Official development blog

Yearly Archives: 2015

Releasing a Commercial ASCII Roguelike, a Post-Mortem

(Graphs and sales data follow the wall of text to give them context.) Releasing Cogmind felt great–two years of hard work finally reaching a state where I could share it in its entirety. Honestly I would have preferred to release much earlier, but the really early 0.10 roguelike release approach is too risky with a […]

Posted in Post-Mortem | Tagged , , , , | 30 Responses

The Making of Cogmind’s Alpha Trailer

A game’s trailer is extremely important, so rather than release some mediocre video recordings during pre-alpha development I decided to let gifs show off the animation while keeping the audio side of things to myself, waiting for the game to reach a more complete state when I could then invest a lot of time into […]

Posted in Marketing | Tagged , , , , | 5 Responses

Cogmind Alpha Access LAUNCHED!

Cogmind is here! Pre-Alpha development has officially come to an end with the release of our first Alpha version over on the website. Thank you for your patience and support through the nearly two years that this blog has been sharing progress updates on the game. It’s been a long journey, and we’re not done […]

Posted in Release | Tagged , | 23 Responses

Map Composition

Much of the “living dungeon” concept described previously applies to the main complex, and some branches. Roguelikes of significant scope tend to use a combination of map generation techniques, necessary to fill the game world with unique maps appropriate for their respective areas. Different map types are also likely to require different algorithms to populate […]

Posted in Design | Tagged , , , , , , , | 6 Responses

The Living Dungeon

Having introduced the world of Cogmind from a macro perspective, we now zoom in on the anatomy of individual floors. In a majority of roguelikes, the content of a given dungeon map is unchanging, and individual encounters on that map play out in relative isolation. When you arrive there are X number of enemies in […]

Posted in Design, Game Overview | Tagged , , | 6 Responses