(Cross-posted from the devblog here--follow link for better formatting.)
Each year in Cogmind development has been bigger than the last, and 2017 was no different!
As in the 2014/2015/2016 summaries, let's start with a collage of images from this year:
Selection of images from the past year of Cogmind development as posted on this blog and Twitter (full mega size here).
In 2017 Cogmind flew through Greenlight, entered Beta after yet more huge content updates, and has since made its way onto Steam, where it's continued to do fairly well as we head into the post-Alpha who-knows-when-this-will-end-but-it's-fun period of expansion!
Development Time
At the Year 4 (technically Year 4.4) mark we've reached 8,410 hours of total work, keeping mostly on par with previous years:
Cogmind Monthly Development Hours, 2013.7-2017.11. (The color coding is for different aspects of development tackled each month, the subject of a future in-depth article to come when Cogmind is complete.)
You can see development ramping upward into 2017 as I was eager to finish up the coding (green) and content (orange) to finish the story before a planned Steam launch, but then in April I got that nasty concussion which resulted in a serious hit on productivity.
Still, this year added 2,046 hours, a slight 3.2% increase over the year before. Work on the game itself (923 hours), however, fell 19.8% compared to 2016, a ratio shift that reflects two factors: 1) progress all but ground to a halt while I tried to recover over summer but couldn't very well stop community interaction altogether, and 2) preparing for Steam inevitably requires a lot of non-game work. You can clearly see the Steam EA release there in October, with a peak resembling my own EA launch of Alpha 1 back in 2015 :). Now that Cogmind is released on Steam and that side of things is stabilized, the graph will start shifting back to more content-focused work over the coming months.
Overall it's been a great year for progress, though it could've been even better had I not hit my head... Luckily when things were at their worst (late August when I was incapacitated most of the time) I finally found a treatment that worked well enough to get me back to full time work!
Acupuncture!
I'm still dealing with some of the effects now, but have at least gotten noticeably better--I mean, otherwise that 243-hour work month when I launched on Steam wouldn't have been possible :P
Features
To summarize this year's highlights: Content was added or adjusted to greatly expand the experience for players across the entire spectrum, as Cogmind got easier difficulty options, the first challenge modes, and an extended end-game with deadly challenges few have even reached, much less survived. Most importantly, in the first half of the year the story was completed with seven different endings to uncover. (I also animated all the endings, which took quite a while!)
There is no map like this in game (honestly it wouldn't make for enjoyable exploration), but it's an experimental precursor to... something secret added this year.
I decided to signify the shift into a new post-story phase by declaring Cogmind "Beta," the massive release of which was both aptly and inaptly dubbed "The End." This happened around the same time as Cogmind reached two full years in my own "early access" program, which has gone well enough.
Of course plenty of other features came out this year, too, as linked from the ten releases beginning with Alpha 13 in the Release History. And we still have one more update to look forward to this month :D
Mix of various feature gifs from the year. Because gifs.
News and Writing
As with last year, most updates have been discussed via release notes on the forums (and now Steam) rather than covered on the blog. At both of those places I've also started regular weekly updates ("SITREP Saturday") rather than posting randomly once every 10-14 days like I was doing before, so that they're more predictable.
Although I haven't been sharing as many design articles this year due to the changing nature of the kinds of things I've been working on (for example much of the game content added this year was secret :P), there are definitely more on the way in 2018. But I have been continuing to write FAQs over on r/roguelikedev, where #55~67 are all from this year and you can read about topics like Mob Distribution, Character Archetypes, Status Effects, and Transparency and Obfuscation as they relate to Cogmind.
Exposure
For years I avoided seeking out too much attention for Cogmind, even shying away from some decent opportunities that presented themselves, because the game world was not only incomplete, but more importantly it was definitely priced for hardcore fans of the genre (for those of you new to Cogmind, know that for a long while it was $25-30 as a more reliable way to "crowdfund" the scope I was trying to build into it--we can thank the early adopters for making the current version possible!).
I didn't want Cogmind's first impression on a wider audience to be primarily that it's strangely overpriced for an indie game, which often fall between $10-20, so I turned down some offers for exposure back then. That changed with the Beta and the price drop, although it's interesting to note that despite my attempts to contact some press and LPers this year, almost all of the best channels interested in Cogmind found it on their own, both before and after the Steam release.
This year Cogmind was one of the subjects of an article on PC Gamer (which also later announced the news of Cogmind's Steam release), and even appeared in two magazines, PC Guru and Canard PC. There have been more than a dozen other smaller pieces this year as well.
Some of the coverage Cogmind received this year, mostly around its debut on Steam.
