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TIGSource ForumsCommunityDevLogsCogmind (sci-fi robot-themed roguelike) - BETA RELEASED
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etodd
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« Reply #1100 on: December 22, 2017, 07:21:34 PM »

Hey thanks for posting so much development info. I've been following your progress for a while and it's great to hear your perspective on Steam and the business side of things. Smiley
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« Reply #1101 on: December 22, 2017, 07:28:29 PM »

Happy to share! My blog has almost become just a bit too business-oriented xD. Need to change that with some more design articles in the new year! (Most design discussion just goes to the SITREP updates and release notes now as short-form content anyway...) That said, it'll be interesting to see how the Winter Sale plays out.
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« Reply #1102 on: December 26, 2017, 04:04:04 AM »

I'm working on a new blog post, this one looking at a whole bunch of aggregate player metrics now that Cogmind is on Steam. There are some interesting findings to share :D

First basic graph I've finished so far:
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« Reply #1103 on: December 27, 2017, 08:40:06 PM »

I have been enjoying hearing about the business aspects of the development as well, thanks for sharing Smiley
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« Reply #1104 on: December 28, 2017, 04:47:22 PM »

Player Metrics: Stats and Preferences on and off Steam
[Cross-posted from the devblog here--follow link for better formatting and light-on-dark style.]

Wow, Steam release. The core roguelike community has formed the majority of Cogmind's player base for a long while, but now we've had a wave of new players from Steam so we'll have to see how this wider audience, and a larger portion of players new to the genre, may have affected some of the stats.

For the past couple years I've been reporting stats based on player-submitted score sheets, which also include some preferences and other settings (you can sample those linked from the leaderboards if you haven't seen one before). These "stat summaries" have simply been going to the forums High Scores thread, with the kinds of stats evolving over time along with an increase in total number and quality.

Today it's finally time to take a deeper look at the data... Doing this sometimes helps with future design decisions, but it's also just fun Smiley

I did something similar back in 2015 for the Alpha Challenge, a metrics analysis in 7,500 words and several dozen graphs, but it's been a long time and we now have a lot more data to work with, plus we can do some interesting before-after comparisons.


Overview
In ten weeks of Beta 3 following its release on Steam, 33,181 score sheets were uploaded, compared to around 15,000 in all of Cogmind's more than 2-year history of prior releases. We technically even lost some 2,000 Beta 3 score sheets one day shortly after launching on Steam due to a little incident with the leaderboards being overwhelmed Tongue (wasn't designed for that kind of load! I did fix it the next day, though)

26,478 runs scored at least 500 points, the minimum required to be included in the scoring data. 65.2% of those runs were submitted anonymously, meaning the player did not set a Player Name in their options. This compared to a mere 5.4% for Beta 2. But we can account for that change with two main factors:
  • As of Beta 3 score uploads were changed from opt-in to opt-out, meaning a lot more submissions by players who otherwise wouldn't bother manually activating it in the options (or even know it was an option in the first place).
  • Even though Cogmind uses non-Steam leaderboards, Steam players probably assume their in-game username is set automatically based on their account, which is not the case. (I've considered adding this feature, but decided not to for now.)

Anyway, lots of anonymous scores. Since we have so many non-anonymous submissions now, as of Beta 3 I removed anonymous scores from the leaderboards themselves, though they're still included in stats below except where mentioned. Overall 1,287 unique non-anonymous players submitted scores, as well as 4,389 unique anonymous players you don't see on the leaderboards. 342 initially anonymous players later set their Player Name and appeared normally.

Counting only those runs included in the data (26k), you can see how the submissions gradually decline following the Steam release. (You can also clearly see the effect of the leaderboard system crapping out that day xD)


Some of the decline can of course be attributed to be people trying the game out then waiting on it because it's "EA" or they have other things to do, and also because many players gradually improve their skills over time and survive for longer periods, leading to fewer submissions overall. As you can see I added average run length (in minutes) to the graph, and the trend line for that rises from 62.5 minutes to 83.8 minutes, a 34.1% increase across two and a half months.

Both off and on Steam, Beta 3 was played for a total of at least 1,541,666 minutes (25,694 hours!), though I excluded a number of suspect high-time records--Cogmind's run length records exclude idle time, but are also on rare occasions susceptible to oddities in a few system environments. And of course we don't have data for players who are completely offline or have deactivated uploading, and I also didn't tally sub-500 score sheets.


Scores and Wins
There was a steep drop in average score, to be expected with so many new players. It reversed the trend we've had over the past year, where scores were generally going up as 1) the world grew wider, 2) more sources of bonus points were added and 3) regular players got better and better. Alpha 14 to Beta 1 saw an 11% increase in average score (to 8,035), for example, then up another 5.3% to 8,461 during Beta 2. With Beta 3? Average score fell 53% to 4,503! Tongue

I'm sure we'll see it rise again later into 2018.

There was, however, a fairly large raw number of wins. In the 29 months prior to Beta 3 players won a total 292 times, while during just the Beta 3 period there were 139 winning runs. Among the rapidly expanding player base we're seeing seriously dedicated new experts, some clocking hundreds of hours in just the past couple months.

There are seven different endings in Cogmind, and a few players have discovered them all, but during Beta 3 the spectrum of wins only covered the first four types. 79% of wins were the "default" ending, 1% were special ending #1, 11% were #2, and 9% were #3. Maybe we'll see some endings 4/5/6 in Beta 4 Smiley (these are the most challenging, two in particular are for super powerful builds).

Now that we actually have some players using the lower difficulty modes, it's also more meaningful to look at how many of those are winning. Wins by difficulty mode:
  • Default: 101
  • Easier: 4
  • Easiest: 13

Comparing the number of winning players vs. the total playing each mode, the numbers look like what one might expect, so the modes are apparently doing their job. Winning player ratio by mode:
  • Default: 38/1,183 (3.2%)
  • Easier: 4/52 (7.7%)
  • Easiest: 9/52 (17.3%)

The latter two modes are mostly composed of very new players so in future versions I would expect the win rate there to rise even faster than the default assuming no new large influx of players (and that players don't decide to move up to a higher difficulty).

I excluded 15 anonymous Roguelike Mode wins, and 6 anonymous Easiest Mode wins, from the above data. Altogether, 51 (4% of) unique non-anonymous players won at least one run of Beta 3.

Looking at all players and score in general, the trend is what one would expect:


Players who tend to score low (which usually but doesn't always mean dying earlier) also played fewer games on average. Playing more games clearly leads to improvement in skill level, although it's interesting to note that flat area in the middle of the run count line, which probably reflects a combination of players who are just naturally better and also those who were playing in previous Betas/Alphas and already more skilled to begin with.


Difficulty Modes
Only a small number of players (27; 2%) ever changed their difficulty mode, in most cases (91%) to lower it. Only one player jumped their difficulty level two notches, twice a player raised it by one level, and 17 lowered it by one. 15 players dropped their difficulty from the default to Easiest.

This data is only looking at non-anonymous records, so technically only 22.7% of players, partially because these are players spending more time with the game, rather than many anonymous players who generally do fewer runs anyway before stopping for now.


Steam vs. Non-Steam
Cogmind can be purchased from two different stores, mine and Steam's, and score sheets indicate which build they were uploaded by (I have a separate build for each), so in all this data we can also look for any differences between the two sources.

During this Beta, 956 non-Steam players finished 4,029 runs, while 4,457 players on Steam finished 22,450 runs. Thus 82.3% of players are using Steam, and playing 84.8% of the runs. A fair number of Linux and Mac players use the DRM-free option (since it's not supported on Steam), as does anyone who just doesn't want to use Steam or prefers to buy direct from developers, together boosting the non-Steam numbers by a good bit.

To my knowledge the majority of the experts switched over to Steam release, so maybe that helps account for the fact that the average score among Steam players was 4,386 (median 3,016), vs. 3,975 (median 2,751) off Steam.

I'll be looking at more at Steam vs. non-Steam data when we get to the preferences later.


Exploration
One of the main draws of Cogmind is exploring the expansive foreign world, so let's see how far into it players have managed to get so far.


Tallied on a per-run basis we can see that a full third of runs end on the first map. That's where you're at your weakest, and especially when inexperienced a few wrong moves can potentially lead to a downward attrition spiral since core integrity is still not all that high and coverage is minimal (lowest slot count).

A still-high quarter of runs end in the floor after that (-9, following the first evolution). Core integrity and coverage are still somewhat low, but most importantly this is the first floor into which Cogmind may enter in a suboptimal state, e.g. partially or totally naked (coming into the first floor this isn't an issue) without much in the way of spare parts. That's the most disadvantageous situation to be in, and it's even more likely here because you may have even entered after passing through the unpredictable and potentially dangerous Mines. This and the initial appearance of Sentries makes the second floor just about as tough as the first for new players.

I'm pretty sure the percentage of runs ending on the first map will shrink with Beta 4 since both its size and difficulty were reduced to not be quite such a harsh early gateway for new players, and to streamline it even more for experienced players. The other two Materials floors also got some tweaks to make them a little easier to survive, so together with the opening floor changes we'll be seeing that whole early-game peak flattening out a bit (though just as much from the fact that we won't have quite such a surge of new players as we did during Beta 3).

Beyond the early-game it's an understandably rapid descending graph with fewer and fewer runs surviving as the difficulty ramps up over distance--difficulty increases rather quickly in Cogmind Smiley

The final depth at evolution 9 is naturally the most difficult so there's an uptick of deaths there. By contrast, anyone who can survive the first Research level at evolution 7 can probably also make it through 8. That said, the area is tough enough that many players enter the final map underpowered, accounting for some of the extra deaths there (some of the rest are opting to take on extended game content and don't pull off the win).

Overall, this related graph tells a less gruesome picture:


Taking only the best run from each player, we can see a more reasonable gradual slope, though the first half of the game is clearly still a barrier to the majority of players (70%).

This is yet more reason to continue adding content to keep players who are stuck there entertained Tongue. (Cogmind's content is mid/late-game heavy, greatly increasing with each new depth, so there's definitely room to expand the early game which is something I'll turn my attention to again later.) However, for really accurate data there we'd technically have to factor out a bunch of low-run players. Remember the run counts per player graph from earlier--a lot of the people at the low end have only actually played 2-3 runs on average, which is not usually enough to learn all the most important survival tactics. This graph's peak would naturally flatten out if those people played a few more runs, but many just bought and tested out the game for a bit, and will come back later.

The slight reversal of the trend in the late-game reflects the idea that many who can at least make it to that hardest segment of the world probably won't take too long to figure out how to push through to the end, especially with... help from branches :D

86% of wins visited special branch maps that, to put it generally, significantly increase Cogmind's chance of survival in the long run. Not that all branches are created equal--the easily accessible maps aren't quite as useful as what's found in deeper or more dangerous areas.

Pretty much all runs that make it out of the early game hit at least one branch or another, even if not looking for them.


The above graph shows the percentage of runs which actually visited any map in the given category of branches as a portion of the total number of runs to reach the depths at which those branches were available. For example more than half of players who could enter the Mines did so (many probably newer players entering somewhat unintentionally, although there are certainly players who enjoy taking Mines exits now that they're not so deadly and can come with more perks).

The Storage branch ratio is especially low because it has fewer entrances than the average branch listed here. And the Research branches are especially high (53%!) because many of the players who can reach those late-game areas know how valuable (and fun) they are.

Speaking of optional maps, while browsing the stats it was interesting to note that 23 times players passed right through a special secret cave area and didn't realize it. Also only 2 players visited the world's most difficult area to reach.

A few plot-related stats, described in cryptic terms to avoid spoilers:
  • Cogmind was imprinted in 3.7% of all runs; players in 84 runs decided not to imprint despite having the chance. 31.6% of winning runs were imprinted, with 8 winners (5.8%) choosing not to imprint. Get your imprinting in during Beta 4 runs, because it's going to be nerfed in Beta 5 to make it a more strategic decision with additional long-term implications (rather than a no-brainer).
  • 12 runs interfaced with DC and went on to win, of 68 total runs choosing to do so.
  • 18 winning Cogminds visited W, of 41 visits in all (43.9%).
  • 24 wins were achieved with a reset core, out of 101 total resets (23.8%).

With all the fresh Cogminds, average lore collection across all reporting players took a dive to only 6%, as did the item gallery collection rate which now averages 14%. That said, congratulations to GJ, the first (and still only) player to discover every single item in the game, and also every piece of lore! That's a heck of a lot of stuff, but someone's finally done it--I'll just have to add more to keep him on his toes Tongue

(continued in next post...)
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« Reply #1105 on: December 28, 2017, 04:47:39 PM »

(...continued from previous post)

Meta/Preferences
One of the areas I most enjoy comparing across releases is player preferences, and of course we can expect some significant changes with the addition of a Steam version accessible to a wider audience.

Probably one of the biggest questions of preference when it comes to traditional roguelikes is "Tiles or ASCII?" In many cases both are supported, and Cogmind was even designed for ASCII with an ASCII-like tileset only added two years into development. But as we know a lot of players have trouble getting into ASCII, so in the big picture tilesets will always win out. The question is by how much.


Prior to Steam 21% of players were using ASCII mode, a pretty good chunk but still a clear minority. With Steam that dropped from one in five to one in twenty players (5%). We'll see similar trends with many other preferences below.

Note that in these graphs, "pre-Steam" data uses Beta 2 records, which are largely representative of the community we've had going for the past couple years. For most graphs I've also separated out Steam vs. Non-Steam players in order to examine whether there are any notable differences there. In hindsight it seems non-Steam players show no major deviations from Steam players in terms of preferences, suggesting that the post-Steam trends are a result of simply having a wider audience, and not particular to the Steam community itself.


Not as many traditional roguelikes support the mouse as thoroughly as Cogmind does, but I'd argue that any roguelike wanting maximum exposure and enjoyment should include full mouse support in its design. Of course I don't really have to argue it, because everyone will probably agree anyway, and in any case there are the facts graphed right there Tongue

Throughout Alpha and early Beta, about a third of players didn't use their mouse at all, but now that's dropped to 7-8%.


As for movement methods, mouse is also king, though notice that even following the Steam release more than a third of players still use the keyboard to move. In Cogmind there is often a need for tactical space-by-space movement, even outside of combat, and even some players who otherwise use the mouse to select targets, get info, or manage their inventory are still open to one of the keyboard-based movement methods.

Before Steam a surprisingly low 25% of players used the mouse for movement. At the time players submitting scores were mostly more experienced (or those very familiar with roguelikes) and would like to exercise maximum precision without fear of misclicks.

Among the keyboard movement methods, as expected numpad is the most popular. Out of curiosity I always keep a close eye on vi key usage, and although pre-Steam vi usage generally hovered around 15-16% and is now below 5%, it's interesting to note that twice as high a percentage of non-Steam players use vi as those on Steam. (There are 136 of you--more than dozens! Tongue) I believe one of the biggest factors here is Linux players, who to my knowledge are almost exclusively using the DRM-free version, and the same crowd also tends to be more familiar with the vi layout.


No huge differences to see in window settings, although based on these graphs I'd say a lot of newer players probably just don't realize there is a borderless window option yet Smiley. We'll probably be seeing borderless fullscreen rising later on, unless there really are that many more people without multiple monitors among the wider gaming population compared to what we had pre-Steam.


For font sizes I've only shown post-Steam values. As before, size 18 is by far the most common, generally equivalent to 1080p.


The vast majority of players are sticking with Cogmind's default typeface (Smallcaps), and as usual Terminus is the second most popular. Interestingly X11 took over as third most popular, attracting a lot more attention on Steam than any of the other remaining options. Also interesting is that Cog slipped pretty far from its pre-Steam third place spot, which we can almost certainly attribute to the fact that it was Cogmind's original default font back in early development, and a greater number of regular players had gotten used to it, but now it requires that players manually select it over the others.

I also compiled a lot more player-specific stats over on the forums:


Note that some numbers in this post may not always be perfectly comparable across different data sets and analyses. I was using numerous different spreadsheets to work with the data from multiple sources, and sometimes excluded subcategories of data for various reasons. Even if not always fully accurate or comparable, the data does meaningfully reflect general trends.
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« Reply #1106 on: December 29, 2017, 04:46:33 PM »

Cogmind made it onto Steam's front page yesterday--featured for a whole day during the sale! (Must be the first time CP437's ever appeared there, hehe.)

I shared some data from that on Twitter, but once the sale is complete I'll look into sharing some more / even better stuff.

(Today I also posted a general progress update to Steam.)
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« Reply #1107 on: December 30, 2017, 08:09:26 AM »

Looking forward to seeing the graph with december sales, with the arrow pointing to "steam front page" at the small spike Tongue
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« Reply #1108 on: December 30, 2017, 05:04:32 PM »

Haha yeah, I should make one and there should be that arrow Smiley

It's impressive, but not nearly as impressive as some people think, and doesn't even compare to the October launch! Lots and lots of exposure, but not a correspondingly massive number of sales. I mean sure exposure leads to more sales down the line so that's good, and yeah there has been a sizeable surge of players... In any case, it'll be very interesting to watch what happens to the overall numbers over the next week, and then the couple weeks after that, to see how this "exposure" affects them compared to the earlier status quo.
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« Reply #1109 on: January 05, 2018, 04:49:20 PM »

Well, the sale is over and I certainly collected some interesting data from it Wink. Not sure what I'll be writing for it, maybe something shorter, maybe just post here, dunno. In any case I want to wait for a while to watch the aftermath and see if/how anything changes over the long-run so that any observations are more meaningful.

This week I got really busy with new content, including a dozen more items. Samples:


Working on some of the art:


Some other animation work related to new terminal features:






And a new setting that forces projectile spread, while reflecting the expected spread in the LOF visualization:




I describe the design behind that in more detail over in this week's SITREP.
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« Reply #1110 on: January 10, 2018, 05:47:47 PM »

Color Customization
[Cross-posted from the devblog here--follow link for better formatting and light-on-dark style.]

I've always enjoyed adding accessibility features, hence Cogmind's sizeable options menu and even more extensive config files. Not everyone will have the same habits or abilities, or play a game in the same way, so where possible it's nice to be able to accommodate different needs. Although I've talked a fair bit about fonts before (still more to come on that front!) and four years back also wrote about some of my ideas on potential adjustments related to color blindness, it's about time for a generalized set of color customization features.

As the player base has grown a fair bit over the past few months, I've received a few requests for ways to tweak the brightness and/or saturation, so that was the trigger for finally implementing a display filtering system.


Essentials
Many games come with a simple "gamma" adjustment option, so that's where I started. Easy enough:


Comparing the default appearance to a 66% brightness setting.

While it's true perceived color brightness is non-linear, adding in more complex calculations to compensate would slow the filter down so I implemented it as a direct percentage modifier, just [RGB * (0.0~1.0)].

Note that for comparison purposes the majority of screenshots in this article use the same scene, and all can be clicked to open at full size.

Some players may also want to drop the saturation to take the edge off the eye-burning terminal contrast :P


Comparing the default fully saturated appearance to 66% saturation.

Since I store colors using RGB and it'd be slow to convert everything to HSV simply to adjust the saturation then convert back again, I found an alternative formula for direct RGB saturation adjustment that seems to work nicely.


Filter Settings
So how are these options made available, and how to create a system that will support additional filters? For now I opted to make it a string in the advanced.cfg file. For example the line "renderFilter=BRIGHTNESS(90)|SATURATION(90)" adds two filters, a first which drops the brightness by 10%, followed by a second that then desaturates all colors by 10%.

There are currently eight different filter types, and the code converts this string into a set of filters that the engine renderer applies in separate passes over the terminal grid colors, both foreground and background. They're applied to every cell individually, so this isn't some GPU-optimized image modification, just an operation repeated for each cell, meaning each filter pass on the standard-dimension UI costs an additional 12,720 operations xD. Yeah there are better ways used by more competent programmers to achieve effects like this, but it works well with my current engine setup :)

At most the minority of players who will use filters seriously will probably only need one or two anyway.


Getting Wild
Having taken care of basic needs, there are of course even more frequently requested adjustments like the ability to outright change terminal colors.

Traditional terminal players are used to being able to fairly easily customize the appearance of a roguelike, including the color palette, but they also only have worry about maybe just 16 colors. Unfortunately there is a huge range of colors in Cogmind so it would be a lot more work to implement a way to customize individual details, but for now I've at least added a very simple method with a broad effect: hue shifting. It can lead to some crazy schemes, but there are reportedly a number of people out there interested in something like this.


Cogmind appearance with all hue values rotated by 180 to become... Pinkmind! (example #2: 90-shift Bluemind)

Colors have been carefully chosen in Cogmind, designed to make the meanings and implications of certain pieces of information that much easier to intuit, and obviously shifting the hue will ruin a lot of that. Some things which were obvious may not be so obvious anymore, and on the flip side unimportant elements may be overemphasized. In any case, doesn't hurt to have this as an extra option for whatever reason!

With a system in place it's also not hard to add new filters.

I mean we can even get crazier than hue shifting and go as far as RGB shifting! Check out the color chaos that results from a +90 shift:


Shifting all RGB values by 90. No.

Are your eyes ready yet? Let's continue with more serious filter efforts...


Low-Contrast and More
One of my goals with this system was to enable low-contrast settings that don't overly impact the general color design, and rather than darkening and/or desturating everything, a better approach is to start by not using a pitch black background. This required some actual changes to the source code beyond a basic filter, since for the past five years of development I've assumed the background is black, but the necessary adjustments weren't too difficult and for the most part now work via a global switch.

The idea is to choose some other dark-yet-not-black color. To avoid wasting too much time here, I used Photoshop layers to tweak a game screenshot until it was low-contrast but highly readable, then made sure the system I had was capable of replicating that process step-for-step. As usual, it's good to have a target to work towards when designing something like this. (For the same reason I always do UI layout mockups in REXPaint first.)


Step 2 for creating Cogmind's low-contrast mode: Raising the overall brightness, especially for darker colors.

In all there were more steps but I compressed it down to just two:
  • Swap out the black background with the chosen new color.
  • Adjust the brightness of all foreground colors using a formula derived from the PS testing above: y=0.7176x + 59. This raises the brightness of most darker colors so they stand out just enough against the new background, but takes the edge off any really bright ones.

For reasons specific to Cogmind's color design I did make a couple exceptions--the second step is skipped for any instances where the foreground color is itself black (this is rare but I use it for occasional reverse cell coloring--black characters imprinted over a solid color), or was intentionally set to match the background color (I sometimes do this to temporarily hide the foreground).

So what background colors did I pick as defaults? I started of course with my dark maroon background from the IDE color scheme I designed from scratch and have been using for the past 10 years or so :P


Some Cogmind source as seen in my IDE, the inspiration for the first low-contrast mode.

Like my IDE scheme, this particular filter is called "Autumn."


Interacting with various Cogmind UI features in Autumn low-contrast mode.

In fact, aside from being my IDE scheme Autumn is also a REXPaint skin, and Cogmind's other new low-contrast mode borrows REXPaint's default skin as well: "Sleepy."


Cogmind low-contrast mode "Sleepy."

These modes still aren't quite perfect due to the aforementioned universal assumption of black, though I did specifically update some of the particle scripts to be compatible with this new filter. The few features which might not always look great under this mode are some of the ASCII item art and intro/ending animations, but this only affects the small minority of areas that use their own dark background colors.

If more people start using low-contrast settings I might go back and invest more time in overcoming some of the remaining aesthetic challenges.

Although I implemented two named low-contrast filters, these are merely for convenience--under the hood they're implemented through a more general filter: LOW_CONTRAST(R,G,B). This means you can create your own low-contrast scheme using your favorite color, or whatever you think works, I just thought I'd provide defaults for some tried and true colors :)


Map-only Adjustments
Earlier I mentioned this setting is called "renderFilter," but there is a second one as well: "renderFilterMap." All filters set there apply only to the map, rather than the entire application including HUD and other UI elements. It's compatible with the same filters except low-contrast, as the latter must be applied across the entire application and cannot be limited to the map area since it's handled on the engine side (as opposed to the game side).

One of the interesting filters more suitable for the map area rather than the UI: SWAP. This filter swaps the foreground and background color of every cell to create an even more colorful "dark on light" style rather than the usual "light on dark" terminal look.


The results of a renderFilterMap=SWAP, with no other changes to the appearance.

I don't think this is as good from a parseability standpoint since it somewhat separates color from the character it's associated with, but maybe it could fun to play around with, plus some players can get used to or even enjoy anything :)


Destructive ASCII action in Swap mode

Notice that these are ASCII examples, because although it's monochrome the default tileset uses multiple shades, and the whole look is not very compatible with this kind of swapping.


Yeah I don't think so.

So if you're interested in trying out this mode I hope you like ASCII, otherwise we'll have to wait for someone to draw a non-shade monochrome tileset that focuses mostly on solid shapes and symbols. I'm sure we'll see something like that eventually. It could look pretty cool (and of course also work in the default/non-swapped mode as well, so the idea is that we'll get that one first then it can be simply swapped over).

Good news is the Swap filter is both compatible with and looks even better when combined with low-contrast mode!


Cogmind ASCII map with both a Swap filter and Low-contrast Autumn filter enabled.

All these customization features are explained a bit more in a new "Color Customization" section of the manual included with the next release (Beta 5).

Specifically with regard to color blindness, I haven't gotten any real feedback from players who need more options in this regard, though from the start I've tried to design the UI such that as much info as possible is conveyed through multiple channels, color only being one of them, so maybe there isn't much demand for additional features there. I could add new filters if necessary, and although individual color swapping would be problematic (primarily because any dynamic colors are scripted and therefore calculated via formulas), perhaps there are some formulas that could be made available as filters to adjust the final color palette that way.


Bonus GIF: Cycling through various display adjustments in real-time after hooking up the color filter parser to the debug system :D
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« Reply #1111 on: January 12, 2018, 04:41:21 PM »

I've also added an option to show the map borders. For now it's off by default however, and only available in the advanced options, because although experienced players can and do figure out invisible map bounds indirectly via other UI features (you may have seen me do this on stream before...), there are a few cases where knowing the bounds can be somewhat spoilery for new players who haven't yet discovered certain areas before.


I also went ahead and created a different style specifically for when the the swap filter is active:


That plus the color customization is most of what I worked on this week, though there's some extra news in the SITREP.

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« Reply #1112 on: January 13, 2018, 04:36:22 AM »

Being the colorblind guy who first requested this kind of support this obviously makes me very happy Smiley

I don't know the impact on performance, but you could try using different color spaces, like LUV, or HSLUV:

http://www.hsluv.org/
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« Reply #1113 on: January 13, 2018, 04:52:43 AM »

Yeah I've looked into it before, ages ago, but everything in the game and scripts and... everything is based on RGB, so regardless of the performance effects just the integration would be a lot of work.

I'd be interested to know if/what you can get out of this particular release. It's not the most useful particularly where color blind players are concerned, just a start. I was thinking of allowing color replacement as a solution to that, though this, too, would be a ton of work for something that may not be all that important given that information is presented in multiple ways :/
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« Reply #1114 on: January 19, 2018, 04:12:36 PM »

Huge progress update as I bring Beta 5 to completion for a release next week.

A visual overview:


And I'm still planning to at some point talk about the results of the Winter Sale and being featured on Steam's front page (super busy right now...) and that'll likely be a TIGS-exclusive since I don't really want to do a full blog post on it but I'm sure devs on TIGS will appreciate the data I collected Well, hello there!
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« Reply #1115 on: January 19, 2018, 08:15:14 PM »

I'm sure devs on TIGS will appreciate the data I collected Well, hello there!
Certainly! Smiley
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« Reply #1116 on: January 23, 2018, 04:49:49 PM »

Cogmind Beta 5 "Zionic Revolution" is out! Featuring interesting changes to your potential Zion allies, new NPCs, items and mechanics, and color customization along with lots and lots (and lots) of QoL.

It's another big one.

For the full release notes and feature demo images, see here.

Cogmind Beta 5 "Zionic Revolution" (0.10.180124) changelog:
  • NEW: 9 new unique named NPCs
  • NEW: 13 more unique items
  • NEW: 1 new wheel variant
  • NEW: 3 new types of resupply dispatch
  • NEW: 1 new 0b10 terminal record, along with several random lore dialogues available in the usual places
  • NEW: 25 new score sheet entries (total = 662)
  • NEW: Several additional special encounters
  • NEW: 3 new optional map styles for ASCII mode players at size 16: Terminus, Verite, Kaypro (see manual under Advanced UI > Fonts)
  • NEW: Some methods for tweaking colors/brightness/saturation/etc (advanced.cfg for now: renderFilters, see manual under Color Customization)
  • NEW: Roster dispatches potentially include allies from a new category
  • NEW: Mechanic for automatically locating nearby terminals (spoiler)
  • NEW: Operators reset their terminal under a certain condition (spoiler)
  • NEW: Special animations for connecting to Z-hack-capable terminals
  • NEW: First connection to a Z-hack-capable terminal gives instruction regarding intel retrieval
  • NEW: Added EM damage spectrum class "Fine"
  • NEW: Enforced projectile spread mechanic for certain weapons
  • NEW: Line-of-fire for volley including a spread-enforced weapon highlights entire potential spread area
  • NEW: Option to always display the edges of the current map (advanced.cfg only: showMapBorders)
  • NEW: Option to completely disable the standard printing/text sfx (advanced.cfg only: muteTextSfx)
  • NEW: All Launcher Guidance Computers prevent launcher misfires otherwise caused by system corruption
  • NEW: Robots sending distress signals to alert nearby allies display the range of that signal
  • NEW: Effect description for matter/energy storage utilities explicitly states their ability to collect resources while in inventory
  • NEW: Active Particle Accelerators show modified damage values for applicable weapons in inventory and part list info mode ('q')
  • NEW: Effect of current momentum on melee weapon damage is shown directly next to applicable weapons in inventory and part list info mode ('q')
  • NEW: Discovering exits purely via Terrain Scanners in easiest difficulty mode reveals their destination as if sighted
  • NEW: Advanced quickStart option also available in easier difficulty modes
  • NEW: "Trapped" challenge mode prevents gaining trap knowledge from hacks, Zionite intel, 0b10 Decoders, and friendly Operators
  • NEW: Prototypes and other unknown parts identified by attaching them accompanied by explicit log message
  • NEW: Component Analysis Suite identification effect log message also specifies name of utility doing the identifying
  • NEW: Manual includes additional subsection explaining overload mechanic for some power sources and energy weapons
  • NEW: It's safe to hold a wait key while a nearby Fabricator or Repair Station is processing (autoblocks command for two seconds on task completion)
  • NEW: Manual includes additional subsection on Key Holding, under Key Commands
  • NEW: Starting position in Scrapyard will never overlap with an item
  • NEW: Map areas discovered via Terrain Scanners and other methods but never actually seen displayed in greenscale rather than color
  • NEW: Active Garrison Access dispatch countdown timers now visible on map when using a Signal Interpreter
  • NEW: Heat transfer damage may outright melt struck part of an already overheating robot (chance matches weapon's heat transfer value)
  • NEW: Filter mass item labels by applying an integrity percentage cutoff via itemLabelIntegrityPercentCutoff (advanced.cfg, currently defaults to 26%)
  • NEW: Filter mass item labels by applying a minimum depth-relative rating cutoff via itemLabelRelativeRatingCutoff (advanced.cfg)
  • NEW: Known faulty and broken items not labeled on map when using mass item labeling (can change behavior via advanced.cfg)
  • NEW: Mass labeling items a second time within 5 seconds ignores all label filters
  • NEW: If exiting a map will fail to bring some allies due to their distance, shows dedicated warning message and puts a longer block duration on the move
  • NEW: All Alpha supporter names registered since Beta 4 added to in-game list (see Credits menu)
  • MOD: Imprinting prevents direct and indirect hacks at most 0b10 terminals (special manual hacks okay)
  • MOD: Z-hacks can no longer be detected, traced, nor blocked across an entire floor
  • MOD: Some items may appear in more than one type of resupply
  • MOD: Cave seal disengage behavior different if imprinted
  • MOD: Mak. Sword uses regular melee impact sound rather than heavier sound
  • MOD: Updated color of Centrium wheel variant art to match other items of same material
  • MOD: Potential cave-in areas on map are always highlighted (tactical HUD mode not required)
  • MOD: Rocket Arrays and Scatter Rocket Arrays significantly improved, though can no longer be focused via targeting
