Official development blog

Tag Archives: Roguelikes

Web Support in Single-Player Roguelikes

While we often think of single-player games not requiring an internet connection, and certainly many of us do play our roguelikes offline, there are advantages to implementing optional online features in a roguelike. Browser games, or roguelikes that require a persistent server connection to handle gameplay/content, are beyond the scope of this article. Those are […]

Posted in Internal | Also tagged , | 8 Responses

The Importance of Roguelike Food Clocks

Traditionally a majority of roguelikes include some sort of food system. Hunger management does seem like a natural part of role-play adventuring, but it also serves a much more important function: Pushing the player along is an integral part of [most] good roguelike design. All but sandbox games present the player with a specific goal […]

Posted in Design | Also tagged , | 6 Responses

Inventory Management

Inventories are almost a staple component of any roguelike, and as such there is usually some amount of inventory management required to play them. Deciding what to carry for contingencies is an important part of roguelike strategy (plus it’s fun! …or cause to kick yourself later). For these decisions to be meaningful, games almost always […]

Posted in Mechanics | Also tagged , , , | 3 Responses

From Prototype to Full Game

I often look back on the time it’s taken Cogmind to reach this stage and ask myself “why the #!@^# is it not done yet?!” (That’s actually me standing in a corridor between a Potion of Speed Coding and Trap of Feature Creep.) More recently I’ve also been wondering if the investment is worth it–think […]

Posted in Gamedev | Also tagged , , | 6 Responses

Fonts in Roguelikes

The first aspect of a traditional roguelike viewers tend to notice is the color palette, but when it comes down to actually playing a game which requires interpreting large amounts of text, color takes a backseat to the importance of the font. Characters/glyphs form not only words and sentences, they even represent the map and […]

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