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JobLeonard
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« Reply #1200 on: October 30, 2018, 04:36:18 PM »

But it refuses to install it in my Steam?

Oh wait, I had to change the settings to also support games not yet verified to work.
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« Reply #1201 on: October 30, 2018, 04:59:09 PM »

Yeah that's something you still have to do, apparently. No idea if/when they'll add Cogmind to their "official list," but already a bunch of Linux players are using it without issue on Steam, so... Shrug
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« Reply #1202 on: October 31, 2018, 07:39:47 AM »

As of yesterday I am one of them Wink
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« Reply #1203 on: October 31, 2018, 03:21:00 PM »

Welcome to the fold!
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« Reply #1204 on: November 02, 2018, 05:33:20 PM »

Wow there's been a crazy amount of Cogmind fan art these days... Zyalin's done some really wonderful portraits of minor NPCs (to avoid spoilers he's not doing any of the major ones), like the superhacker ME-RLN:



I'll be putting together a bigger collection of all this art next week, including I guess some new pieces that I'm working on for the game itself Smiley
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« Reply #1205 on: November 09, 2018, 03:17:38 PM »

SITREP Saturday #39: Artlike

Since the 7.1 release last week I've been hard at work on Beta 8, with a bunch of that time spent in REXPaint on new art. Some of you may know what that means... yet more parts!



That's just a small sampling to whet your appetite Wink

Fortunately it's not just me who's been up to producing art, so we can also feast our eyes upon Cogmind-related works from the community! There's been quite a lot of it over the past few weeks...

Hall of Heroes

Zyalin has been enjoying the world's atmosphere so much that he's chosen to share his impressions of the Heroes of Zion. These are only minor NPCs which don't play a part in the plot lines, but they have a lot of personality, making them good candidates for portraits. Over the past few weeks he's been sharing them with us over on Discord, having just recently finished the series.

ME-RLN (posted a couple days ago but including here for completion)



1C-UTU



7V-RTL



NK-0LA



P1-3CE



AD-0RF



99-TNT



CL-ANK



12-ASH



Having finished the heroes, Zyalin has continued drawing more bots, though now simply inspired by the world rather than anything directly from the game.

There's Zerbe-RIF:



A scary escaped prototype which has reportedly "stolen the last copy of NetHack" xD



And this great derelict with what could be a stolen pair of nice legs and a whole bunch of duct tape!



Datasheets

Not too long ago KernelPanic initially started sharing pixel art conversions of Cogmind's ASCII parts (their first attempt at pixel art, no less!):





Also eventually experimenting with new styles:



But then the parts started finding their way into these cool data sheets:



"Halloween version" for the Recycler Tongue



Cogmics

Pioneered by PlasticHeart, I've shared a few before but so-called "cogmics" have recently become a wider thing in the community, with at least 5-6 separate people (lost count xD) using their own cogmic style to share Cogmind jokes about the world, strategies, or even the community itself. Here are a few I've picked out...

PlasticHeart cogmics:



Gotta hate those surprise ARCs! (or any number of other surprises when opening doors without sensor data xD)



Using the new 7.1 RIF to loop garrisons (this one was specifically drawing Pimski doing it in -1/Access for what has become the second-highest ever scoring Cogmind run, which you can see on the leaderboards now).



New players are generally inundated with good advice on arrival on the Discord, but sometimes there are jokes as well Tongue



Lots of strategy discussion and sharing regarding established builds...



Decinym's impression of discovering nothing desirable after using CRM ("alien magic," haha xD):



Same scenario depicted by Zyalin (apparently Core Expanders are an artifact hunter's worst enemy Tongue)



Zyalin draws Raine as she goes for the Mad Max achievement, then accidentally picks up a prototype flight unit next to the wheel she wanted. Oops!



Allied Operators are great, by Zyalin.



8FPS lamenting the Beta 7 fix which blocked the cheese tactic of safely crushing a certain major NPC via treads without the usual repercussions.



Most recently, JackNine has been sharing some polished cogmics with a completely new perspective. (These include fun little details that are worth a second look, too :D)

Remember that Mines encounter?



(for me it's especially funny JackNine would make this connection, since a separate event I've been planning to add to the caves at some point is a more direct reference to this classic scene)

ASCII vs. tiles, Halloween edition!



