Official development blog

Category Archives: GUI

Message Log

Arguably the most vital part of a traditional roguelike’s interface, a message log gives the player all those details that might otherwise be depicted by (or lost in the confusion of) greater graphical detail. It’s also a nice after-the-fact record of why you find yourself flirting with the brink of death when things suddenly start […]

Posted in GUI | Tagged , , , | 12 Responses

F1 Help

Context help, already available for item and robot stats as described in an older post, is great for getting a bit of useful information on the fly. Unfortunately by it’s very purpose the distributed approach is limited to concise at-a-glance explanations that won’t bog the player down with excessive immersion-breaking text while in the middle […]

Posted in GUI | Tagged , , , , | 2 Responses

Part Info Visualization Modes

I recently entered “tired of seeing notes about future tasks that could easily be done now” mode, wherein every few weeks I attack all those little comments that have piled up here and there while working on bigger features (most recently hacking). One result was the addition of new visualization modes for data about your […]

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

Hacking, the Interface

As previously mentioned, there is no hacking “mini-game.” We don’t want to interrupt the flow of a game that can otherwise be quick to play (if that’s your style). Thus the process of hacking emphasizes a very quick “in and out fast” approach. Hacking Process Hacking a machine is a pretty straightforward process. Bump into […]

Also posted in Mechanics | Tagged , , , , | 3 Responses

Context Help

The casual player can get by for a while in Cogmind without paying too much attention to the details. Just strap on a power source, some legs, a weapon or two and you’re good to go. But a majority of players will no doubt be looking to tweak and optimize their build, and to do […]

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