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Category Archives: Design

Sound Design in Cogmind, a How-to

Previous coverage of the audio development process has taken a look at everything except working with individual sound samples. They are of course the building blocks of the entire system–if they aren’t appropriate and each working to enhance the overall experience, then the game is better off mute. That would save a lot of time, […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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