Official development blog

Yearly Archives: 2016

Year 3 of the Cogmind

Unbelievable… I’ve been working on Cogmind for three and a half years now. Yet another year has gone by, and this time the end is very much in sight! To start off, as I did for 2014 and 2015 here’s a collage of development images from the past year: GIFs outnumbered PNGs about three-to-one, but an […]

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Improving the Hacking Experience

The terrible curse of gamedev is that it’s really hard to finish a game when there’s always something that could be better. The great thing about gamedev is that there’s always something that could be better, meaning room for more new features and content to make players happy :D The previous round of major UI […]

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Weaving Narratives into Procedural Worlds, Part 3: Methods

With Part 1 (Value) and Part 2 (Characteristics) of this series as a background, it’s time to examine the variety of methods Cogmind uses to achieve those goals, which are important considerations every step of the way. This is also what is meant by “weaving,” because there are quite a few individual components working together […]

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Weaving Narratives into Procedural Worlds, Part 2: Characteristics

In Part 1 I shared several areas where I believe roguelikes can benefit from the inclusion of story elements. Then comes the hard part: actually doing it :) Because there are certainly a number of ways story can worsen a roguelike experience, the next step is to identify the characteristics of a good roguelike narrative, […]

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Weaving Narratives into Procedural Worlds, Part 1: Value

There’s been very little discussion of Cogmind’s story here on the blog, which belies its informative role and importance throughout the alpha development process. In fact, following the mediocre stock sci-fi back story given to the 7DRL, on rebooting the project in 2013 the very first stretch of Cogmind development was actually devoted solely to […]

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