A long time in coming, but here we go! This marks the beginning of what will be the most significant undertaking in Cogmind\u2019s UI development history: making everything<\/em> bigger. Not just the map, for which zooming<\/a> was recently implemented as a toggleable option, but all the text as well.<\/p>\n This will be fun since I do love me some interface work, as evidenced by the massive number of optional QoL features I\u2019ve introduced over the years, but despite pouring many hours into accessibility and streamlined gameplay before, this particular feature took the longest to get to.<\/p>\n Back in Cogmind\u2019s early years I gave strong consideration to implementing it then–put together some mockups, discussed options with the community, and so on, but the time wasn\u2019t right. Back then I couldn\u2019t nail down what would be the most extreme (but still acceptable) options. We didn\u2019t yet know what reasonable limits to put on such a feature, as in what\u2019s the absolute furthest<\/em> it could go without compromising other parts of the game design. It had to wait.<\/p>\n Being the way a player interacts with all of a game\u2019s content, UI is naturally central to the experience, thus one of the most fundamental aspects a game\u2019s design needs to address is matching up that design with its corresponding system requirements, including the display device!<\/p>\n To take an extreme example, there are obviously different considerations when developing for mobile vs desktop, and the results of the different decisions made to optimize a design for the target platform is also why ports between various platforms don\u2019t always come out the same, whether technically or in terms of feel.<\/p>\n Not surprisingly, starting in the 2010s there began a trend towards developing games in order to ultimately target as many different platforms as possible (desktop and consoles being the most common crossovers), and it was very interesting to see player reactions to this trend, especially PC players lamenting how games were changing to ensure they could accommodate consoles as well. A necessary evil if you want to maximize profits, I guess \ud83d\ude1b<\/p>\n Finding middle ground so that more people can enjoy a form of entertainment is in some ways also a noble goal, although this naturally waters down the experience at the same time. The more strict your requirements, the more you can make assumptions about the target player\u2019s experience, and in turn optimize a design for what you know to be true. Basically if done right, the end result will be better, for that particular group of players<\/em>.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s the backdrop for how Cogmind came to be born in its original form over a decade ago, wanting to have a large enough terminal grid to be able to simultaneously show a huge amount of info at once–Cogmind\u2019s terminal dimensions are easily the largest of any roguelike, and also better support very large and active maps–Cogmind has the largest maps of any subterranean roguelike, and also by far the most active maps, with lots of entities milling about doing their own thing, some more or less important than others, but all worth of being aware of for various reasons.<\/p>\n The scope could not be so ambitious without what I decided at the time: This design will lean really heavily into having a large screen to play on. \u201cLarge\u201d meaning physically large, resolution being irrelevant since we\u2019re talking about a traditional terminal here, all that info simply appearing bigger when the screen is bigger, the display always being divided into at least a 160\u00d760 grid. (By comparison, the classics use 80\u00d725, and some later roguelikes use something in between, so Cogmind has nearly five times as much display area as the original roguelikes, or several times what is found in some other later roguelikes.)<\/p>\n Fast forward more than 10 years, and a much greater portion of people now play games on laptops, not to mention a greater variety of players have begun discovering and becoming interested in Cogmind, so the demand for alternative interface options is clearly growing ever larger.<\/p>\n Even if not the original target audience, I always wanted to accommodate more people when possible, and although my intention was to wait until somewhere around 1.0 to experiment with the possibilities, it\u2019s also becoming clear that there\u2019s no idea when Cogmind 1.0 will actually happen \ud83d\ude1b<\/p>\n Fortunately at this point we also have a very clear idea of Cogmind\u2019s development needs, how players interact with the game, and pretty much all the UI considerations and limitations that we\u2019d need to take into account to design the \u201cmost extreme\u201d alternative interface layouts that could still work.