How to deal with "programmers" Smiley



Many thanks to everyone for your artistic contributions! Some of the artists have been uploading their creations to the Images section on Steam, though not all so I thought I'd share some of my favorites as part of a progress update :D

Apostle of RIF

The Apostle of RIF is alive and well [enough]! We've survived another two parts with the RIF build, hacking and fighting up to -5/Upper Caves at this point after making the desired visit to Extension to rescue a certain someone (and then backstab them--sorry bud!).









The written summary of the run (w/images) continues in the same forum thread.

Part 4 is coming next week at the usual time (Monday evenings EST, after the DST change in the US the time is around 7pm).

Also on Twitch, our own emote was approved Wink



I dunno though, I might end up switching it to :wheel:, which'd go along better with my streams since I've been doing a lot of wheel-based runs. (That said, some of the future runs I have planned are more likely to be back on legs.)

Scraps

My "How to Make a Roguelike" talk at the Roguelike Celebration is now also available in text form on the blog. It's a comprehensive primer on how to get started with roguelike development, with guidance and tips in 5,500 words and 84 images!



I also cross-posted it to Gamasutra, where it was received quite well and even got featured on their front page as the top article Smiley

You can see the screenshot they chose was from POLYBOT-7, woohoo.



In other artlike news, Rex Quantum has scrapped together a printed Cogmind manual using leftover office supplies. How appropriate Tongue





Overall there won't be as many progress updates prior to Beta 8, if only because a good chunk of this dev time is going towards new content that'd be nice for everyone to explore on their own. Also a heads up: This is stuff that'll be accessible near the start of a run, so unlike a lot of other big content updates it won't require that you already be able to reach the mid- or late-game areas. Stay tuned for more!
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« Reply #1206 on: November 23, 2018, 03:36:01 PM »

SITREP Saturday #40: 10k

New parts, new art, more streaming, an interview, a blog post... it's been busy around here!

First, how about some new item teasers :D



I don't want to spoil the surprises, but can at least say this has been a very productive couple of weeks. More on that later.

In more immediate news we have the Thanksgiving sale period, for which Cogmind is 10% off for another half a week or so, both on Steam and the website. (Reminder: This is the lowest EA discount we'll have, barring extra promotion from Steam in exchange for a slightly higher discount, though the chances of that don't seem very high anymore.)

The Steam Awards have also begun, and the community consensus so far has been to vote for "Most Fun with a Machine," so consider adding your vote to the pool!



One of the more exciting (scary?) milestones that was hit this week: I've hit the 10,000-hour mark with Cogmind development!



The "little project" that started in 2013 is still going full speed ahead, all these years later... At some point I'll be doing a blog series on this, making all my time records public alongside an in-depth analysis of the data.

For now, though, there's the much more important Beta 8 to attend to!

It's a Mystery

Beta 8 is adding a bunch of brand new mechanics, including some which are very... out-of-the-box stuff, meaning I've been very busy breaking things left and right as I treat the code base to new experiences Smiley

As much as I'd enjoy sharing the more exciting advances, I'd like the future Beta 8 release to recapture a little more of the "surprise factor" that we used to get with Alpha releases back in the day, where each one always included chunks of unannounced content.

I do, however, have a few shots taken during development so far which I'll present here without necessarily much in the way of explanation.



Using the Lightning Gun to test a new mechanic, and it started open walls like doors! o_O (this is not the mechanic, just an unexpected side effect xD)



Weapons with the DISPOSABLE tag are getting a counter number. Wasn't needed before seeing as all disposable weapons are single-use, but... who knows Wink



Cogmind pushes past immobile allies rather than swapping with them.



Teach me your secrets!



Here's some stuff which is not actually in the game, but was used or encountered while working on certain features:









There's More Where That Came From

Continuing on the tail end of that massive surge of fan art from last time, here's some more Smiley

Don't get the wrong idea, this is most certainly not happening, but PlasticHeart sure has just the right concept to get your imagination running wild. #ChooseYourFaction



JackNine brings another cogmic, this one about "turn matters"



Zyalin continues to impress with more concept bots, like these "super derelict bros"



And if Recyclers give you nightmares, what about this "T-70 Combat Excavator"?



