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Category Archives: Mechanics

Projectile Deflection

Ever since my first design docs from Cogmind pre-alpha, written back in 2013, I always wanted a projectile deflection mechanic. Like it doesn’t get much cooler than that, being able to swat away bullets or even send beams back at an attacker, or redirect them into other targets. Every few years I think about the […]

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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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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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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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Extreme Infowar: Active Sensor Suite

While earlier in Beta 11 development I already revisited and expanded Cogmind’s selection of parts geared towards information warfare, there was a need for yet another new one to complement the upcoming Heavy class. This time it’s a big one with even more (big!) benefits but also more (big!) drawbacks! Introducing the Active Sensor Suite… […]

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