<\/p>\n So it\u2019s time to do that.<\/p>\n Cogmind\u2019s original UI concept had two basic requirements: a sufficiently large map view area, and a persistently visible list of all parts.<\/p>\n Interface components we can\u2019t really do without, even if some were to take a slightly different form. Basic stats reflecting current resources and status are also pretty important!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Unlike pretty much every other roguelike in which the player has a mostly persistent set of equipment, Cogmind\u2019s parts list involves items that are subject to frequent tweaking and toggling, or at least warrant much closer turn-by-turn observation due to damage and\/or status changes. The list also includes up to 26 different slots at once, whereas other roguelikes generally have half that, at most.<\/p>\n As such, being able to see and interact with this list in its entirety at all times is quite important, so it was given its own area on the interface. That will always be there.<\/p>\n Sample parts list.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Seeing the map, where most of the action happens, is also kinda important, too. But how much of it do we want to see at once? How large does this view need<\/em> to be?<\/p>\n Cogmind was not designed to require widescreen support. In fact, the UI layout we have was originally built to fit snugly in 4:3 aspect ratio, only expanding horizontally to fill more space as available.<\/p>\n Therefore although it can be expanded to show more area, under that layout the minimum<\/em> map view area allowed was set to 50\u00d750 (in terminal dimensions this is actually 100\u00d750, because map cells are square rather than rectangular, each occupying two terminal cells).<\/p>\n The number 50 is incredibly central to Cogmind\u2019s design, because almost no weapons or active intel should have a range that can exceed the area a player can see by default. Cogmind being a game focused on ranged combat, repeatedly getting attacked from out of view would not be great, nor is having data on enemies roaming around you in multiple directions, known but out of view. These and other drawbacks of a small view area don\u2019t make for an optimal play experience.<\/p>\n Assuming map view dimensions of 50\u00d750, placing Cogmind at the center means the player can see out to a distance of approximately 25 or more in any direction. So ranges should for the most part be kept within that value.<\/p>\n Another reason to have a decently large map view in the first place is, again, the sheer size of maps to explore, and the potentially high level of local activity out there. A view area as large as 50\u00d750 can still only see a mere 1\/16th of the area comprising primary maps–more for some smaller maps, and even less for larger ones.<\/p>\n Demonstrating a 50\u00d750 area visible around Cogmind as seen while exploring a map (export provided by Mojo).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Like some roguelike classics, in TGGW<\/a> it\u2019s quite nice that you can see the entire map at once without any scrolling whatsoever, though it was clearly designed for such from the outset, with correspondingly short attack and sight ranges, and a smaller amount of concentrated content per floor, making each floor experience short and sweet.<\/p>\n Sample screenshot from The Ground Gives Way, with a mostly-explored map floor showing its layout.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Cogmind needs space for the scope it aims to fill, and a UI to match that, or at least facilitate exploring it instead of having to scroll a million times to form a mental picture, or constantly checking different directions to be aware of potentially impactful developments out there.<\/p>\n Basically from a gameplay standpoint roguelikes are best built with an optimal interface designed with optimal play in mind.<\/p>\n But now let\u2019s switch gears and see what we can do in terms of making everything<\/em> larger by breaking that design while attempting to mitigate the downsides \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n Back in late November<\/a> over on Patreon (and made available to everyone a little later) I put together a diagram and basic explanation for a hypothetical route Cogmind\u2019s interface could take on the way to something that would expand the potential number of players for which it\u2019s suitable.<\/p>\n Here I\u2019ll be diving into that diagram again to give a more organized summary with some extra details.