But often more helpful than media coverage these days, Let's Players were responsible for the biggest boost in exposure, with popular players like quill18, Aavak, and Nookrium definitely driving interest around the Steam release. (Also many thanks to the smaller channels out there doing even more streams/videos over the long term <3)
Not that I can draw a huge audience myself, but I've been continuing to occasionally stream as well, and we often have new players drop by to mingle with the regulars and pick up tips, which goes a long way towards improving the skill level of the community as a whole. As of the most recent stream I'm uploading them to YouTube where they'll live longer than on Twitch, in case people want to watch them later.
We'll see if Cogmind gets any mentions in end-of-year articles, but I can say that just this week we already made the IndieDB Top 100 list for 2017--voting for the final round is actually ongoing right now.
Obviously the best new point of exposure for Cogmind in the long term is Steam, where it's accessible to a greater number of players and can integrate more closely with the gaming community at large.
Steam
We'd been talking about it in the future tense for so long that it almost feels unreal, but 2017 was finally the year Cogmind arrived on Steam.
Early in the year Valve announced they'd be getting rid of Greenlight by replacing it with a simple paywall, and I knew we were close to a Steam release anyway, so I figured I'd respond by quickly putting Cogmind up there and try to beat the inevitable deluge of games to Steam. Given all the assets I already had lying around it took only two days from decision to campaign, which was pretty cool.
Well that didn't take long!
Cogmind made it through pretty quickly, though I still planned to wait at least a couple months for the Beta before it'd be Steam-ready.
Clearly a dedicated fan base at work :P
Unfortunately my accident essentially coincided with Beta completion, meaning I had to give up the plan to reach Steam before all those other games, and also forgo a preferable early-summer Early Access release.
Staying alive for the long-term seemed a little more important at the time xD
But hey come October believe it or not it really did happen! Player reviews have been good, and the leaderboards certainly exploded. I've actually already covered a lot of details from the Steam release and its aftermath in my postmortem, so check that out if interested.
Some graphs shared in my recent Steam EA month-1 postmortem for Cogmind.
2018
All that's behind us now... what we want to know is what great things 2018 will bring!
Well, certainly we've gotta finish the stuff still listed on the long-time roadmap, which altogether will take at least a few months, or more considering it'll all be mixed in with other improvements, too. So without a doubt we'll get those built-in achievements, an expanded robot hacking system, more ambient audio, and revamped score sheets.
This means Early Access will easily last another six months, and probably longer because I don't want to bother calling it 1.0 if we'll still be getting new extra features for much of the coming year.
Exactly how much longer will really depend on what happens on Steam while the remainder of the confirmed features are being worked on. If reception and sales are sufficiently good, I'll have trouble stopping myself! I can't be specific about the virtually endless list of potential features I've accumulated (player expectations and all that...), but I'll admit there is room for, plans for, and a desire to add, many new items, mechanics, robots, maps, NPCs, factions, everything...
Feels great to be back, and the rest has done well for my post-concussion issues. Me and my brain have been humming along at full blast all week since returning, and here's what we've been up to :D
As much as I want to get working on major new features right away, my priority is always to address bugs ASAP. Since a number of rare issues were discovered following the new activity on Steam, I had to spend a few days squashing all those.
I'm happy to report I've now moved on to the next phase of pre-major stuff: The near-term feature list. A lot of little feature requests and tweak ideas have piled up, and since many of these are both easy to do and already confirmed in my plans, I'd prefer to get most of them out of the way before moving on so we can start the next big things with a clean state. (Plus medium-priority tweaks and whatnot have a way of piling up quickly when untended across multiple versions, and I don't want that to turn into an endless list!)
Robot Info
I've made a few updates to the robot info window, starting with a list of immunities below any resistances they might have (including context help describing each).
The vast majority of robots have no immunities, but without a few immunities it'd be way too easy to cheese to death major NPCs and some-late game robots by taking advantage of basic combat mechanics :P
For example the most common immunity is against critical strikes, because kinetic crit stacks are a super effective way to plow through enemies. Really this immunity just more or less puts major bots on par with you, since you're not that susceptible to crits either! (Not that this immunity is new--immunities have been around since the beginning, but since they only come into play late in the game most of the experienced players have figured this out. But it needs to be made more apparent so I've been wanting to explicitly show immunities for a while...)
Some robots also have previously hidden "traits" which are essentially passive effects. These are not usually all that important to the game and were originally meant to be something to discover--the lore usually mentions them in one way or another. But their details are now fully revealed and explained in a new dedicated window.
In order to make room for all this stuff, I had to put robot Analysis text in a separate window, too, but that's not really needed all that often, so this was a good change, freeing up valuable space to fit more important info! (also technically a few late-game analyses were so long they didn't fit into the robot's window, so this was going to happen eventually anyway)
(the recording shows an immunities button from an earlier test build--they don't have their own button anymore)
Although there's context help explaining the meaning of resistance values in Cogmind, which uses an old X-Com method of "damage modifiers," to help new players more quickly grasp the data I'm changing all resistance displays to use the more modern and common system of positive values representing resistances and negative values implying a weakness.
