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F1 Help
Context help, already available for item and robot stats as described in an older post, is great for getting a bit of useful information on the fly. Unfortunately by it’s very purpose the distributed...
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Message Log
Arguably the most vital part of a traditional roguelike’s interface, a message log gives the player all those details that might otherwise be depicted by (or lost in the confusion of) greater graphical...
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Map Dynamics
Continuing on the concept touched upon in the previous post about message logs in roguelikes, shifting the player’s attention from log to map works in tandem with making more information available...
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Options, Revisited
Cogmind’s game options were first covered in a post last year, but the selection has since expanded, and because their number has grown closer to what will be their final state, I went ahead and...
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UI Feedback: Map Dynamics 2.0
A while back I mentioned a design initiative based on the concept of “map dynamics,” aimed at increasing player focus on the map area as opposed to the message log or other windows. After the initial...
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An Alternative UI?
Normally when I publish a new article, the focus is on explaining the results of some new feature/mechanic/design. Today’s post is a little different because it’s about an important feature that has...
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Designing Cogmind’s World Map
Cogmind began as a 7DRL based around a simple fight (or flight!) from your subterranean starting location directly to the surface. As the new Cogmind works its way towards 1.0, a big part of its...
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Dialogue UI
I recently added the third and final dialogue-related UI feature to Cogmind, so it’s time for a review of what all these different ways of displaying who says what are doing in the game :D Message Log...
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Iterative UI Design
Today I’d like to share the process behind the development of a singular UI feature, in particular the part (equipment)-sorting implementation, which is a good example of taking a simple premise and...
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Improving the Hacking Experience
The terrible curse of gamedev is that it’s really hard to finish a game when there’s always something that could be better. The great thing about gamedev is that there’s always something that could be...
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