Grid Sage Games

Factsheet

Developer:
Grid Sage Games
Based in New Taipei, Taiwan

Founding date:
September 22, 2013

Website:
gridsagegames.com

Press / Business contact:
gridsagegames@gmail.com

Social:
Mastodon @Kyzrati
@GridSageGames
Discord (#cogmind)

Releases:
Cogmind

Address:
New Taipei City
Taiwan (Republic of China)

Phone:
None

Description

Grid Sage Games is a one-man independent game studio based in Taiwan and operated by Josh "Kyzrati" Ge, specializing in traditional roguelikes and tactical games. While Josh has no formal background in Computer Science, he's spent the past 30 years tinkering with computers, games, and programming as a hobby.

History

Prehistory

Before forming Grid Sage Games, Josh was making innovative roguelikes aimed at evolving the genre without abandoning its roots. As part of this effort he created a popular fan remake of X-COM: UFO Defense. In the middle of "X@COM" development, much of the same technology and techniques were applied to a short-term project for the 2012 7-Day Roguelike (7DRL) competition: Cogmind. Judges ranked the game as one of the best that year, and though subsequent development ceased after two months, it later went on to become the highest player-rated 7DRL of 2012. X@COM development continued for another year, during which Josh also began releasing REXPaint, now one of the most popular ASCII editing tools among artists and game developers.

First Commercial Game

In 2013 Grid Sage Games was formed to create "modern traditional roguelikes" full time. Taking the Cogmind 7DRL as a successful prototype for a unique game, work began that summer to turn it into a much bigger and more polished production. The entire process has been documented via the ongoing dev blog, sharing progress and design philosophy with players and other developers alike (the blog itself ranked among Feedspot's Top 50 gamedev blogs in the world). Even before its official release, Cogmind was recognized in IndieDB voting as one of the top 100 games of 2014, and by Rock, Paper, Shotgun as one of the Best Upcoming PC Games of 2015/2016. Two years after beginning development, Grid Sage Games released the first alpha version on May 19, 2015. Every December from 2015 through 2023 it was again voted into the Top 100 games of each year on IndieDB. Cogmind has been in full-time development for over ten years.

Innovation

With Cogmind, Grid Sage Games continues to push the genre forward in many ways never seen before in a traditional roguelike. See a summary of firsts in action at www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/innovation.html

Projects

• Cogmind