So this applies not only to robots, but all objects with a list of resistances:
Coincidentally I wrote a bit about information transparency yesterday over on r/roguelikedev, where you can also read about how it's approached in some other projects.
Corruption
We have a new corruption effect, which is dangerous but more rare than any of the others.
Not only is it rarer, but I'm also adding corruption thresholds for many effects--so no more misfires at 1%--and this new one has the highest threshold.
For extra fun, corrupted bots also now misfire or outright target random bots.
(this sample image is not indicative of the intended frequency--I recorded during testing with a 100% chance :P)
This essentially gives yet another boost to EM side effects, but on the flip side Programmers are now capable of resetting some allied bot systems to fully purge their corruption.
Miscellaneous
As requested, pure keyboard players will now have access to comparisons between two or more items on the map.
I seem to have spotted a bug in the new Programmer corruption purge system that caused it to instead attempt to hack a friend, but I couldn't repeat it so that might still be in there. I'm thinking it was probably the Programmer itself being corrupted and deciding to attack instead of help an ally (under that new mechanic...), which would be fine :P. In any case, it was fun to try to repeat the bug--spawning a horde of allies and repeatedly zapping them all :D
I fixed a bug with the color-coding in the repair/scan item list when scrolling through more than 26 applicable items--the colors are still pretty with a huge and messy inventory, though :)
Player Raine357 has scraped all 30k+ Beta 3 scoresheets into a database to run queries on them, like this one showing average player damage type distribution throughout the game, demonstrating how all the types become equally viable by the end (EM has additional effects and does only about half damage compared to other weapons).
Stream
By the time I got back, my previous stream linked from the last SITREP was no longer saved on Twitch, so the first thing I did was stream the weekly seed.
It was a three-hour winning combat run, pretty straight to the end except for a fair bit of craziness as I approached the end and got sidetracked into a bit of trouble before making a typically epic Cogmind comeback <3
I've also (finally) decided to go ahead and upload my streams to YouTube so they don't disappear like that in case some of you want to check them out later!
A Question
So I was approached by Valve recently letting me know they'd like to feature Cogmind later this month on the front page for an extended period.
This is great news, but they also said that to be featured I'd have to do a 25% discount. Technically Cogmind has been available at its current price for eight months now, so even though it's only been on Steam for two of those months, maybe it's about time to allow players to join us at the fairly decent price of $15? That said, technically I also not long ago promised to not do any discounts greater than 10% during EA (at the time not having any idea that Cogmind would be graced with such attention from Valve :P).
So I've already initially refused their offer on the grounds of that promise from a couple weeks back (yes, a lot of people are calling me crazy xD), but am a bit conflicted because it might be the best choice for Cogmind at this point, since an opportunity like this probably won't be available again.
Any opinions?
(Update: As per the discussion on this topic both here and in other channels, I've since updated the previous SITREP with a detailed explanation. Thank you for your feedback!)
Update When?
Progress overall has been good for a week back at the helm so far, though I'm not yet sure how much I want to stuff into the next release. I think it'll be Beta 4 instead of 3.2, but calling it that implies packing in even more features :P
At least according to my old system... I'm still trying to figure out a reasonable way to adjust my dev cycle and other factors to emphasize more frequent updates rather than packing too much into each, but I've always rather liked meaty changelogs.
Anyway, there won't be a public update next week, but depending on progress over the next 4-5 days I might put something out the week after that. More in next week's SITREP :D
The voting happens in two phases, first (now) just to determine the Top 100 group, then those 100 compete for one of the Top 10 spots. While I don't think Cogmind has the numbers to break into the latter crowd (it's a popularity contest, after all, and Cogmind's audience is pretty niche!), I'm pretty sure we can make the Top 100 again. Cogmind has been in the Top 100 for several years now thanks to fans helping vote it past the first round. Thank you!
Registration isn't required.
I won't be posting a dedicated reminder about the next phase, but will mention it in the news assuming Cogmind makes it past round one.
(Also if you haven't done so yet, for those of you with Cogmind on Steam, leaving a review is really helpful!)
(Also, on IndieDB go vote for your other favorite roguelikes that have an IndieDB page--lots do!)
I'm back from my trip and have started work on the next Beta. More news on that come Saturday! Yesterday I streamed the weekly seed and won--that was pretty fun (details and video links), and the rest of the week will be devoted to preparing the next release.
