Official development blog

Yearly Archives: 2014

Anatomy of an ASCII Title Screen

The design philosophy behind Cogmind emphasizes maximum immersion wherever possible. For this reason I’d like to avoid game-y interface elements–those which are not part of the game world itself but instead remove your mind from that world and remind you that it’s a game. (A fact you’re obviously unlikely to forget, but anything that breaks […]

Posted in Art | Tagged , , , , , | 6 Responses

New Cogmind Website

Cogmind development is finally far enough along that we have sufficient content for a proper website! If you noticed it at all, the original Cogmind “website” consisted of a bare-bones intro and FAQ. That placeholder has been replaced with a full site, so the game now has a go-to portal for information where you’ll find […]

Posted in Marketing | Tagged , , | 4 Responses

The Player is Always Right: An Existential Approach to Game AI

This post is not exactly as philosophical as the title might suggest, just a catchy way to paraphrase what I consider the best way to handle artificial intelligence in games. In short, as long as there aren’t any glaring oddities in a mob’s behavior the player will tend to justify what’s going on by whatever […]

Posted in Design | Tagged , | 10 Responses

From Prototype to Full Game

I often look back on the time it’s taken Cogmind to reach this stage and ask myself “why the #!@^# is it not done yet?!” (That’s actually me standing in a corridor between a Potion of Speed Coding and Trap of Feature Creep.) More recently I’ve also been wondering if the investment is worth it–think […]

Posted in Gamedev | Tagged , , , | 6 Responses

Cogmind Fonts

Cogmind currently comes with a whopping 26 bitmap fonts. This unusually large number is somewhat less impressive than it seems, as they are certainly not all completely unique styles, but it still took more than a week to draw, scale, and tweak them all to the point of polish sufficient for at least early releases. […]

Posted in Art, Dev Series: Fonts | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment