Official development blog

Yearly Archives: 2015

Morgue Files

Death is fairly frequent in roguelikes, but the fun doesn’t stop there! We usually still have access to post-game “content” in the form of text files detailing how a particular run played out. The typical traditional roguelike player tends to love statistics describing their performance, and detailed morgue files are a good way to satisfy […]

Posted in Meta | Tagged , , , , | 13 Responses

Player Metrics (Alpha Challenge 2015)

Player metrics are an important resource for a game developer, providing valuable insight into player preferences, capabilities, strategies, and more. Data is also fun, so I’m here share it with you all :D Cogmind features the ability to upload player statistics at the end of each run (opt-in only, of course, in case some players […]

Posted in Meta | Tagged , , , , , | 10 Responses

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 | 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 | 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 | Tagged , , , | 8 Responses