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Category Archives: Design

Rebranding Difficulty Modes

A couple years back I introduced difficulty settings to Cogmind. At the time I wrote about the benefits and drawbacks of difficulty modes in roguelikes, along with an introduction to Cogmind’s difficulty-related features, and overall I’ve been pleased with the results, but with experience I’ve discovered there is definitely room for improvement in a few […]

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Robot Hacking: Upgrades

Last year Cogmind got an expansive new robot hacking system with a lot of hacking options to use as either a primary or supplementary strategy. Overall it’s not as powerful as the simple placeholder version used in Cogmind’s early years, but it’s a lot more versatile. That said, as it was designed bothacking does become […]

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Special Game Modes in a Roguelike Context

By their nature roguelikes are highly replayable, but can also serve as a great foundation on which to essentially multiply that replayability again and again. Adjust a few variables here, add a little content there, and you can have a very different game, one that some people admittedly might enjoy less, but they don’t have […]

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Turn Time Systems

I’ve always enjoyed turn-based games, giving you unlimited time to consider and react to changing situations (even if you don’t always take advantage of that opportunity and instead bumble into mistakes far faster than necessary). Turn-based mechanics are especially apt in traditional roguelikes, where the RNG typically plays a starring role and therefore said changing […]

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Roguelike Level Design Addendum: Static or Procedural?

Having walked through both static and procedural map design in the previous posts, this is a good opportunity to examine the qualities and value of each. Why use one over the other? Why not use both? Roguelikes tend to be associated with procedurally generated maps, so much so that we see mainstream non-roguelike games having […]

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