design | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Responses