Official development blog

Tag Archives: Gamedev

Dissecting a Cogmind Changelog

Cogmind has had 15 major releases in the past 21 months, and the changelogs for especially the latest four have each been massive walls of text. While it’s fresh in my mind, and before we move on to a different system of smaller, quicker patch-style releases, I thought it would be interesting to share an […]

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Pricing a Roguelike

Price, funding, revenue, development costs… these are not terms traditionally associated with roguelikes. The situation has changed significantly over the past several years, though. Not only are there many more roguelikes these days, but some of them (*gasp*) even cost real money! Having made the leap from years of hobbydev to years of commercial roguelikedev, […]

Posted in Gamedev, Marketing | Also tagged , , , , | 12 Responses

Year 3 of the Cogmind

Unbelievable… I’ve been working on Cogmind for three and a half years now. Yet another year has gone by, and this time the end is very much in sight! To start off, as I did for 2014 and 2015 here’s a collage of development images from the past year: GIFs outnumbered PNGs about three-to-one, but an […]

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The Alpha Release Cycle: Running a Successful EA Program

Just last week I put out Cogmind’s tenth alpha release, and as we speed towards the end of the open alpha period, now is a good opportunity to look back at the very deliberate pattern behind the development of each release, a repeating cycle that has continued for over a year now. And not just […]

Posted in Gamedev | Also tagged | 2 Responses

Tutorials and Help: Easing Players into the Game

With a generally lower barrier to add content compared to other games, roguelikes have a tendency to be packed with features and mechanics, and while that doesn’t characterize every roguelike out there (notably 7DRLs and other quick hobby projects), there is an important need to help new players overcome the initial barriers to learning a […]

Posted in Design | Also tagged , , , | 7 Responses