Official development blog

Tag Archives: Prefabs

Garrisons 2.0

Garrisons were originally added to Cogmind in the months after the first Alpha release in 2015 (see an overview here) as an optional location for players to visit, adding a unique extra dimension to the world to answer the question “what if I infiltrate these things where many enemy squads come from?” (More recently here […]

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“Desire Paths” for a Robot World

desire path (n.) — a planning term referring to a path made by walkers or cyclists, as opposed to one that is officially planned For years I’ve always been interested in making some kind of utility that allows you to see paths that were traveled by robots, partially because it just seems like a neat […]

Posted in Mechanics | Also tagged , | 4 Responses

Level Design and Shaping a Cogmind Experience

For years I’ve been taking a pretty standardized approach to designing each new map in Cogmind, and although we have dozens of them now, it’s one of the few topics I’ve never covered on the blog. This is essentially because a serious in-depth look at the entire process would require spoiling a lot of content, […]

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Map Prefabs, in Depth

An increasingly common approach to roguelike map development today is to have content partially determined by so-called “prefabs,” with layouts which are hand-made rather than fully procedurally generated. Doing so gives a designer more control over the experience, or portions of it at least, without completely supplanting the advantages of roguelike unpredictability. Prefabs are a […]

Posted in Design, Dev Series: Procedural Maps | Also tagged , , , , | 2 Responses

Generating and Populating Caves

Before this point, the vast majority of Cogmind maps have fallen under the room-and-corridor style generation. The wide range of adjustable parameters, when combined with a variety of themed content (and prefabs!), give that one style plenty of potential to create a unique feel and gameplay for different areas of the world. That said, roguelikes […]

Posted in Design, Dev Series: Procedural Maps | Also tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment