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Tag Archives: Items

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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“Post-Balance” Cogmind Item Expansion

Beta 11 was a huge milestone in Cogmind development, having completed a comprehensive review of all items and their stats and mechanics in order to rebalance where necessary, a process I wrote about in detail last year. The results since then have been great, but what comes next? Fun. Lots and lots of fun. Beta […]

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The Scrap Engine

Last time I wrote about item variants and randomization in roguelikes, and how Cogmind is purely based on a large set of static items, but more recently I’ve been running an experiment to play with not-so-static items. The entire mechanic revolves around a single new utility: the Scrap Engine. The Scrap Engine operates like the […]

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