The Gunslinger

RIF is dead, long live The Gunslinger!

Last week we finished the RIF run in its fourth stream, which ended rather early on -4, but such is the potential result of playing Cogmind inflexibly, as it further ups the challenge. Still, sticking to a certain conduct is fun so I plan to do more of this in the future.

Part 3 (summary w/images):




Part 4 (summary w/images):




Since Part 4 came to an end before time was up that day and I wanted to play some more, we started up a separate stream. Despite intending to do quick-play runs with decisions made more for fun rather than optimization, that stream went on for another couple hours, and its second run even spanned 24 maps! It had some pretty epic moments, summarized here and available on YouTube below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIUM_8tWXMQ

Fast forward to this week and a fresh run has begun! This time it's a guns-only combat run, as we go for some related achievements and try out the gunslinging modifications in Beta 7. Using four guns to destroy three Swarmers in a single attack? Check :D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWLYK6almG8

Zyalin was busy during the stream as well, drawing this "Gunslinging Ladybot" to go along with the theme!



Part 2 coming next week, same time (Twitch ~7pm ET).

Extended Cogmind

John Harris interviewed me for Extended Play, talking about Cogmind and related stuff. It's a very long interview which spanned a couple years of intermittent questions, and was very interesting to participate in. At this point I dont' even remember all the topics we covered , but it touches on a lot of different areas.



Normally I write articles featured on Gamasutra, not have an article written by someone else about me there Tongue. Alternatively you can check out the same interview on his own blog, or find it in John's retro magazine Extended Play (Issue #2), which contains an assortment of other content, too.

Over on my blog I do have a new article, this one on how I recently solved a rare long-standing bug in Cogmind that might affect players using manual seeds, causing some maps to possibly have different content than expected. "Debugging Mapgen Seed Divergence" offers a relatively detailed look at both the definition of this type of problem and how to isolate it, showing the steps taken along the way.



And that's all I've got for this SITREP! Plenty more work to do on Beta 8, and as always it'll be quality and quantity over speed, so no dates to announce yet.
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JobLeonard
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« Reply #1207 on: November 23, 2018, 05:12:16 PM »

Quote
I don't want to spoil the surprises, but can at least say this has been a very productive couple of weeks.
By your standards?! So you're saying you tripled the content of the game?
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« Reply #1208 on: November 23, 2018, 06:00:42 PM »

Hahaha xD

Well... to be honest my standards have also changed a couple times over the past year and a half since I had that serious concussion! I still can only put in around 80% of the time I used to. In recent weeks there's been another marked improvement though, which is nice. Feeling a lot more able to concentrate for longer periods without too many negative side effects, so maybe one day I'll return to normal and we'll get super ultra mega releases like the good old days. For now we'll have to settle for super releases Big Laff
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« Reply #1209 on: November 24, 2018, 06:19:06 AM »

Quote
so maybe one day I'll return to normal and we'll get super ultra mega releases like the good old days.
Please don't, you were crazy pushing yourself and that's not sustainable - concussion or not. Your health is more important to us. I'm being serious here.
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« Reply #1210 on: November 24, 2018, 03:50:51 PM »

Well I don't know about "crazy," really... Although it might look like that on the outside, I generally only worked about 50 hours per week at my prime. That's not a whole lot! (currently I'm back up to near 40 hours, hence the 80% statement from my previous comment)
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« Reply #1211 on: November 24, 2018, 05:02:59 PM »

> only worked about 50 hours per week

> That's not a whole lot!

Are you American or something? Tongue
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« Reply #1212 on: November 24, 2018, 05:10:39 PM »

Haha, considering I get to do a lot of fun gamedev stuff and it's also been my hobby for ages, I'd say it doesn't have the same type of pressures that doing some regular desk job under a boss might have! So these hours are not quite equivalent to those hours.