  • MOD: Hero class renamed to Knight, ASCII changed from 'O' to 'K'
  • MOD: Hvy. Hardcell Cannon resource costs reduced
  • MOD: AM-PH4 propulsion tweaked
  • MOD: Behemoth cannot appear on top of cave exit stairs, and much less likely to be too near any cave entrance
  • MOD: "Trapped" challenge mode trap count multiplier upped from 5 to 10
  • MOD: Hack given by the so-called "annoying derelict" in caves causes the victim to follow instead of remain stationary
  • MOD: "Armor Coverage" best state entry in score sheet refers to raw total coverage of attached armor instead of percentage value
  • MOD: "Suicide/Restart" button on Game menu renamed "Self-destruct"
  • MOD: Robots sending distress signals to allies out of view only reveal that ally's position in easier difficulty modes
  • MOD: Robots calling for help or reinforcements from a garrison only reveal that garrison's position in easier difficulty modes
  • MOD: Removed Game menu, Save/Restart/Quit buttons now appear on Basic commands page
  • MOD: Removed tutorial message explaining how to save and exit
  • MOD: Removed "Show Non-FOV Color" from options menu, always on by default
  • MOD: Removed Ctrl-` command for toggling non-FOV color display
  • MOD: Weapon Cycler and Quantum Capacitor effect descriptions reworded for specificity, no longer refer to "projectile weapons"
  • MOD: Alarm Traps in Garrisons no longer trigger an investigation, they simply alert any nearby hostiles
  • MOD: Mechanics that clear robot memory (e.g. the Reconstructor) now also clear off-turn partial spot records
  • MOD: Melee momentum damage bonus applies to all melee weapons, not just I/S/P damage types (piercing still gets its double bonus)
  • MOD: Melee damage type modifiers on Status page merged into a single "Melee" value (extra piercing damage bonus only displayed by the weapon)
  • MOD: Only non-zero values are listed under the Status page's resistances and damage modifiers
  • MOD: Data Miner dispatch redirects no longer occur during late-game wars
  • MOD: With Label Supporter Items option on, the few items not applicable for gallery collection show standard description at bottom of info window
  • MOD: Easiest difficulty mode puts Med. Storage Unit in Scrapyard, rather than Sml.
  • MOD: A certain Exoskeleton's overweight penalty reduced from 30 to 20
  • MOD: Robot core damage popups in Tactical HUD mode default to showing actual remaining integrity rather than as a percent
  • MOD: Replaced advanced.cfg preciseCorePopup option with its opposite, percentCorePopup
  • MOD: "No X in view" message displayed when there is no applicable object for the given label type instead shows "No X to label"
  • MOD: Targeting will not autosuggest a previous target whose relation with you has changed since you last attacked it
  • MOD: Super Gauntlet challenge mode keeps the lone target Garrison Access available even under high security lockdown
  • FIX: Crash on right-clicking directly into second robot info while analysis or traits of first robot still open [Valguris]
  • FIX: Overloaded weapons did not apply damage bonus again walls [Valguris]
  • FIX: Walls/doors not applying damage resistances correctly [Valguris]
  • FIX: Schematics for items only available by special means did not display fabrication info when opened via fabricator/schematics list [Valguris]
  • FIX: Credits list contained some duplicate supporter names [zxc]
  • FIX: Insufficient energy for overloadable propulsion upkeep might overload the propulsion instead of autodeactivating it [zxc]
  • FIX: Typo in options.cfg (fix resets your calculation log setting; if you want a non-default option you'll need to redo) [zxc]
  • FIX: Penetration values missing from gallery export data [Raine]
  • FIX: While on-map combat log active, any visible messages could partially overlap an open Status window [Raine]
  • FIX: Typo in screenshot tags and filenames for game over screen [johnicboom]
  • FIX: Advanced quickStart option could also be activated in tutorial mode despite lack of Storage Unit in that layout [Zoticus]
  • FIX: New corrupted AI misfire mechanic could in some cases affect player UI target recall [Happylisk]
  • FIX: Could continue hacking record queries at a locked terminal prior to closing window by using number keys if keyboard mode active [neutral]
  • FIX: Pressing 'f' during the exact frame a major NPC enters view and opens dialogue window blocked commands once window closed [nuzcraft]
  • FIX: STAY command issued to ally with a previous destination allowed them to reach it before returning to intended stay location [GJ]
  • FIX: Subatomic Replicator used without effect then dropped into inventory remained unidentified until inventory redrawn due to another interaction
  • FIX: A certain type of derelict log could reveal exit to Zhirov's location, which they shouldn't know
  • FIX: Moving multi-cell robot sensor scans not displayed correctly in tiles mode
  • FIX: RMB on robot then opening Analysis or Traits and closing again prevented further right-clicks on other robots until info window closed
  • FIX: "Max Gunslinging Chain" entry in score sheet was not being tallied
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« Reply #1117 on: January 24, 2018, 12:54:12 PM »





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« Reply #1118 on: January 30, 2018, 04:17:29 AM »

Steam Winter Sale Data

As promised, time to talk a bit about the Winter Sale! I'm not doing a full blog post for it, just sharing the data here as a "TIGS exclusive" since I collected it for my own use anyway Tongue. (Maybe I'll put it on Gamasutra if it turns out interesting enough...) It's made even more interesting by the fact that half-way through the sale Cogmind was featured on Steam's front page for a day.

Cogmind was apparently one of the least discounted featured games of the sale, which is kinda interesting. It was 25% off, and only at the request of Steam since they said they couldn't feature Cogmind at the 10% discount I was originally planning. So let's see how it fared...

Visitors

Looking at just the first week of the 15-day sale period, the visitor sessions have spikes that clearly reflect the time Steam updates the games featured on its front page each day. This apparently attracts a large amount of traffic to the site in general.


With Cogmind specifically, however, there are certainly some aspects that favor US traffic, for example being English only. Another related factor could be US customers making up a large portion of Steam customers. I can see this in my November monthly sales data which shows that, compared to direct sales from my site, Steam buyer composition is 40% more American, certainly a larger ratio than I expected. (Direct buys were 42% American, Steam buys were 59% American.)

Expanding the graph to include the entire sale dwarfs pretty much everything except the day Cogmind was featured. That really does bring a lot of exposure. (Duh Tongue)


There were millions of impressions that day, and for a more mainstream game this would have been a gold mine. Not so much for Cogmind because, well, it's obviously a fairly niche game. But still, any exposure is good and it does meant that more people who do happen to enjoy this niche (or just might like it!) had this opportunity to discover Cogmind that day.

There's an interesting tall spike there at the end of the day, I guess people hanging around the main page right before it switches over to the new featured games, although it's interesting that didn't happen at the beginning, too. I don't have a good explanation for that one.

Exposure

Despite millions of impressions from the feature, there were only about 163,848 actual visits to Cogmind's store page that day.


Compared to 249,827 total visits over 15 days, that's two-thirds (65.6%) of the entire sale visitors arriving in a single day.

Taking another step back to put the entire sale in perspective, in the two weeks before it began Cogmind averaged 991 visitors per day, much lower than the sale's 16,655 (or 6,141 if excluding the feature day). So as one would expect, there's a ton of general traffic during a sale (+520%), and even more if featured.

Sales

How does this translate to sales? Not nearly that well xD


Although as mentioned previously the feature day accounted for two-thirds of sale period traffic, that day accounted for less than one-fifth of the total sales! One could say that certainly visitors don't necessarily buy immediately and may wait some amount of time, days or more, before buying, but sales momentum clearly declined after being featured rather than the other way around.

One would be tempted to say that the exposure really didn't do a whole lot, but that's impossible to know for sure since who knows the decline could have otherwise been even faster without it.

Overall, by raw sales numbers Cogmind did much better during its October EA launch than during the Winter Sale, even though the latter had a steeper discount. Niche!

Of course the thing about sales and features is that they're not targeted, and Steam notably does a terrible job of recommending games people might like so I have little confidence in their ability to lead the right players to Cogmind. This is doubly hard because the mainstream use of the term "roguelike" is used by games that are nothing like Cogmind, so it's only partially Valve's fault.

Wishlists

Another way to look at the discount's (and especially the feature's) impact on sales is by analyzing wishlist numbers. This is actually a point Valve used when trying to convince me to increase my discount in order to be featured--that even those who don't buy will at least become aware of the game's existence, wishlist it, and maybe buy further down the line.

There was definitely a respectable spike of wishlisting on that day...


Although a high peak, it can't quite compare to the total volume during EA launch a couple months prior.


(No y-axis on these because it's data direct from Steamworks.)

Both wishlisting (and sales) are definitely greater during the first week of the sale, and start declining thereafter. It would seem there's a lot of buyer fatigue in the latter half of such a long sale Tongue

Relative Performance

Mainly because I'm curious, I also recorded how Cogmind fared against other games during the sale, in terms of revenue. As I mentioned in a previous postmortem, this information is easy to tell by following Steam's Top Seller lists by genre, because they directly reflect each game's relative revenue and the lists are updated quite frequently.

About once per day (in an anonymous browser via VPN in the US) I checked how many pages it took in a given category to reach Cogmind (each page contained 10 games during this period).


Naturally Cogmind is at a slight disadvantage outside the EA category, since the others include "complete" games, but overall Cogmind did pretty well and, the primary reason I wanted to create such a graph, the effect of the front-page feature is pretty apparent there. It shot Cogmind up to one of the top selling roguelikes, for sure, as well as being pretty high in the much larger EA category.

For comparison, because I'm still wondering what it's all about, I also recorded Cogmind's ranking in the "New and Trending" tab over this period, and found that being featured had literally zero impact! So much for trending.


Perhaps Valve excludes factors like traffic from their own promotions on the main page, since maybe that "doesn't really count."

I'd been of the impression that at least releasing new patches and getting attention that way was a method of rising in those ranks, but I've since released a major version that got some attention and didn't get anywhere in New and Trending, so I dunno...

Conclusion

Relatively speaking, what did the sale, and being on the front page, mean for Cogmind's bottom line?


I didn't have any expectations myself, but in hindsight the results aren't super amazing like some believed they would be. Hey, it's still better than not being featured (pretty spike!) and definitely better than not having a sale at all.
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« Reply #1119 on: February 02, 2018, 05:02:23 PM »

I'm working from Japan for a few weeks Smiley

My latest office setup:


On the dev side this week I wrote up a thing for a r/RoguelikeDev FAQ on my in-game debugging features. Stuff like:

Highlighting map encounter prefabs, colored by their type (fluff/reward/danger/risk-reward...):



Visualizing squad routes:



Visualizing ambient sfx propagation:



Checking cellwise cave-in factors as affected by explosions:



I also just posted a longer progress update on Steam, this week's SITREP titled "The Next Big Thing," in which I share more player stats (including aggregate preferences!) and talk about implementing Achievements for both Steam and non-Steam builds.

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