Update 171211
Cogmind has made it through round 1 and is now confirmed in the Top 100 of 2017, thanks for all the votes!. Round 2 voting has started now :D
SITREP Saturday #4: The Autumn Cogmind
As announced before, development is on a short pause right now as I take care of some business-side Cogmind issues, plus some time visiting family on the other side of the globe.
To recap, last week Beta 3.1 went out on what was certainly an odd release day I've never tried before. There's not much online activity on weekends, especially Sunday, so it's not a great day to release. This time I didn't have a choice since the new version had to be out before going on this trip, while also leaving enough time to deal with issues should any arise. At least the release went smoothly so that rather than dealing with any issues I could start working on the next few things on my list!
I didn't get started immediately, however, instead streaming some Cogmind on the date of the update. This is something I've always felt like doing in the past, but also always felt like I needed to be ready to react to release issues, or even just comments. I had released privately a couple days early, though, and it was doing fine so I figured it'd be okay to be away for a stream. Plus I really wanted to play, and we have a lot of new players now so it'd be good if I could get in another stream before leaving. I ended up streaming for five hours with the "biggest" turnout ever, peaking at over 30 viewers. It was an unusual day for me to stream, but if I can I'll try again for a weekend stream in the future.
As for the stream, this time I just wanted to try some different crazy strategies, expecting to die and play a few runs in the same vein, but surprisingly that one run went on for five hours and I made it to the last map, anyway, despite all the handicaps from the non-optimal decisions along the way. Was fun :) (I had only a few utility slots to work with!)
Regarding the 3.1 release, one of the main features was Steam Cloud support, but I noticed that even though I'd enabled it in the Steamworks options and it was working normally, the fact that a game has this feature is not shown on the store page unless you manually set that in the page options. I only learned this a couple days later after finally getting a reply from Steam support. I had completely forgotten that was even a setting, because of course it's not on the cloud settings page... Hopefully that didn't confuse anyone, but yeah Cogmind has cloud support.
A couple of fun things following the release:
DDarkray converted one of the greatsword ASCII art pieces to a cursor for use with the new custom cursor feature:
I was reading through a bunch of the reviews and came across this pretty funny section in one of them:
That's one way to put it :P
As usual, I like to record events and report on them, hopefully learning something in the process, so to culminate this fun and informative process of launching on Steam, I put together an in-depth postmortem: "Data and Thoughts from a Month on Steam." Some interesting and useful discoveries were made.
The store page got 236k visitors in the first month...
So if you're interested in behind-the-scenes details like that, check out the post for all kinds of graphs to explore. Cogmind is 10% off for the Steam Autumn sale right now, so it'll be interesting to see how that data compares to what I have so far. (Most people tend to buy Steam games when they're on sale...) Note that while Cogmind will occasionally have 10% discounts during Early Access, they'll never be more than 10%*. (Also, the same discount is available from both Steam and direct from my site--I'll always mirror discounts for DRM-free version.)
(*While I hate to break explicit promises like that, shortly after this news I was contacted by Valve offering some preferred placement on Steam's front page during this year's Winter Sale--the platform's busiest time of the year--if I'd be willing to do a 25% discount. I initially refused, but after opening this up for discussion and talking to players about it for a while, I found that even among current owners support for taking the offer was unanimous. Of course the exposure will be good, and it's true that guaranteed placement on Steam's front page is a hard deal to pass up... While the timing would've been perfect if I'd been able to release to Steam back before summer (the "no injury" scenario xD), technically Cogmind has already been available at $18-20 for the past eight months, so temporarily making it available at $15 seems okay. Note that future discounts will still generally be 10%, at least during EA.)
In other roguelike news, if you're interested in the genre's history, Slashie has done some great research into the origins of the term "roguelike". Read about how someone suggested this genre be called "sucrpgs" :P. He presented his findings at the most recent Roguelike Celebration which unfortunately I couldn't make this year but it's funny because that was only 10 days ago and I am near San Francisco right now xD (I gave a talk at last year's celebration which you might be interested in)
I won't be back for another week, so our next SITREP will be in a couple weeks so I have more progress to talk about!
Beta 3.1 "In the Cloud"
Our first post-Steam update! Below you'll find a fairly hefty changelog considering it's only a minor version increment, but there's no new content--instead I wanted to get a lot of little feature requests and tweaks out of the way as soon as possible before moving on to bigger things. Beta 3.1 brings us Steam Cloud support, ALERT messages you can't miss, and all maps accessible from any difficulty level...