Plus these hours per week include community interaction, i.e. time spent in chat rooms and forums with players, and even time spent streaming the game! So I'd say "not a whole lot" is a pretty apt description Smiley

I think people see my changelogs and progress updates and assume it takes a zillion hours to do this kind of stuff, but the real gains are made possible by being efficient and focused, not working tirelessly through the night. (Like the 7.1 release wasn't a major one, but had a number of significant mechanics changes and additions and was put together in less than two days Tongue)
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« Reply #1213 on: November 24, 2018, 05:22:39 PM »

This is a level of productivity which all gamedevs strive to achieve. I hope it rubs off on some of us as well!
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« Reply #1214 on: November 25, 2018, 04:06:45 AM »

Heh, well I'm sorta cheating, and you can, too! Tongue

I mean if you only work with tech you're very familiar with and build a solid foundation for your game (including expandability), then also spend years adding stuff using the same methods, then you get really good at this one thing. I mean, once you effectively become a 10,000-hour expert at developing your own singular game...

This makes me almost afraid to move onto other projects, as much as I also look forward to doing so if only for the freedom and new design spaces (though when the time comes I don't plan to stray too far from what I normally do).

In any case, building a comfort zone and staying inside it is not what many devs seem to enjoy doing, but it does have its advantages in the long term!
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« Reply #1215 on: December 04, 2018, 03:59:08 PM »

Year 5 of the Cogmind
[Cross-posted from the devblog here--follow link for better formatting and light-on-dark style.]

It almost seems unbelievable, but we're already pushing into our sixth year of full-time development!

Once again it's time to look back over the past year at our progress, which in 2018 includes several major releases, other roguelike happenings, and our first full year on Steam. Here's an image collage to get us started :D


Selection of images from the past year of Cogmind-related development as posted on this blog, forums, and Twitter (full mega size here).


Development Time
This year we hit a pretty surprising milestone: Over 10,000 hours of work on Cogmind!


Cogmind Monthly Development Hours, 2013.7-2018.11 (click for crisper full-size version). (The color coding is for different aspects of development tackled each month, the subject of a future in-depth article to come at a later time.)

The tally at the end of November just edged past that mark to reach 10,062. In Year 5 I added another 1,690 hours, which is 17.4% less than the 2,046 hours of 2017. Work on the game itself totaled 763 hours this year, compared to 896 hours of community-related work (purple). That's a 1:1.17 game-to-community ratio for 2018, compared to 1:1.10 last year. The lower ratio, as well as overall decrease in hours, can both be attributed to a number of factors:
  • Prior to Steam I did occasional small progress updates on the forums, but shortly after the Steam launch there were community requests for frequent news, so I decided to try even more regular reports in the form of "SITREP Saturday." This does mean I have to spend more time preparing these updates, though I'll admit they've been crucial in helping the dev process seem more alive and driving more sales to... keep development going xD
  • I've also been streaming more! And over this past year have even started uploading most of the videos to my YouTube channel. This, too, is taking more time out of direct development, but I'll also admit it's been beneficial in a number of ways, like helping new players learn more about the game, sometimes attracting new players, and giving me more chances to play and walk through everything that's going on, which sometimes leads to balance changes or new content. I mean I'm going to play anyway, so may as well do it online to get the other benefits, too, right? :) (it's also been a lot of fun just hanging out with the community, but technically it still counts as "work"!)
  • Even now, 19 months after it happened, The Concussion continues to be a drag on development. Dealing with it still requires a fair number of hours spent on hospital visits every week for treatment, and I have no choice but to sleep more than I normally would each day. Altogether these hours come out of direct dev time, since I can't reasonably reduce the amount of community involvement without taking a clear hit in terms of revenue :/

The biggest chunk of total usable hours that were instead allocated elsewhere went to POLYBOT-7, although technically that has indirect benefits for Cogmind as well, since it's a somewhat similar game and got some decent attention. I'll talk more about that later.

All that said, 2018 has certainly been a very productive year. According to the graph, November actually saw more work on the game proper than any single month since April 2017, the month right before the major Beta 1 release--from this you can probably tell that the upcoming Beta 8 has a decent number of fresh goodies ;). And this year we finally got to a number of major features required for 1.0, making good progress checking off the last remaining bits of the roadmap, alongside other additions.


Features
Although there were only four major releases in Year 5, every one pushed Cogmind forward in a big way.

Beta 4 and Beta 5 piled on tons more QoL, improved the early game, and reworked imprinting to make it a much more interesting strategic choice. Then the following two releases took longer than any had before...

Beta 6 was the achievements update, where we got a non-Steam-reliant system including 256 achievements spread across six categories. You can read more about their design here.


