So amazing, all these smart people making commercial games in such a short time, and then there's me still working on the same old thing year after year, even though it was released a long time ago xD
Ah, this was mainly because it's easiest to show UI/UX innovation in images :P
The gameplay is unique, and much has been written about it, but it's not all in one centralized location like that page, which was easier to put together as simply images for demonstration.
For the other side of things there are many many articles on the blog detailing systems and mechanics and design considerations. Plus there are Steam reviews, which give a pretty clear picture of what people think. This one, and many others, are telling: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198035898628/recomm...
Also hi :)
(Edit: Oh, and I stopped writing a lot of Cogmind-specific design the articles for the blog in recent years, and some of the writing you might be looking for has gone towards FAQs here: https://www.reddit.com/r/roguelikedev/wiki/faq_friday)
Hahaha, thanks. It's funny when I sometimes get notices from new players who've said they got into it after having read all my blog and FAQs. I'm like "you just read... ALL of that?!"
(I'm happy to have started the FAQ series beyond the blog, because it's about so many other devs' RL projects as well, and we can share and learn so much more!)
REXPaint is not based on .Net, and works flawlessly under Wine on Linux. Although there's no native build, there are a bunch of users on both Linux and OSX (especially since a sizeable portion of the roguelike dev community uses non-Windows platforms).
Ah yes the owner would be me, and I really have to get around to releasing a new version of REXPaint xD. Lots of potential feature ideas, and it's cool to have to many people using this little tool I originally made for my own projects!
I've also already got a little backlog of great art by users from recent weeks that I still need to add to the gallery...
The System Requirements section on the buy page addresses the cross-platform issue (as does the FAQ). I don't make a big point of it because while it works fine through Wine etc., it's not natively cross-platform.
As for your other question, I should really put a notice on the website that Cogmind is completely DRM free. That's not currently indicated anywhere... (I'll add it tomorrow, thanks!)
Edit: Just quickly added it to a header since the site's getting a lot of traffic right now.
Do you think you'll be joining GOG? They seem like a great company to me but I've only ever been on the consumer side of the equation. I greatly enjoyed my DRM free copy of The Witcher 3!
I assume I will, yeah, as they have a good, loyal customer base and are known for quality. Still in early talks, and it wouldn't happen until next year, I don't think, because we'd need to wait for a price drop, and I don't want to really push and advertise Cogmind until it's about done.
I actually contributed a bit to libtcod back when it was in active development :D
The roguelike I worked on before Cogmind was originally written to work with libtcod's frontend, but I wanted to do a few unorthodox things and rather than continually patch up libtcod decided to build my own frontend from scratch. that bit was all I was using from libtcod as I already had my own game library and roguelike engine at the time. My version supports mixed font sizes out of the box and is written in C++ rather than C.
It's possible I'll be using a wrapper for the full version, yeah. I've got your info and I'll look you guys up when it comes to that!
As for fonts, there are 82 font bitmaps included with the game, so for those seeking more traditional options, we've got 'em: http://www.gridsagegames.com/forums/index.php?topic=165.0
(The game is highly customizable, with new optional features added every new version.)
Yeah, I want to eventually have a wrapper to simplify installation for those players. For now there are step-by-step guides on the forums that keep the process pretty simple with regard to Cogmind.
I may one day write more about the engine. I've written small bits here and there in the past, though nothing comprehensive. Getting busier and busier after release, so less time to write and publish articles :(
By the time you are ready to release, you could probably compile to WebAssembly and ship with a bundled webkit/chrome app wrapper (like how Slack's native clients build on a bare bones browser that is bundled with it).
It's crazy how much JS is out-competing Java in some areas.
Many thanks! And feel free to wait until the price drops next year if you need to :). I've got enough funds to see it through to completion, though I'd like to use any surplus to hire a professional composer for the OST.
I too have been following the development of Cogmind since having a post of mine about dungeon generation using BSP trees being linked on your dev blog. The game looks impressive.
Thank you, and yeah for that first post in the mapgen series I linked to a bunch of good online examples for others to check out, so thanks for that :D
Your game dev blog is worth alone a good read. Specially the 5 part series on map generation. Most sources online are pretty obscure, being either just a brief on what algorithms steps involve or a crude demo attached on a forum.
If anyone is interested, these are the series I am talking about:
