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Category Archives: Design

Item Variants and Randomization in Roguelikes

Most roguelikes apply some sort of randomization to their items, which makes a lot of sense for a genre focused on replayability. This can take the form of enchantments, prefixes, suffixes, or even randomized stats or different properties not necessarily reflected directly in an item’s name like the above list. The various possible combinations can […]

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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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Kyzrati’s Game Design Philosophy

Recently a player asked me a question regarding my game balance philosophy, and while I can often respond to queries by pointing to some previous article, despite all my writing and no doubt occasionally touching on related topics, I had yet to explicitly do any sort of summary of the philosophy behind my gamedev work. […]

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Rebalancing Cogmind

A decade of development into a huge project is almost unavoidably going to accumulate some amount of cruft. Mechanics that are never quite worth taking advantage of, items that haven’t lived up to their potential, or were later superseded by other options but remained unchanged, or even long-term experiments that were included at some point […]

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Special Commands Menu Design

For years now I’ve been planning to eventually create a menu for accessing Cogmind’s lesser-used “special commands,” features not only requiring the keyboard, but even all assigned to Shift-Alt key combos. So these rarely needed (but still sometimes useful) features were already pretty clearly grouped together as a unit by their annoying modifier, but ideally […]

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