Cogmind Beta 3.1 "In the Cloud" (0.10.171111) changelog:
NEW: [Steam] Steam Cloud support
NEW: ALERT log messages also appear over the map at the top left (adjustable via advanced.cfg: mapAlertDuration)
NEW: Most ALERT log messages/announcements accompanied by a sound effect for emphasis
NEW: Triggering High Security is accompanied by a special sound effect
NEW: Message/combat logs prefix lines with turn numbers in Tactical HUD mode (toggle via advanced.cfg: disableMessageLogTurnNumbers)
NEW: noFluffLogMessages option to never show purely atmospheric log messages related to some robot actions (toggle via advanced.cfg)
NEW: Ctrl-RMB on walls/doors for their stats (if a info window already open, simple RMB works too)
NEW: Custom cursor support (see manual under Advanced UI)
NEW: Descriptions for all 49 advanced.cfg-only options added to manual under Advanced UI
NEW: WORKMAN keyboard layout file
NEW: Partial keyboard layout files for QWERTZ, ABNT2, UK
NEW: Numpad Enter also closes context help, advances transmission text, and works on game over screen to restart
NEW: Tutorial message explicitly indicates purpose of matter on first acquiring it (same as item description)
NEW: Several situational tutorial messages regarding energy management
NEW: Weapon penetration stat context help explicitly mentions that Huge robots count as a single object
NEW: "Inventory Autosorting" in options menu toggles automatic type-sorting of inventory items (equivalent to 't')
NEW: Attached part relative coverage visualization also shows specific values in Tactical HUD mode
NEW: All Alpha supporter names registered since Beta 3 added to in-game list (see Credits menu)
NEW: All Alpha item-attribution names registered since Beta 3 added to the item collection gallery
MOD: All maps accessible in all difficulty levels (most challenging areas no longer blocked off in easier modes)
MOD: Structural Scanner no longer required to get explosion data in machine info (but still required to know if such a machine has been destabilized)
MOD: Structural Scanner effect description explicitly states that it
MOD: All keyboard map-shifting commands now jump the map by default (single-space shifting no longer possible)
MOD: Shift modifier no longer required for keyboard mode to shift map view (Alt-only), except for vi-keys
MOD: vi-keys no longer need Shift or Alt modifier in dedicated mapshift mode (`), simply hjklyubn will do :)
MOD: /user/cogmind.cfg split into three files: system.cfg, options.cfg, advanced.cfg
MOD: "Show Part Range" and "Invert Map Pan" removed from options menu (now in advanced.cfg)
MOD: advanced.cfg autoSortInventory renamed to matchSortInventory
MOD: Tread crushing effect description includes explicit notice of max core integrity to be crushable (50)
MOD: Removed critical hit stat context help mention of effect on machines, large doors, and barriers (no longer applicable)
MOD: Walls/doors destroyed by launchers cause alert increase as with other weapons
MOD: Experimental/pre-release builds no longer warn about version number not matching server records
MOD: Scan window uses a much quicker, quieter sound to prevent overlap when hovering cursor across groups of items
MOD: Text printing/scrolling sfx replaced by a more subtle version with lower pitch and volume
MOD: Doubled matter extraction rate of all Field Recycling Units
MOD: Save file naming scheme changed to reflect internal save version, and extension changed to .sav
MOD: Tunneling hack more useful
MOD: Resource containers no longer have a LOAD setting (since the desired behavior is now automatic anyway)
MOD: Integrity-wise sorting of inventory now orders by absolute integrity rather than percent remaining
FIX: Attaching Core Expander from inventory via any means of direct swapping would crash game on subsequent key press [russomatroso]
FIX: 0b10 Decoder Chip [G/L] crashed on attempting to reveal an item outside FOV dropped on a chip-discovered trap [Darg]
FIX: Manual referenced older damage modifier for critical strikes against armor (is 20%, not 25%) [zxc]
FIX: Clicking 'X' button to close robot manual hacking window with code list open didn't also close the latter, and would later crash the UI [Valguris]
FIX: Potential to crash in the combat log if a certain sequence of messages quickly appeared under rare conditions [LordKee]
FIX: Using a Reconstructor while affected by a Stasis Beam to move outside the beam range would maintain the hold as long as no new obstructions [DDarkRay]
FIX: Unidentified prototypes in inventory indirectly revealed coverage and integrity values through respective visualization modes [DDarkRay]
FIX: Saving files would silently fail if player manually deleted the target directories [The Renderer]
FIX: Ctrl-CMB to toggle volley range visualization not working under some conditions [Uninstall Wizard]
FIX: On some Linux/Wine setups online News update feature might occasionally have a trailing 0 causing repeat news content to flash as if new [Joshua]
FIX: Typo in lore [zill]
FIX: Unidentified prototype resource containers held in inventory could still indirectly collect and store energy/matter
FIX: With non-green console border colors, the first item comparison in the gallery would still have two inside corners appear green
FIX: Removed critical strike stat context help mention of props being destroyable by crits
Cloud Saves
Beta 3.1's main attraction is compatibility with Steam Cloud, allowing anyone playing through Steam to preserve their settings, save file, and metadata across multiple machines, automagically.
