Official development blog

Category Archives: Design

Iterative UI Design

Today I’d like to share the process behind the development of a singular UI feature, in particular the part (equipment)-sorting implementation, which is a good example of taking a simple premise and working it one step at a time, examining the results of each new element added throughout the process until as a whole it […]

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Fabrication

Fabrication has just been redone, and it is good. I wrote a little about Fabricators a long while back when they were first introduced to Cogmind as a new feature we didn’t have in the 7DRL, allowing you to build robots and parts if you could get your hands on the schematics and meet other […]

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FOV Aesthetics

At its most basic, displaying field of vision in a roguelike is simply a matter of whether you see a cell or don’t. These cells are in view–draw them; those cells aren’t–don’t draw them :P But there can be more to it than that! There are plenty of ways to get better-looking FOV, though before […]

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Generating and Populating Caves

Before this point, the vast majority of Cogmind maps have fallen under the room-and-corridor style generation. The wide range of adjustable parameters, when combined with a variety of themed content (and prefabs!), give that one style plenty of potential to create a unique feel and gameplay for different areas of the world. That said, roguelikes […]

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Dialogue UI

I recently added the third and final dialogue-related UI feature to Cogmind, so it’s time for a review of what all these different ways of displaying who says what are doing in the game :D Message Log This is the obvious one–any NPC dialogue is added to the message log for future reference if necessary, […]

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