Month: December 2022

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 they should be easier to trigger, not to mention also more readily available to mouse users.

I waited quite a while to implement this menu, mainly because I wanted to design and build it for a more stable and complete set of special commands, one that we couldn’t really be sure about until later in development (and sure enough these features have been gradually expanding and fluctuating over time, coming to a head in the current Beta 11). In the meantime it wasn’t an especially pressing issue because, again, these aren’t exactly commonly needed features,

Last time I wrote about item variants and randomization in roguelikes, and how Cogmind is purely based on a large set of static items, but more recently I’ve been running an experiment to play with not-so-static items. The entire mechanic revolves around a single new utility: the Scrap Engine.

A new utility is born.

The Scrap Engine operates like the Field Recycling Unit in that in addition to the normal inactive and active states it can also be cycled to COLLECT mode, during which it will “eat” items at the current location. These items are presumed to be disassembled and added to the Engine’s resources in order to be mixed with others and reassembled into new “constructs,” the name for a new category of randomized items. Instead of creating new ones it can also use these resources to modify existing constructs. Although in both cases the results are indeed based