Don't worry, that's not all. We've got more where that came from ;)

Most recently Beta 7 finally replaced the placeholder robot hacking system that's been in there since 2015, which I'd dubbed the "last major system" we'd need before heading to 1.0. I'm pleased with how it's turned out (better be--it took forever to design and implement!) Some further adjustments were made in Beta 7.1, and we'll probably get some more robot hacks eventually, but for now you can play with the 65 already in there :D

We also had a little fun for April Fool's this year, the kind of thing I'd like to do again... On that note, be on the lookout for another special intermediate update at some point this month, hopefully not long before Beta 8 itself lands.


An assortment of 2018 progress gifs!


Cogmind-ish Stuff
So what other peripheral activities was I up to this year instead of working purely on Cogmind?

Well, 2018 is only the second time I've participated in 7DRL since creating the first iteration of Cogmind back in 2012. You can read more about that, and the game itself, in the original release announcement. One could say it's a Cogmind-like ;)


POLYBOT-7 box art.

It really ate up a ton of time, though, which is kinda funny because it's suppose to be a "7-day" roguelike xD. All told I took a month off for that including planning, the week itself, and writing a massive postmortem. I'm very glad to have done it, and would love to do more 7DRLs, though I'm thinking it's probably a better idea to skip 2019 in the interest of getting Cogmind to 1.0.

I also took part in this year's Roguelike Celebration, which while technically only a couple days long also requires that I travel around the world, so there's that plus the fact that I need to arrive even earlier to avoid serious jet lag, and then I combined it with a bit of vacation to make the trip more worthwhile. Such a great event, and although my talk wasn't focused on Cogmind in particular, being about roguelikes did of course still provide a few opportunities to mention my own work. Beyond the actual attendees, the video of that talk was watched over 6,000 times in its first month o_O





And although it didn't really take much time, I did finally release a new version of REXPaint, one of my primary dev tools and one that's used by quite a few other devs and artists. I do have bigger plans for it, including putting out a sizable 2.0 one day, but don't want that to interfere with Cogmind development so keep waiting until at least Cogmind 1.0 is a thing.


Words!
As usual I've been writing a lot--documenting events, analyzing things, sharing knowledge...

One of the highlights this year is being featured as the front page main article on Gamasutra three separate times!

These are all articles originally serialized on the Grid Sage blog which I then merged into larger single articles for that site.

As mentioned earlier, this year I've also been putting together a ton of progress reports for the forums/Steam. We're up to 40 SITREPs now...


A whole bunch of SITREPs...

In addition to the blog and these other outlets, I've continued hosting the r/RoguelikeDev FAQ Friday discussions. #69 through #76 are all from this year, and you can check them out for writings on topics like Packaging and Deployment, Map Memory, Movement, Procedural Generation, and Consumables.


Steam, Year 1
While Cogmind may have been on sale for three and a half years now, it's only been on Steam for a little over a year. I haven't been doing any business-related articles like I used to, not since the launch post-mortem from November 2017, though I did take a stat-heavy look at player metrics on Steam. (It was nice to get that out of the way before GDPR this year convinced me to change Cogmind stats back to being opt-in only, meaning that any data we collect now is only a minority of the total.)

Today I've put together a graph showing how sales on Steam have been trending over time:


Cogmind sales history on Steam, Oct 2017~Nov 2018 (click for full size). Note: Sales off Steam are excluded here, but I mirror all discounts on my website, and the relative amount of revenue from direct sales pretty consistently hovers between 10-15% of all revenue, because yeah a lot of people buy games through Steam but Valve takes a huge nearly one-third cut of revenue from games sold on their site!

Sales are decent considering it's already been a year, though you can clearly see the total volume shrinking. Apparently I need to do more major releases paired with visibility rounds :P ("Visibility rounds" are Steam's option for developers to show a game off to more people a limited number of times during its lifetime, and which must be paired with a significant update.)

Or I guess just doing discounts like 25%+ would likely bring in a lot of revenue, although I don't really like the potential long-term impact that can have, not with a game as niche as Cogmind. I'm being as conservative as possible here... Besides, I already promised to keep the occasional discounts to 10% during EA, so not much room to maneuver there ;)

I did have that single two-week 25% discount at the end of last year in exchange for Valve giving me free front-page publicity for a day during that period, so it's good to see what kind of impact those things can have (I wrote about this on TIGS).

