Top all-time · #1410
Grid Sage Games
Company blog · gridsagegames.com/bloggamesprogramming
Grid Sage Games is the company blog at gridsagegames.com, writing about games and programming. Since 2014, 51 different Hacker News readers have linked it 79 times, most often “REXPaint: Powerful, User-Friendly ASCII Art Editor”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-12-18, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 11 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
Josh Ge's Cogmind roguelike development blog, plus his REXPaint ASCII editor. HN readers link the blog for in-depth roguelike development, game design, procedural map generation and ASCII graphics posts.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Homepage of indie developer Grid Sage Games, developer of Cogmind
Most-linked posts?
- REXPaint: Powerful, User-Friendly ASCII Art Editor9 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2018-12-10
- /cogmind/8 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2019-12-18
- /blog/4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-03-21
- How to Make a Roguelike (2018)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-06-18
- (2014) Procedural Map Generation3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-12-22
- Sorry macOS users, but Apple has gone too far for some of us devs2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-09-29
- RexPaint: a powerful and user-friendly ASCII art editor2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-05-06
- /cogmind/buy.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-06-30
- /blog/2015/04/cogmind-roguelike/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-06-30
What Hacker News says?
Reminds me a lot of Cogmind's[1] level entry visuals, love it! [1]: https://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/
Comment linking /cogmind/
on “TTE: Terminal Text Effects”Submitted REXPaint: Powerful, User-Friendly ASCII Art Editor as a story · 208 points
HN discussion1) Games should be able to operate in more moral ambiguity than clear black and white prescription 2) Game mechanics should violate your expectations more. 3) More variations on theme see https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/gsg-content/uploads/2018/... most games operate in a very narrow rangen of expectations that lead to a staid and predictable experience. Almost all first-person games suffer from this sort of homo…
Comment linking /blog/gsg-content/uploads/2018/10/roguelike_theme_list.png
on “Ask HN: What game do you wish existed?”Submitted Developing Multitile Creatures in Roguelikes as a story · 142 points
HN discussionI also grew up with pixel art. What I do like about pixel art was that it forced you to use your imagination more to complete the scene. That has driven me towards modern games made entirely in ASCII or text, however, not towards more pixel art. I highly recommend Brogue or Cogmind for people that want an example of a beautiful looking contemporary game made with ASCII/ANSI. The developer of Cogmind open-sourced his…
Comment linking /rexpaint/
on “Why All of Our Games Look Like Crap”Submitted Sorry macOS users, but Apple has gone too far for some of us devs as a story · 142 points
HN discussionI think this looks more consistent than both: https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/gsg-content/uploads/2018/...
Comment linking /blog/gsg-content/uploads/2018/10/python_roguelike_temple_of_torment.png
on “Why All of Our Games Look Like Crap”Submitted Level Design and Shaping a Roguelike Experience as a story · 140 points
HN discussionYou probably know all this, but for others: Cogmind is a lot of really thought out small touches that sum up to an engaging experience despite at first glance looking like any other roguelike. It's got great animations/explosions and an intuitive UI. The developer is the main mod of r/roguelikedev, has been running a great blog for years where he dives deep into aspects of roguelike dev ( https://www.gridsagegames.c…
Comment linking /blog/
on “Shattered Pixel Dungeon is an open-source traditional roguelike dungeon crawler”Submitted Releasing a Commercial ASCII Roguelike, a Post-Mortem as a story · 95 points
HN discussionNice! I was wondering if it would be good for making ascii art assets for roguelike games (for example: https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2014/12/cogmind-ascii-art... or https://www.markrjohnsongames.com/games/ultima-ratio-regum/ ) - some of the art you've made for oxide thinks it must be good for that!
Comment linking /blog/2014/12/cogmind-ascii-art-gallery/
on “Monodraw”Submitted Generating and Populating Caves in a Roguelike Game as a story · 68 points
HN discussionWhile not exactly the same use case, I'd also like to point to REXPaint [1]. Same same, but different. And Windows only, though Wine might help under Linux. [1] https://www.gridsagegames.com/rexpaint/
Comment linking /rexpaint/
on “Monodraw”Submitted Fonts in Roguelikes (2014) as a story · 8 points
HN discussionDropping 32bit support is game-over for gaming on macOS. The numbers already didn't add up for indie developers [1]. Even AAA game developers often ignore macOS because the ROI is just too low. And from the $5/month subscription how much will end up to the developers [2]? Essentially what Apple Arcade will end-up hosting is ports of run-of-the-mill mobile games. And I'd bet the advertised number of developers will d…
Comment linking /blog/2019/09/sorry-mac-users-apple-doesnt-care-about-us-devs/
on “macOS Catalina”Submitted Iterative UI Design – Cogmind / Grid Sage Games as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThat's great news on the front of "classic" rogue-likes. On the flipside, I'm really enjoying how Cogmind is evolving the interface and pushing ASCII graphics: http://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/ It's a great year for Rogue-likes in general, it seems!
Comment linking /cogmind/
on “After a ten-year hiatus, NetHack 3.6”Submitted How to Make a Roguelike (2018) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionREXPaint ( https://www.gridsagegames.com/rexpaint/ ) is really excellent for this sort of thing.
Comment linking /rexpaint/
on “The Art of Warez Documents the Lost ANSI Art Scene (2019)”Submitted Rexpaint: ASCII Art Editor as a story · 2 points
HN discussionCogmind is an interesting example of pure ASCII holding itself to a very high UI standard. Here is a quick animated gif with a few examples of interactions: http://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/gsg-content/uploads/2014/1...
Comment linking /blog/gsg-content/uploads/2014/11/cogmind_ui_animation_compilation.gif
on “The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress (2011)”Submitted RexPaint: a powerful and user-friendly ASCII art editor as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe best series of maze generation that I know is in Cogmind's dev blog: http://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2014/06/procedural-map-gen...
Comment linking /blog/2014/06/procedural-map-generation/
on “Rooms and Mazes: A Procedural Dungeon Generator”Submitted Rexpaint – a powerful ASCII art editor as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThese games still exist today, but come from small passion studies (much like early-mid Sierra)...and today, the number of games published is much, much greater than it ever was then. That is to say, generally only indie- or genre- enthusiasts know where to find the "good stuff" for any given category good, because the small studios don't have the marketing dollars to compete with the larger players or to cut throug…
Comment linking /cogmind/
on “Sierra was captured, then killed, by an accounting fraud”Submitted Mapgen: Tunneling Algorithm (2014) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionCogmind might be worth a look too, the author's dev blog is also superb. https://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/ https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/
Comment linking /blog/
on “Dwarf Fortress Creator Explains Its Complexity and Origins [video]”Submitted Level Design and Shaping a Roguelike Experience as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSimilarly, Cogmind's success is partially because it learned all the hard-won lessons on good game UI of the last decades, plus the importance of a fancy tile-set: https://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/ It does, however, also have the fanciest abstract ASCII graphics I've ever seen. (the other reason is that it's just a damn good game)
Comment linking /cogmind/
on “Dwarf Fortress: An actual look at graphical improvements”Submitted (2014) Procedural Map Generation as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
