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Category Archives: Design

UI Feedback: Map Dynamics 2.0

A while back I mentioned a design initiative based on the concept of “map dynamics,” aimed at increasing player focus on the map area as opposed to the message log or other windows. After the initial spate of related features and animations, this part of development was put on hold as the rest of the […]

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The Player is Always Right: An Existential Approach to Game AI

This post is not exactly as philosophical as the title might suggest, just a catchy way to paraphrase what I consider the best way to handle artificial intelligence in games. In short, as long as there aren’t any glaring oddities in a mob’s behavior the player will tend to justify what’s going on by whatever […]

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Font Creation

Finding the perfect font can be difficult, even more so if you’re also hoping that font will offer a unique appearance associated with your game. You’ll often come across fonts that possess several of the right qualities but have other drawbacks, especially when taking into consideration the many factors covered in the previous post about […]

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Fonts in Roguelikes

The first aspect of a traditional roguelike viewers tend to notice is the color palette, but when it comes down to actually playing a game which requires interpreting large amounts of text, color takes a backseat to the importance of the font. Characters/glyphs form not only words and sentences, they even represent the map and […]

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Robots

Cogmind is a game about robots, so it’s about time we talk about them (finally!). It’s taken quite a while to get to this point because robots are built upon the game mechanics and items (and to an extent, the story), so holding off on this central element enables us to consider the full range […]

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