<\/p>\n General overview of potential semi-modal and modal UI layouts for Cogmind. See below for explanation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The first phase is Cogmind\u2019s current UI layout since mid-2013 when I started the commercial version (the 7DRL<\/a> version was slightly different, always using 4:3). I\u2019m using 76\u00d750 for the map dimensions since that is the default map view width for 1080p users, which comprise the majority of players. As you can see, both the base sight range and good sensor\/attack ranges are safely within the map view (these images are all drawn to scale!).<\/p>\n Before I started considering an immediate move to an across-the-board increase in cell size, I experimented with just zooming the map. Early experiments were promising enough to convince me to just do it–plow through the implementation and see what it feels like in practice (I wrote a series on that<\/a>).<\/p>\n Quick map zoom recording taken while implementing the related animation work.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n One argument for prioritizing map zoom over figuring out how to enlarge the rest of the UI (if even possible) could be that such an approach might just be satisfactory for some players who say they\u2019d prefer \u201ca larger interface.\u201d<\/p>\n Most play time is spent looking at the map, after all, and although this would not impact text in the rest of the interface, humans are better at recognizing familiar letters at smaller sizes than, say, game-specific monochrome sprites on a map. While Cogmind\u2019s tiles were designed to be fairly recognizable via general shape, that\u2019s still not comparable to our existing familiarity with letters (on that note, this is also why Cogmind ASCII mode can be more easily enjoyed on smaller screens than tiles).<\/p>\n That said, for everyone else who still can\u2019t handle the smaller text, a zoomable map would only serve to further highlight the disparity between tile size and text size. Not only that, but as you can see from the Phase 2 diagram above, playing with the map zoomed pushes even base attack\/sight\/intel ranges somewhat out of view, much less enhanced the ranges. We\u2019re going to need some powerful QoL features to make that playable in a serious capacity! (Update 240211: Some time after finishing this article I put together another piece detailing all that<\/a>, with numerous demos.)<\/em><\/p>\n In that light, I decided it wouldn\u2019t be a great idea to release just<\/em> a Phase 2 UI with map zooming. I think for a lot of people it would feel more like a band-aid than a complete solution, and the latter is what I\u2019d rather provide, especially as this will define a portion of peoples\u2019 first impressions of a \u201cnew and improved\u201d UI.<\/p>\n Phases 1 and 2 combined are basically the same old Cogmind interface, just with the ability to zoom the map (and supporting QoL features in that case). Phase 3 is a significant departure from the norm and requires a lot more work to realize.<\/p>\n The differences start at the lowest level, converting what has always been a 60-row terminal console to one that only requires 45 rows. This allows for an up to 33% increase in font size from what everyone is using now. For example if you have a 1080p resolution, 60 rows translates to a font size of 18 (=1080\/60), where 45 rows would instead translate to a font size of 24 (=1080\/45). So anyone currently using a size 18 font would see their maximum increased to 24, a 33% boost.<\/p>\n A summary of the most common resolutions and the corresponding font size increase enabled by a 45-row layout (among a few even lesser-used resolutions than these top four, the increase might instead be closer to 20%). It\u2019s interesting to compare this chart data to a similar one I made back in 2014<\/a> in an article about fonts, when the most popular resolution 1080p stood at a much lower 33%, and 768p was ranked a much closer 25%. 1440p\/2160p were barely footnotes by comparison and there was a somewhat wider spread of resolutions in use.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The increase in font size results in a 44% reduction in total space to display info, and a 54% decrease in visible map area, which is a lot, but the latter is at least less severe than that caused by Phase 2 map zooming, which drops visible map area by 75%! The main difference is that Phase 2 zooming can be toggled in real time, whereas this info loss to accommodate a 45-row architecture by default is not capable of seeing full ranges as originally designed.