I've been working on a project very sporadically for the past few years, and I decided to finally make a post about it!

If you aren't familiar, Cosmodread is a VR horror survival roguelike that takes place on a mysteriously derelict spaceship that the player character awakens on. The goal of the game is to get the ship's systems up and running and get back to earth. I am reimagining this vr game as a top-down horror survival rogue-like


In January 2022 (when I started the project) I contacted the developer of the game and asked him if i could take a peak at his map generation code so that mine can be as accurate as possible, and he gave me access to some prototype python tools of his (which I had to sign an NDA for, so no looksies) which I have been poking around at to get my own map generation. I got a bit swamped down with all of that and so I decided to work on getting internal frameworks for the main menu and new-game selection screens working.

Another major part of the game is getting all of the information from the game itself such as what items exist, how to craft them, and various other bits of information that I can't really find online (the cosmodread wiki is a bit helpful, but I will definitely be updating it with more information as I gather it.

I have also made several design documents that I have been using to prototype UI elements and layouts before trying to implement them.

The main purpose of this project is to teach myself better programming techniques than the ones that I used during the makin of my DungeonCE project, and I think I have been doing a good job so far!

I would have made more progress on this project, but the last few years have been pretty rough for me life-wise, so I haven't really had the mental energy to continue until very recently, I hope to pick up the pace more soon~

I will include a screenshot or 2 of what I have so far, and everyone should let me know if they want to see some of my UI designs for the actual gameplay portion!


Current Goals:
-I am getting the newgame menu working and looking good, and then I will look at map generation again
-work on map generation
-get some sprite work done for map tiles
-get a map working with player
-get more information by actually playing the game more (I'm not copying everything from the game, I just want the collectable text logs to match, and want the recipes to match. I have no way of getting the specific health and damages of enemies and weapons and stuff, but I want to balance those myself, since obviously the gameplay is different)

Here is the sprite I have made for the player character, patient 247


Current Main Menu:

(the blinking is more uniform in real life)
I will probably round off this crt, but I haven't done it yet

Of course we want to see some UI designs. This looks really cool. Finally a top-down Metroid.

Here you go! (these are exported from my reMarkable 2 e-ink tablet, and each graph square signifies a 16x16 pixel area of the screen)

Gameplay mock-up:


Map Screen mock-up:


Inventory Screen mock-up:

Love the mock-up images! Very detailed and well thought out.

Thank you so much!!! UI stuff and intuitive controls are very important to me, so I have put a lot of time and energy into that part of it, especially since I am going from a VR game to a calculator. :3

Here is a showcase of the new-game menu! (Which i will probably rename to New Run, since that more fits the rogue-like gameplay)


For context, each toggle represents the available game modifiers, and red lights mean unlocked, and green would signify that the modifier is selected and will be applied to the run that will be started.
The small crt displays the name and descriptions of the highlighted modifier, and will also display the various unlocked starting weapons once I get some 2-color sprites drawn for them. It may also display details about what the different ship sizes actually mean.

The rogue-like aspects of cosmodread come into play with many different blueprints that can be found during play, and every run is guaranteed to contain a crafting machine. Different weapons can be found in runs, and can also be unlocked as starting weapons if the blueprints are found (the default starting weapon is a crossbow), this allows for subsequent runs to be made slightly easier. Other unlockable craftables include a bag that gives more inventory space, personal armor, the one healing item in the game, O₂ bottles, and a map beacon.

When can we download a beta version?

Once I have some amount of actual gameplay functionality, I might make a beta available~
(so probably no sooner than a few weeks, most likely significantly longer than that)

I love the various fonts on display here! Did you adapt existing fonts, or make your own?

I basically made my own, but I did base them on other fonts that I found that matched my vision!

Small Update: I have been poking around at this a little bit, but I haven't made much substantive progress with the code itself.

However, I have gathered some more data from the VR game, and I would like to be able to put it in the wiki, does anyone know how to edit fandom.com pages?

I looked at it, but I couldn't figure out how to add a new tab and I got overwhelmed

Three dots, then add new page, it looks like: https://community.fandom.com/wiki/Help:New_page

Oh wow! It makes sense that there is a help page I just didn't think about that, thank you so much!!

I'm honestly having a really hard time figuring out how to do what I want to do with my map generation in actual code. I have figured out the steps that I want to take (based on the python script I got from the original game creator) and I understand how I want my process to work, but I can't really figure out how to implement it in C and it is frustrating me greatly....

Something that I think would help me a lot would e to have a conversation with someone who knows what they are doing with C on the CE and go over my thoughts and plans with them. Any help I can get with this I would be very much appreciated!

If anyone is interested, just shoot me a message here or on discord <3

I've done more poking around with map generation code and understanding what I'm doing, I will hopefully be able to show off a demo soon!

Very exciting! Looking forward to seeing progress

I misunderstood my own knowledge and am not very close to showing off a dem, BUT I did try my game out on real hardware for the first time and also made a mockup of the main gameplay UI to see what it looked like on calc, and I am very pleased with the results!

mockup in CEmu:


mockup on calc:


main and new game menus on calc:


Seeing how the main gameplay ui will look in real life makes me want to add some kind of status/info bar across the top of the screen, but I don't know what kind of information it would make sense to display up there~ Maybe some stats on the current run? Like "objectives completed x/5" or something like that

This is looking really good I like the art style! If you don't feel like a top bar is needed for gameplay then I'd just leave it out. You could also just add something up there for 'aesthetics' but make it no functional.

Thank you very much!


That's a good point! I might just add a bit of a bar just to help delineate the top of the screen, but without any info on it

This looks amazing. Can't wait to play it.