Official development blog

Monthly Archives: February 2014

Items: Types & Distribution

Items are at the core of many a good roguelike experience. While inherent abilities and character traits can play a part, wielding/equipping/using new items is the simplest way to open up different strategic and tactical options. As covered in the previous post, Cogmind takes that to an extreme with the philosophy that you “are” your […]

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You, Cogmind

Here we are six months into this blog and there hasn’t yet been a post dedicated to the game’s namesake robot! Unlike a majority of roguelikes you don’t start the game by selecting a race, class, or anything else. You play Cogmind, more or less a “naked robot core,” and are quickly defined by what […]

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Data-driven Development

As we transition from internal developments to content creation, let us first present an overview of how most of that content is organized. Cogmind is an example of the “open data” model, wherein as many content-specific parts of the game are exposed in public files anyone can open up and read/edit with a text editor. […]

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Making a Game

Cogmind is edging into a new phase of development, that all-important part of making a game called “making a game!™” Naturally any game needs an engine to build it with (some devs skip this phase entirely if there’s something out there that can already do what you want, e.g. Unity3D), but a lot of unfinished […]

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Map Dynamics

Continuing on the concept touched upon in the previous post about message logs in roguelikes, shifting the player’s attention from log to map works in tandem with making more information available directly on that map. I like to summarize this kind of feature with the phrase “map dynamics” (from a UI perspective, not map layout), […]

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