Official development blog

Category Archives: Design

Exploring the Concept of a Terminal Roguelike “Overmap”

Lots of games have “minimaps” allowing you to view a greater area than normally visible in the game screen, although (except in maybe a few rare instances) these usually aren’t games with displays limited to a strict terminal grid like we have with Cogmind. After all, you can only “zoom” so much given the restrictions […]

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Audio Accessibility Features for Roguelikes

Anyone who’s followed my development work over the years will know that I’m big on providing all sorts of quality of life features, optional functionality, configurable settings, and so on. This is also why even from the earliest stages (pre-7DRL!), and ever since, I’ve given the utmost priority to Cogmind’s interface. How players interact with […]

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Building Cogmind’s Ambient Soundscape

I first introduced Cogmind’s ambient sound system back in 2014 during the pre-alpha days, as it was initially developed for Cogmind’s predecessor (X@COM) in the years before that, and sound would continue to play an important role going forward. It wasn’t an especially long post like the ones I tend to write these days, but […]

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Developing Multitile Creatures in Roguelikes

Creatures/entities that occupy more than one space in the grid-based world of a roguelike still aren’t all that common, although in the development community this is an increasingly popular topic. Many of these discussions revolve around how to solve various technical and design issues associated with this type of entity, and while I’ve provided input […]

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Special Mode Design: Battle Royale

Every good game needs a Battle Royale mode, right? Okay maybe that’s something you’d be more likely to expect from an actual online multiplayer AAA title looking to jump on a bandwagon, rather than a traditional roguelike :P Nonetheless, I did build one for Cogmind! It was going to be Cogmind’s next April Fools Day […]

Posted in Design | Tagged , | 6 Responses