This required the somewhat altered config system I talked about a couple weeks ago. As such, there are two important steps to follow if you're going to take advantage of the cloud support:
Your settings will only be migrated properly if you update to this version, Beta 3.1, so do that first.
Also if you've played Cogmind before, be sure to start playing on the machine with the settings and data that you want to keep! Just running it once should be enough, and then you can use either/any machine.
Note that 3.0 saves are compatible with 3.1, so you can update immediately, even in the middle of an ongoing run, and just keep going.
Know that this won't always be the case in the future--major versions and any updates that add new content do break save compatibility. That said, beginning with this release Cogmind stores saves under a new filename that reflects its internal save version, and what I plan to do is leave prior versions of Cogmind available as separate branches on Steam, so even if you do update (perhaps by accident), you'll still be able to rollback your install and play an unfinished run on a previous version if you like.
Difficulty
Difficulty hasn't been significantly altered with this update, though do be careful with those explosives. They're lifesavers in a lot of situations, but now they also piss off the Complex more than they used to. Each wall and door destroyed by non-AOE weapons has always raised alert by a small amount, but explosives were exempt from that rule until now. Obviously collateral damage with AOE weapons is much more likely, so the consequences are now more in line with their power.
A few items were nerfed, the only really notable category being Coolant Injectors, which have always been pretty OP since they were introduced--now they might not last you forever :P
I buffed the secret hack that everyone loves to hate. Now you'll probably want to use it a lot more often if you're planning a specific route through the world.
The biggest change to difficulty comes outside the default Roguelike mode, since there are no longer any limits on where Easier and Easiest mode players can visit. This is the way it was early on when I first implemented these modes, but the active community was much smaller then and almost no one was really playing the easier modes anyway, so there was a stronger cry to gate the most secret lore behind the regular difficulty. Now it's all open again :)
Beware though, the other half of the reason I thought it was a good idea to close off some maps was that they are disproportionately challenging even on the easiest mode! Cogmind's world was balanced for the default difficulty, so on the easier modes it's possible to wander into what are still very deadly areas. But hey, at least it's definitely easier than what you'd face on the regular mode, and it gives you access to all the lore.
(Currently fewer than 10% of players are using either of the easier modes.)
Accessibility
As described last weekend, Cogmind now supports custom cursors. The manual shows how to do it--it's super easy. While I fixed most of the odd behaviors caused by enabling optional software-rendered cursors that Cogmind didn't originally account for in its architectural decisions accumulated over the past four years (:P), there could be some undiscovered issues if I missed any UI combinations during testing. Let me know if you end up using a custom cursor and find anything fishy.
3.1 also includes more keyboard layouts, which I tried to support to the best of the ability of the system. The thread for how to use those is here.
Feature Images
A collection of demos from this release...
Optional automated inventory sorting:
On-map popups for important ALERT log messages:
Numbered log lines:
Example 2:
Explosive machine details are now freely available (without Structural Scanner):
Ctrl-RMB on a wall or door to inspect it for armor and resistance info (or just RMB if window already open):
Coverage visualization includes precise numbers:
[Non-serious] custom cursor in action!
Further differentiated config files:
Ctrl-CMB also toggles volley range visualization:
SITREP Saturday #3: YAQOL
Anyone who looks back through Cogmind's release history will see that I've always placed a lot of importance on maintaining good QoL. I love adding content and mechanics (and have oh so many plans...) but the priority is always to take care of the little things that help improve what we already have, and since we have a lot of new players now--over 1,000 on the leaderboards (counting only named players), it's natural that the influx has brought with it a lot of requests we can reasonably accommodate.
So that's much of what I've been working on this week.
Beta 3.1 is around the corner, and focuses on quality of life among other small changes and features (including of course the Cloud support I talked about last time).
Small features like optional automated inventory sorting:
I was actually going to release earlier this week, but kept postponing it because there was a really odd bug which didn't make any sense given the source code, so I thought it might be the compiler and couldn't confirm that, and basically had, and still have, no idea where it's coming from. An old game file I no longer use (and since deleted) kept popping up out of nowhere, recreating itself when there is clearly no code in the game to do that. This file affects the operation of the game so it was rather important to figure out, but it's completely random. I thought it was the compiler using old code but rebuilding from scratch didn't stop it. Anyway, I filled an entire page with notes about this bug trying to figure it out, as I encountered it a few times each day, adding more and more tests in between working down the list of other features that we wanted eventually anyway. I never did find the bug, but release can wait no longer so I coded a workaround that will at least prevent it from screwing things up should it appear again. Strangely enough, this file didn't appear at all in the past day...
Progress
Other progress from the week, best demonstrated in images:
New on-map popups for very important ALERT log messages!