Financially we're doing okay, but I'm starting to get worried about next year. This won't change much with regards to development plans since it was already about time to start aiming closer to 1.0 anyway, though I can see it keeping me from straying too far from that goal in 2019 :P

Special thanks to Shogo, Joshua, Wladimir, Gary, and others for your generous donations this year to help keep development going!


2019
If possible I'd like to reach 1.0 next year! So first we're going to get an action-packed Beta 8, then I'll switch gears to focus on features that must be done by 1.0 (which is just a milestone, by the way, not the end of the road!).

There are absolutely tons more optional features I'd like to add, but I'm pretty sure I won't be able to safely fund development past another year of EA. We haven't yet hit the review threshold I was hoping for, at least not in Steam terms (we've passed the threshold, but they don't count reviews from non-Steam purchasers :/). I mean, yeah we could've hit it already if I'd only released on Steam rather than via direct sales so long before, but to be honest this wouldn't have been a net positive because a huge chunk of Alpha revenue would've gone to Valve rather than me, making it hard to put so much time into polishing, so I'm glad things have worked out as they have so far.

But anyway, who knows, we may still hit it if I take too long to finish 1.0 ;)

Many thanks to everyone who's left a review so far--we've definitely got a much higher review-to-sale ratio than your average game on Steam <3

As for the release date, "next year" is a pretty broad target, though I can get a little more specific for you: We're going to get at least several more Betas before reaching 1.0, so it's unlikely to happen before Q4. Of course, if it gets too late I may have to avoid the holiday season and end up pushing it into 2020. October would be an okay month, but I'm not too keen on releasing in the months shortly after that. Anyway, we're flexible here :)


Lots of fun toys coming in 2019!
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« Reply #1216 on: December 14, 2018, 03:49:21 PM »

SITREP Saturday #41: Be the Tank

Art, mechanics, streams, IndieDB Top 100... the year ain't over yet!

Quite a few new items coming to Beta 8, still adding yet more:



Most of these were actually appended to the art preview selected for the "Year 5 of the Cogmind" annual review, though one of those is previously unseen.

I've been working on a whole bunch of stuff for Beta 8, though most of the new content is under wraps until the release. Instead I can show this mysterious animation as updated for compatibility in optional low-contrast modes:



But there are also some interesting new mechanical developments to get specific about. Let's dive right in...

Is that a Leg in Your Pocket?

I always wanted a simplified propulsion system in Cogmind, which is why from the very beginning (2012!) propulsion itself has had no mass, regardless of whether active or inactive. This makes it much less complicated to juggle even more propulsion considerations on top of all the other parts you have to think about.

Of course it also resulted in the interesting side effect of so-called "propulsion armor," or sometimes attaching useless deactivated propulsion simply for its coverage and integrity. As a pretty unique quirk to Cogmind's systems that you can learn to use to your advantage in some situations, I've never felt a strong need to do anything about it.

Then suddenly some weeks ago I wasn't even thinking about this topic (or even propulsion) at all and for some reason the idea of adding a "drag" mechanic popped into my head. I liked the principle of having inactive non-airborne propulsion slowing down flight and hover, and started to like it even more as I continued thinking about how this could indirectly help further differentiate treads and aid heavy combat builds. With a new mechanic to limit certain kinds of propulsion armor and the potential for temporarily cheesing tread-specific benefits, treads could be buffed such that it's easier to make extremely "tanky" builds with lots of treads, which almost become a build's armor, among other benefits.

So all treads, legs, and wheels will come with a new stat, "drag," which kicks in only when these parts are inactive while airborne. Note the addition of a new stat here doesn't lengthen the item info, just takes the place of the "mod/extra" stat where appropriate ("mod/extra" is only used for airborne propulsion, so that same stat slot for non-airborne propulsion is instead "drag," essentially how some weapons may have a Heat Transfer stat or a Spectrum, but not both). Also note that drag values are not all over the place--they're actually static by propulsion type.

Now, balance-wise, the idea behind drag is not to prevent propulsion armor completely (in which case it could just be blocked!), but instead simply have a speed cost associated with it, one that some players might be willing to pay under certain conditions.

