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Category Archives: Dev Series: Sound Effects

Audio Accessibility Features for Roguelikes

Anyone who’s followed my development work over the years will know that I’m big on providing all sorts of quality of life features, optional functionality, configurable settings, and so on. This is also why even from the earliest stages (pre-7DRL!), and ever since, I’ve given the utmost priority to Cogmind’s interface. How players interact with […]

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Building Cogmind’s Ambient Soundscape

I first introduced Cogmind’s ambient sound system back in 2014 during the pre-alpha days, as it was initially developed for Cogmind’s predecessor (X@COM) in the years before that, and sound would continue to play an important role going forward. It wasn’t an especially long post like the ones I tend to write these days, but […]

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Sound Design in Cogmind, a How-to

Previous coverage of the audio development process has taken a look at everything except working with individual sound samples. They are of course the building blocks of the entire system–if they aren’t appropriate and each working to enhance the overall experience, then the game is better off mute. That would save a lot of time, […]

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The Audio Engine

Any game that wants to play more than just a few sounds, or tie sounds to the game in an interesting way, needs some kind of audio engine. This can range from something as simple as an in-house sound manager with per-sample volume controls to the powerful fully dynamic sound engine that is FMOD. FMOD […]

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Weapon SFX

While there are many non-weapon sound effects to be heard in Cogmind, a majority still belong to gunfire, lasers, explosions, etc. Like working with particle effects, before creating and assigning them to specific weapons the planned sounds were organized into subgroups according to their properties. Many of these properties were already taken into consideration during […]

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