Official development blog

Monthly Archives: November 2013

Info, Animated

The info windows have been overhauled and are now even more informative than before, made possible by smaller fonts. Before they were just walls of text and numbers, while now we have color-coded labels and bars to help quickly weigh the advantages and drawbacks of whatever you’re examining without being forced to interpret a bunch […]

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Fog of War

“Unknowns” are an important part of roguelikes. One could say they constitute the primary appeal of the genre, especially considering that it makes sense to define “fun” as a result of encountering the unexpected. Thus it’s no surprise that roguelikes are growing in popularity, seeing that they place a heavy emphasis on exploring the unknown. […]

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Allies & Factions

One of the major challenges playing the 7DRL prototype was a limited list of options for dealing with hordes of enemy robots that would alert each other and swarm you. You could fight them in a bottleneck or narrow corridor, try to herd them into a group and use a powerful explosive, or better, simply […]

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GUI Animation

The GUI is getting a makeover with new animations While the 7DRL had animated window borders, text printing, and button hover highlighting, all were just simple features copied over from the original source at the time (X@COM). Nonetheless, it was definitely a feature that had players going “wow” from the start, so we need more […]

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Introducing… the Intro

Cogmind Intro

The next stretch of development is aimed at improving interface animations to further strengthen immersion. This means more ASCII eye candy, and better sound effects. I’ve started at the “beginning” by creating an intro for the game. It’s 34 seconds of procedurally generated particle effects, setting the tone and atmosphere of the game as Cogmind […]

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