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Category Archives: Design

Experimenting with Drone PIP

Early this month I was streaming a Cogmind run on Twitch, at one point once again sending out drones to scout around as I like to do. Drones are generally pretty fast, and I’ll often just make sure I’m in a relatively safe spot and keep an eye on what the drone(s) find while I […]

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Projectile Deflection

Ever since my first design docs from Cogmind pre-alpha, written back in 2013, I always wanted a projectile deflection mechanic. Like it doesn’t get much cooler than that, being able to swat away bullets or even send beams back at an attacker, or redirect them into other targets. Every few years I think about the […]

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A Simple Approach to Player-Designed Robots

I like the idea of designing robots, putting together builds for a particular purpose or with particular capabilities in mind. As I’ve stated many times before, my first influence for Cogmind was the original BattleTech board game, where my friends and I wouldn’t just take stock mechs, but designed our own based on the rules, […]

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Special Events Give Back, and Perfect Stealth

Cogmind’s “special modes,” timed events with unique mechanics, can in one sense be seen as the experimental test beds of Cogmind. Sometimes ideas come along that are interesting to play with, but may either not be suitable for the regular game, or I don’t feel the effort and architectural requirements to support them are worth […]

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Teleportation Mechanics

Teleportation. It’s cool. You like it. Your enemies maybe not so much. The ability to teleport across short and/or long distances to instantly arrive at some destination is fairly common throughout the roguelike genre. Although teleportation can be used for tactical repositioning, or to perhaps reach otherwise unreachable areas (especially if the target is controllable), […]

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