
Level Design and Shaping a Roguelike Experience - tiniuclx
https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2019/02/level-design-shaping-cogmind-experience/
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tiniuclx
The original title of this post is "Level Design and Shaping a Cogmind
Experience," but I felt that the HN audience would be more familiar with the
name of the genre than the game itself.

If you're one of the lucky 10,000, Roguelikes are a type of video game that
has remained virtually unchanged since Rogue, which was released in 1980 for
Unix mainframes. Most games are based around procedural generation and dungeon
crawling.

Cogmind is a modern, Sci-Fi take on the genre and possibly the most user-
friendly Roguelike out there.

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harwoodr
How's it compare to the modern, Sci-Fi zombie apocalypse roguelike "Cataclysm:
Dark Days Ahead"?

~~~
tiniuclx
While I haven't played CDDA, I can talk a little bit about what makes Cogmind
unique compared to the rest of the genre.

Cogmind is classless - you always start the game with the same set of items
and abilities. Your build is defined by what parts you find or salvage from
enemies, as well as certain events that give you permanent upgrades.

The most obvious difference is the combat system: each and every item you
equip can be damaged and destroyed. Items also have a 'coverage' statistic
which is proportional to how likely the item is to absorb a shot. For
instance, armour in Cogmind isn't really special under this system - it's just
an item with high health and coverage.

Cogmind is also mostly based on ranged combat, though melee is an option for
both you and enemies. Therefore, the tactics you must use are slightly
different.

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rtisdale
Your game is great!

You should definitely give CCDA a look if for no other reason than to oggle at
the sheer breadth of the project.

Few notes about CDDA:

CDDA also shares the classless aspect with Cogmind.

All items (including your own limbs) are destroyable.

While it doesn't offer the ability to fully swap body parts (that'd be a great
feature suggestion. Hmmm..) it does offer mutations and bionics.

It offers a solid mixture of both melee and ranged combat along with vehicular
combat.

All that being said Cogmind was a definite standout title. 10/10 on the UI/UX.

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tptacek
It turns out this guy has a really excellent blog, and a good lead-in to it is
a talk he gave on how to get started developing Roguelikes:

[https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2018/10/how-to-make-a-
rog...](https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2018/10/how-to-make-a-roguelike/)

This talk came dangerously close to derailing my 2-week work-cation plans; if
libtcod-go had actually built, I might have been in serious trouble.

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lawn
I must say I haven't even played a traditional rogue-like and it might derail
my plan as well...

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Cthulhu_
Same, I just can't get into the roguelike genre but it's appealing as a side
project. Also because it's quite different from my day job (data wrangling,
rest apis, forms etc, yay)

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doesnt_know
Cogmind is the most thoughtful and elegant roguelike ever created. The dev is
also prolific in the community and happily shares his RL dev experience to
anyone that will listen. I recommend anyone who is even remotely interested in
RL design and development to browse through his blog, which has literal years
of high quality content.

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kgwxd
Love Cogmind! If you're a purist, first thing you'll want to do is [Esc] [4]
Options [v] Keyboard Mode [F] ASCII mode. Can confirm the game works on Linux
using Wine.

~~~
Lowkeyloki
It also works well on Steam using their Proton system, although you'll have to
opt in to it. I just bought this game last week!

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eismcc
Poking around the site and this game and blog look awesome.

Also: how to build a Roguelike
[https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2018/10/how-to-make-a-
rog...](https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2018/10/how-to-make-a-roguelike/)