These are accompanied by a very obvious alarm sound, because despite being so bright in the message log ALERT messages were still easy to miss, but they often have serious implications for survivability. If you want to keep the good old "what where'd that assault ARC come from?!?!" experience, there is a way to turn map alerts off :P
Coverage visualization graphs are now accompanied by their specific percentages in Tactical HUD mode:
In case you don't want to use the 'v' key/button, Ctrl-CMB now works to toggle the volley range visualization:
Explosive machine details are now free. No more Structural Scanner required, just inspect the machine:
The mouse can also now inspect walls and doors via Ctrl-RMB (or just RMB if the info window is already open).
Good strategy sometimes calls for knowing what it'll take to create new doors. (Though know that unless it's a special wall, melee weapons and non-EM cannons are usually enough to do the trick.)
More Coverage!
Cogmind got two pages in the November issue of Canard PC, the "leading video game magazine in France, Belgium and Switzerland." They rate it "Sans Danger," meaning it's safe to buy even though it's in Early Access :)
I did an interview for Indie Hackers, where I answered questions/wrote about things like marketing, revenue, creativity, advice for others, and Cogmind/my background. (This is a site for entrepreneurs, so it's not really about the game itself.)
I also did a little interview for Goomba Stomp. This one's more about Cogmind, and also roguelikes in general.
Upcoming Schedule
Beta 3.1 is coming very soon (like this weekend soon), about which I'll have a separate post covering the changelog and release notes.
Then there are some things coming up which will slow development for a bit. I have to spend yet more time at the hospital (the situation worsened recently, but there are new leads and therefore hope to get rid of this problem for good), and in addition to that I'll actually be out of country visiting the US for a while. I have to head over there for Cogmind-related business reasons (of all things...), but decided since we have family over there celebrating the holidays I may as well bring everyone along and stay a little longer. Trips that far are expensive, anyway, might as well make it more worthwhile! Everyone's always asking us to visit but I've always been too busy working on Cogmind to make the trip xD
I'd prefer to not be away having only recently released the Steam version, but perhaps finally being somewhere I'm not tempted by my full workstation here would be good for the recovery, too! In any case, during this period I'll certainly be available online as usual, just not able to reply nearly as fast as I normally do :P
Unless something really interesting happens, since there won't be as much progress I will probably skip the next two SITREPs before returning to our normal weekly schedule.
Really looking forward to December, when I'll push through all the remaining high-priority and near-term items so we can move on to much more significant features!
SITREP Saturday #2: Cloudy with a Chance of Saves
A 100% chance! Cloud saves (and settings) are coming to Cogmind soonish.
I chose to go with Steam's "Autocloud," which doesn't require any code changes. Instead it's just some backend settings that specify which files to migrate between machines. The cloud itself was really easy to set up.
Testing a cloud-enable version of Cogmind:
Using the Steam console to ensure the proper files are being synced:
After which I started up the game on my old laptop to make sure it resumes where it was with all the same options... Yes! I was actually worried at first that this would be a process full of headaches because I followed the (simple) instructions and... it failed to notice any files to sync :/. Then I just tried again and it worked fine. So yeah, um, I guess it works.
The whole process only took a couple hours, but I'll test it some more to make sure it'll be stable. In any case, Cogmind also keeps multiple backups of your /user/ files for emergency recovery purposes, so nothing to worry about :D
When the time comes, you'll want to update to Beta 3.1 first, and also be sure to start playing on the system that has the original files! (Don't worry, I'll remind you in the patch notes.)
Although Steam Cloud is simply a setting I can flip on now, I won't be enabling it until the next update because there was another much more involved change required for proper cloud support: adjustments to the config file. I already talked about that bit last week, but that requirement means I'll need to push an update before activating the cloud. (In the meantime, I also finally added to the manual a description of what each advanced.cfg setting does, since their names can only hold so much information.)
Features
In terms of Cogmind itself I've just been handling some little bug reports, with a lot of other stuff piling up on the near-term TODO list since I'm still too busy to deal with it.
As it turns out, Cogmind's default hardware cursor doesn't work on one particular player's 2160p setup, so I added support for custom "software" cursors, which basically means it's now possible to wrest control of the cursor's appearance from the OS and make it look like anything :)
Custom cursors can be made to different shapes, colors, or even sizes in case you enjoy crushing tiles:
It's as easy as drawing a little .png and dropping it in the right directory.
This scary guy was helping me debug the new system...
...but I had to destroy him in the end.
BUGS!
When you use a custom software cursor on top of a display system relying on dirty rectangles, the cursor has to save what's behind it as it enters a new position, and redraw the background when it moves again.
Otherwise it just becomes a big mess :P
Yesterday I slipped in one of the recent features requests... probably not hard to spot which one :)
Log messages can now come with turn numbers! This is the default in Tactical HUD mode, though new advanced options can be used to turn them off if you don't want them.
