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Hello all, I've arrived here from twitter.com/GridSageGames, where for the past 10 years I've shared -related material, be it new or in-development RLs, dev community news, and links to my own design articles or other progress.

I've been a full-time indie dev for the entirety of that decade--the Twitter account was originally created for posting the updates on my own work, but later morphed into a channel with a broader aim, while staying within the realm of roguelikes.

I've been making PC games for over 20 years, but the earliest thing anyone will be familiar with is (xcomrl.blogspot.com/), a 2011 remake of UFO Defense that I spent a couple years on while (unbeknownst to me at the time) honing my skills and the tech that would become the foundation for my main project, Cogmind.

was at first a in 2012, just a spinoff from "X@COM" literally using much of the same code base (pretty interesting considering how different they are!), and after a few months of intermittent updates to fix some bugs and address a few feature requests, I set it aside with no plans to revisit it.

The following year I really needed a better ASCII art creation tool than what was available at the time, so I built one myself. was released for free in 2013, and has received numerous updates in the time since, many of them requests by other devs and artists, since it became quite a popular tool: gridsagegames.com/rexpaint/

Although I'd originally built it as an art tool, it gradually became indispensable for my UI layout design (terminal games, heh) and putting together prefabs and maps. I wrote a guide about its various uses here: gridsagegames.com/blog/2015/07

Many in the community use it for the same purposes, especially mapping/prefabs, but plenty of artists have picked it up as well. I've collected and shared a lot of their work in the gallery: gridsagegames.com/rexpaint/gal

Over the years it's also been used in the production of many games large and small (even some where you'd never guess, based on their outward appearance :P).

In 2013, seeing as I was already spending the vast majority of my time on gamedev anyway, I thought it'd be interesting to try an actual *commercial* release.

Cogmind 7DRL was pretty well received for being a 7DRL, with a community of players who even participated in a little tournament I held, and wishing there was more... and, well... it seemed like a pretty good foundation for a bigger game, so I decided to start there!

Kyzrati

Cue two years of pre-alpha , followed by an EA release on my own website (not Steam!) which actually went quite well, both critically and financially: gridsagegames.com/blog/2015/06

( breakdown from a year later as well: gridsagegames.com/blog/2016/05)

Later that year I became moderator of r/RoguelikeDev (which didn't have any active mods) and helped turn it into a popular dev spot with lots of useful reference material, helpful discussions, and annual events: old.reddit.com/r/roguelikedev/

I also participated in some of the earlier Roguelike Celebration events (gridsagegames.com/blog/2016/09), when they were live in San Francisco (for which I flew to the other side of world just to participate, because roguelikes are worth it! okay also because my brother lived there at the time heh).

At the Roguelike Celebration in 2018 I gave a pretty popular talk "How to Make a Roguelike" that has since brought a huge number of new devs into the community and helped jump start many projects. It's available both as a video and in article form here: gridsagegames.com/blog/2018/10

During this period I was also brought on as moderator for the creation of the Roguelikes Discord server, basically the sister server to both r/Roguelikes and r/RoguelikeDev where a lot of the same people hang out: discord.gg/t9cVHhj. It's a great community, and also the primary gathering place for active Cogmind players, as well as for many other roguelikes and their devs who don't always have their own server (DCSS, TGGW, etc).

DiscordJoin the roguelikes Discord Server!Check out the roguelikes community on Discord - hang out with 12,842 other members and enjoy free voice and text chat.

Years ago players convinced me to start some Cogmind, and I've been on Twitch ever since as another way to hang out with players while openly testing gameplay features and discussing plans. Eventually I started branching out into sharing roguelikes by other devs, too: twitch.tv/kyzrati/ (I archive almost all streams to YouTube as well: youtube.com/user/GridSageGames)

Each year I also stream entries, an annual roguelike jam I've participated in a couple times but more often just serve as a judge. 7-day Roguelikes are great experimentation beds, so it's fun to play through a bunch of them and see just how creative they are. I did a huge for my own 2018 7DRL, a second take on the Cogmind concept: gridsagegames.com/blog/2018/03

Here I should point out that for both Cogmind and POLYBOT-7 I worked with @thkaspar who did the tilesets and is an awesome pixel artist <3

did eventually come out on Steam, back in 2017, at which point as far as completion goes it was "done" (for the second time :P) but I refused to label it 1.0. Even now, five more years later, it's still basically an eternal "beta"--let the free expansions continue!
store.steampowered.com/app/722

^That release is from Zyalin, who does a lot of roguelike-related art and who I've specifically hired for key art on some releases since he had done so much cool Cogmind fan art before :D

Throughout all this I've written a *lot*--hundreds of thousands of words between r/RoguelikeDev, my older/other blogs, and, most importantly, my current primary : gridsagegames.com/blog/

I write mostly about , and sometimes crosspost to other sites, including putting bigger general interest material on Gamasutra where it often made the front page feature (for now they've shut down their submission system since they rebranded the site to GameDeveloper.com :P).

Nowadays some of my writing now goes first (or only) to Patreon, where mostly Cogmind players support further development and get access to prerelease versions and WIP features that we can refine. Plus I imagine one day other projects might appear there as well :P
patreon.com/Kyzrati

So yeah, that brings us to today, where 10 years later I'm *still* working on , my passion project that also happens to pay the bills, an immersive robot roguelike with a modern terminal UI and soundscape like no other. For being about robots, there's a surprisingly lively world to explore out there ;)
gridsagegames.com/cogmind/