Here's a demo of the mechanic in action:



As with any brand new mechanic, we'll have to see how everyone responds with their builds, but in short, treads will become that much more unique (especially compared to legs, which have always offered similar capabilities), and propulsion armor won't be so common anymore. (Drag will not impact core movement, by the way!)

Freeeeeedommmmmm!

Drag is liberating. It's introduced a lot of design freedom to make treads shine at what they should do best: Enable you to effectively crush hordes of bots. (Okay well literally crushing them under your treads is already possible, but you know what I mean :D)

To that end, treads will be better putting their generally massive integrity to work protecting your other parts, gaining about 40 coverage each. This pushes average tread coverage much closer to that of light armor, and armored treads will be about on part with light armor in terms of how well they shield other parts.

On the offensive side, each tread slot gives a 2% bonus to accuracy. So the average tread build will have something like 6-8% better accuracy for all weapons, or even 10%+ for those going with a truly tanky build using a greater number of treads defensively as well (or to carry a ton of stuff--we might be seeing more... really heavy stuff in the future Wink).

Treads will also have a reduced overweight penalty (though still not as good as wheels).

In the end there are a lot of strategic implications here. As a combat player I know I can't wait to take a Beta 8 tank out for a spin Tongue

First Time's a Charm

Over the past couple weeks we've had several people stream their first runs of Cogmind, with the community around to help and enjoy that initial experience all over again.

Tone, a seasoned roguelike player generally found playing NetHack, streamed his very first Cogmind run while myself and a bunch of other Cogmind players were hanging out there for much of it. Here's the first day, and here's the second.

Although it was his first run he, uh, won Tongue. Many (most?) viewers had already won before so there was certainly a fair amount of backseating, but it was a fun slow crawl spanning more than 13 hours (unusually long for a Cogmind run, but the whole thing was all streamed, after all, and he was learning on the way). It also got plenty hairy in a few places. First run and all Smiley

I also continued my ongoing stream run this week, Part 3 of Cogmind the Gunslinger:





WARNING: Unlike most of of my streams, the entirety of Part 3 is super spoilery--front to back special late-game events and branches.

The stream actually included a first for me as well, as it headed into one of the few areas of the world I've personally never explored before!

During Part 3 I achieved the bounty set by MTF, who challenged me to confront a certain rare late-game enemy. True to his word, MTF immediately purchased 4 copies of Cogmind to hand out on stream :D (MTF says this might happen again in some future run, I'll just have to keep my game in top shape, unlike my earlier RIF stream which got crushed late in Factory before I could reach the bounty location xD)

While watching the stream, Zyalin drew my combat build, with a twist Tongue



Zyalin says:
Quote
This is Bounty-Bot-7
made up from a recycled sentry core
Upgraded by the powerful KYZ-Guidance-Unit for real-time insider knowledge
and comes with a Backseat-Mounted MTF-Combat suite for maximum bounty potential

Last week Gold-Plated Games also checked out Cogmind for the first time, with both myself and the community in tow (unexpectedly Tongue). Fun times.





Top 100

Thanks to support from the community, for the fifth year in a row Cogmind made into IndieDB's Top 100 :D

Voting for the Top 10 started this week, but I don't think it's really worth bothering to compete against the really big mainstream games for those slots.

Next week there might be something special coming to Cogmind... temporarily Wink
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Kyzrati
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« Reply #1217 on: December 20, 2018, 03:15:12 AM »

Special release :D



Full details in the announcement, but the gist is that from now through the end of the year, each day Cogmind will feature different new content, including 17 new unique parts (some with completely new mechanics).

This mode will start up automatically for regular Cogmind players.
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« Reply #1218 on: December 20, 2018, 03:31:04 AM »

Any discounts for Christmas sale? Wink
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« Reply #1219 on: December 20, 2018, 03:57:43 AM »

Yup, but just the usual 10% as announced in the progress update last weekend*. Valve didn't want to do any kind of promotion so I will continue to stick to my stated EA pricing!

(Actually the sale doesn't start on Steam for a bit, but on my site it's already active since I'll be asleep when Steam's starts Tongue)

*I removed that section from the TIGS version of the SITREP, since I don't really advertise here, keeping it instead focused more on dev stuff and progress (the original SITREP on the forums and Steam had that section though).
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