Official development blog

Tag Archives: Roguelikes

Traps

Traps. Right, that’ll be easy. Design a handful of spaces that when stepped on by the player cause any of a number of effects. Just a couple days of work. Or not. That might be the case with traps in most roguelikes, but not Cogmind traps. Two weeks later, they’ve been heavily integrated into many […]

Posted in Design | Also tagged , , | 10 Responses

Roguelike Development with REXPaint

I mention REXPaint a lot on this blog. This is not coincidence, nor because I created it. It happens to be an incredibly useful piece of software for roguelike development! REXPaint is an in-house tool I developed in 2013 shortly before resuming work on Cogmind. It has since been made freely available for other devs, […]

Posted in Gamedev | Also tagged , , , , , , , | 14 Responses

Readable Text Fonts for Roguelikes

There’s a reason “terminal” fonts are a standard for traditional roguelikes even today. Certainly tradition plays a part, but even more importantly, they’re designed to be highly readable. Last year while still in pre-alpha Cogmind received a huge influx of font bitmaps to support different resolutions, in some cases with multiple variants at a given […]

Posted in Dev Series: Fonts | Also tagged , , | 8 Responses

Cogmind the Roguelike

Probably one of the latest hot marketing terms to see rampant use in the indie scene is “roguelike,” regardless of whether it really suits the game in question. No, I don’t plan to tackle that can of worms (the topic gets more than enough attention over on /r/roguelikes), but I would like to begin a […]

Posted in Design, Game Overview | Also tagged | 18 Responses

ASCII vs. Tiles

Ah, a visual dichotomy not nearly as old as roguelikes themselves, but nonetheless of great significance today. While a game’s visual style need not always be rooted in its underlying mechanics (especially the case with traditional turn-based roguelikes), the choice between an ASCII or tileset map representation obviously has a major impact on the experience. […]

Posted in Art | Also tagged , , | 20 Responses