Another example:
This has been on my TODO list for a very long time, but the "best" implementation I was planning would take a while (and no one had been requesting it in recent years), so I kept deprioritizing this one. Then another request came this week and I decided fine, I'll just do it the easy way so it's at least in there as an option! I like how the extra numbers make it appear nice and computery, too :)
Videos
This week I finally got to stream again! Thanks to everyone who showed up, it was a lot of fun (especially once I actually got OBS to recognize my mic again xD).
I haven't played much over the past several months, and got a little overconfident and died after about an hour, but then started a new run and at least made it to the late-game before, again, dying :P. I make a lot of different decisions while streaming than I normally would (I won the run I did before streaming, really!), but it's all fun so no matter :D
There are still a number of others recording Cogmind content, too, including newcomer LuckyLuckLuc who is getting good fast and just recently streamed his first win. Shobalk is continuing his intro video series.
SITREP Saturday #1: Getting Steamy
What a launch week! Thanks for your continued support, and welcome to all our new players!
Our leaderboards are now packed with over 700 unique Cogminds fighting their way to the surface. We've got lots more players and data than that, but note that you have to set your name in the game options menu in order to appear. (Even if you weren't aware of that, this week I changed the leaderboards code to retroactively associate you with your old anonymous scores if you do choose to name/rename yourself.)
With help from streamers, some articles, and no doubt the launch discount, Cogmind lingered at or near the top of a number of Top Sellers charts, even making the Steam front page for a little while. Gonna have to save that screenshot for history :)
Cogmind was pretty prominent in the Early Access category, and even did very well in the Indie and Strategy categories alongside mostly no-EA games. For the first week Cogmind also sat on the first page of popular games tagged "rogue-like" (along with a very nice lineup of... roguelites xD)
I was occasionally taking screenshots and recording performance data, which I hope to later use to write some kind of article on the process, but honestly I didn't have much time to really follow that stuff closely. Throughout the first ten days of release I was completely buried in emails, various forums, and social media, responding to players and others with questions or wishes.
Coverage
Cogmind has been recently played by a number of LPers, among them:
quill18 streamed some Cogmind and has been uploading it to YouTube
Some of Cogmind's regular players have been uploading videos, too, which you may find helpful:
Shobalk recently uploaded a Getting Started Tutorial
nuzcraft (who records all our weekly seeds, too :P) also shared some quick Survival Tips
zxc, one of Cogmind's best players, recorded a full combat win with Beta 3
I'll hopefully be streaming next week--I always play combat (and currently hold #5 on the leaderboards, so I'm not terrible :P)
On the publication front, there haven't been too many pieces yet, although a number of websites are planning to do something in the coming months, and Cogmind will even appear in a major gaming print magazine in Europe next month.
I did an AMA on r/gamedev last week if you want to check that out.
Progress
There's still more to do in the transition from non-Steam to Steam development, so progress will be a little slow for a bit here, but there is a ton of game in there for everyone to explore, and it's been through years of expansion and polish so that should keep you occupied for a while ;)
As one would expect with exposure to any sizeable new group of players, the top priority is to address any little accessibility needs as possible, so that's primarily what the first update will entail. (Fortunately there aren't too many of those!)
For those of you who haven't previously been following my work, know that I had a serious head injury about half a year ago and it has been an obstacle ever since. That's the reason Cogmind came to Steam a little later than planned, but I wouldn't have released on Steam if I wasn't already on the mend. While still not back to normal, I have at least finally found treatments that are working (and most importantly enable me to work at all! :D). I have no idea how much longer it'll take--brains are weird like that, but for now I still have to spend about 10 hours per week in the hospital and that eats into potential dev time. I've still been managing a good 45 hours or more per week, and that's enough to keep things humming along.
This week dev time has been spent organizing plans for content and features for the earliest updates based on feedback so far. That's in addition to the already extensive plans I had already prepared xD.
Now that we're on Steam, because it's not too hard to implement and I presume a number of players want it, the first thing to see to is Steam cloud support.
One cloud prerequisite is that I split Cogmind's configuration file into at least two parts, so I did that yesterday. In fact, it's now three files.
Two of these, system.cfg and options.cfg, are comprised of automated settings or those controlled from the in-game options menu. Advanced.cfg is the one that contains special toggles or tweaks only modifiable via that file. With the next release I'll also be including descriptions of what each of those advanced options actually does :) (quite a few have been accumulated over the past couple years, mostly used by players who've been around for a long time, or asked for them in the first place)
Anyway, it's all the same stuff we have now, just stored in different files to facilitate user-friendly cloud saving.
I'll be updating you with informative SITREPs at this time each week--see you around :D