<\/p>\n That said, as long as the QoL features built around map zooming work out well enough, they can also be of help in the Phase 3 UI, which technically already handles most ranges fairly well, and keeps the base sight range fully within its boundaries.<\/p>\n Overall I believe if given a choice between using a Phase 1\/2 interface or Phase 3, the latter is probably a preferable default (except for among a good portion of current\/frequent players who are quite used to having easy and efficient access to all the info provided by the regular interface).<\/p>\n And once players are using this Phase 3 layout, map zooming will likely become less useful overall (docked before it\u2019s even been introduced xD). For one it would shrink the map view even more ridiculously, while turning size 24 tiles in our 1080p example above into 48px tiles, which is kinda huge \ud83d\ude1b<\/p>\n Combining map zooming with a 45-row interface is\u2026 yeah. (sample assuming 1080p resolution, open for actual size, which is even larger than it appears here)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That\u2019s probably overkill for most needs, though I can see zooming occasionally coming in handy for some people who still prefer the regular UI layout. In any case we\u2019ll have stats on preferences in the future, and it\u2019ll be very interesting to see how usage of various modes, and map zooming, plays out. (I can say that so far among the patrons who have access to test builds with zooming\/Phase 2 enabled, almost no one is making serious use of the feature, but that\u2019s not saying a whole lot because they were frequent players used to the playing without zooming to begin with.)<\/p>\n One welcome side effect of the font size increase is that 1080p players, who as noted form the majority, will be using size 24, which is a 2x upscale of the base tile size, in other words the original size for which the tile designs were optimized! Both myself and Kacper<\/a> (the tileset artist who created most of them) are very happy about this \ud83d\ude42 (2160p players will also have access to such a multiple as one of their options)<\/p>\n So the next job in this process is to figure out how to squeeze Cogmind\u2019s normal 60-row interface into only 45. Say goodbye to 15 rows from\u2026 somewhere \ud83d\ude1b<\/p>\nUI Requirements<\/h2>\n
![\"cogmind_essential_UI_areas_highlighted2\"](\"https:\/\/www.gridsagegames.com\/blog\/gsg-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/cogmind_essential_UI_areas_highlighted2.png\")
<\/p>\nParts List<\/h3>\n
![\"cogmind_parts_list_various_late_game_RIF\"](\"https:\/\/www.gridsagegames.com\/blog\/gsg-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/cogmind_parts_list_various_late_game_RIF.png\")
<\/p>\nMap View<\/h3>\n
![\"cogmind_sample_default_map_view_area_vs_full_map_size\"](\"https:\/\/www.gridsagegames.com\/blog\/gsg-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/cogmind_sample_default_map_view_area_vs_full_map_size.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"TGGW_screenshot_04\"](\"https:\/\/www.gridsagegames.com\/blog\/gsg-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/TGGW_screenshot_04.png\")
<\/p>\nAlternative UI Layouts, an Evolution<\/h2>\n
![\"Cogmind](\"https:\/\/www.gridsagegames.com\/blog\/gsg-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/cogmind_interface_phases_potential_layout_evolution.png\")
<\/p>\nPhase 1<\/h3>\n
Phase 2<\/h3>\n
![\"Cogmind](\"https:\/\/www.gridsagegames.com\/blog\/gsg-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/cogmind_map_zoom_animation_highlight.gif\")
<\/p>\nPhase 3<\/h3>\n
![\"cogmind_resolutions_and_font_sizes_2024\"](\"https:\/\/www.gridsagegames.com\/blog\/gsg-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/cogmind_resolutions_and_font_sizes_2024.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"cogmind_interface_phases_potential_layout_evolution_phase_3\"](\"https:\/\/www.gridsagegames.com\/blog\/gsg-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/cogmind_interface_phases_potential_layout_evolution_phase_3.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"cogmind_semimodal_ui_layout_1080p_map_zoom_sample\"](\"https:\/\/www.gridsagegames.com\/blog\/gsg-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/cogmind_semimodal_ui_layout_1080p_map_zoom_sample.png\")
<\/p>\n
![\"cogmind_450p_mockup_zoomed\"](\"https:\/\/www.gridsagegames.com\/blog\/gsg-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/cogmind_450p_mockup_zoomed.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"cogmind_interface_phases_potential_layout_evolution_phase_4\"](\"https:\/\/www.gridsagegames.com\/blog\/gsg-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/cogmind_interface_phases_potential_layout_evolution_phase_4.png\")
<\/p>\n