Official development blog

Tag Archives: Accessibility

Item Searching and Filtering

Many years ago, Cogmind’s predecessor X@COM pioneered the idea of using a pop-up label system in an ASCII game to identify objects like items, beneficial both to help teach new players as well as a natural quality of life improvement. This allows players to more quickly know exactly what an item is, useful when there are […]

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Audio Accessibility Features for Roguelikes

Anyone who’s followed my development work over the years will know that I’m big on providing all sorts of quality of life features, optional functionality, configurable settings, and so on. This is also why even from the earliest stages (pre-7DRL!), and ever since, I’ve given the utmost priority to Cogmind’s interface. How players interact with […]

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Quicksaving and Restore Points

For me, permadeath is a huge part of the roguelike experience. When you make enough mistakes that you lose–that’s it, it’s over. No immediately starting from a safe checkpoint not long before in order to try again, no in-game benefits carrying over to future attempts. Each run is an isolated attempt in which you’re armed […]

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Rebranding Difficulty Modes

A couple years back I introduced difficulty settings to Cogmind. At the time I wrote about the benefits and drawbacks of difficulty modes in roguelikes, along with an introduction to Cogmind’s difficulty-related features, and overall I’ve been pleased with the results, but with experience I’ve discovered there is definitely room for improvement in a few […]

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Color Customization

I’ve always enjoyed adding accessibility features, hence Cogmind’s sizeable options menu and even more extensive config files. Not everyone will have the same habits or abilities, or play a game in the same way, so where possible it’s nice to be able to accommodate different needs. Although I’ve talked a fair bit about fonts before […]

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