Official development blog

Category Archives: Design

The Scrap Engine

Last time I wrote about item variants and randomization in roguelikes, and how Cogmind is purely based on a large set of static items, but more recently I’ve been running an experiment to play with not-so-static items. The entire mechanic revolves around a single new utility: the Scrap Engine. The Scrap Engine operates like the […]

Also posted in Mechanics | Tagged , | 2 Responses

Item Variants and Randomization in Roguelikes

Most roguelikes apply some sort of randomization to their items, which makes a lot of sense for a genre focused on replayability. This can take the form of enchantments, prefixes, suffixes, or even randomized stats or different properties not necessarily reflected directly in an item’s name like the above list. The various possible combinations can […]

Posted in Design | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Garrisons 2.0

Garrisons were originally added to Cogmind in the months after the first Alpha release in 2015 (see an overview here) as an optional location for players to visit, adding a unique extra dimension to the world to answer the question “what if I infiltrate these things where many enemy squads come from?” (More recently here […]

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

Kyzrati’s Game Design Philosophy

Recently a player asked me a question regarding my game balance philosophy, and while I can often respond to queries by pointing to some previous article, despite all my writing and no doubt occasionally touching on related topics, I had yet to explicitly do any sort of summary of the philosophy behind my gamedev work. […]

Posted in Design | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Rebalancing Cogmind

A decade of development into a huge project is almost unavoidably going to accumulate some amount of cruft. Mechanics that are never quite worth taking advantage of, items that haven’t lived up to their potential, or were later superseded by other options but remained unchanged, or even long-term experiments that were included at some point […]

Posted in Design | Tagged , | Leave a comment