Beta 5 is mostly done! This was the last full week of prep work, focused on handling as many feature requests as I could fit in (including some of my own :P) while also fixing any new bugs discovered in Beta 4.


One player requested that, as a memory aid, terrain discovered via scanners (or other means) could be displayed differently than that which had actually been visited and seen before. I went ahead and used monochrome "greenscale" to draw those areas rather than the usual darkened colors used everywhere outside FOV.

I like how it looks, plus it's a good excuse to use the old green style I originally used (it was the only/default style before Alpha 13 a year ago!).

Momentum damage modifiers are now precalculated directly next to the melee weapons they affect, so you don't have to do it :P. This is especially helpful when trying to smash, slash, or stab your way through a stubborn door.


Similarly, active Particle Accelerators now show exactly how they affect the damage of your energy weapons (including those stored in inventory in case you want to pull them out for maximum fearsomeness).


I removed the separate "Game" menu page, simply putting its three buttons on the Basic commands page so they're accessible immediately as soon as you press Escape, also making them easier for new players to find.

There are a number of other changes still coming to the Escape menu system, but this was a relatively easy adjustment that was worth making now.

Thermal/heat transfer weapons that hit overheating robots may now melt their parts as well.


The advanced quickStart option is going to be available at easier difficulty modes, too. I knew there might be minor issues regarding implementation and hadn't looked into them since I previously didn't have much interaction with players not using the default difficulty, so I didn't know whether anyone would actually use it. During Beta 4 I did hear one voice on the matter, though, so here it is! Adding quickStart to Easiest Mode did require swapping out the Sml. Storage unit for a Medium one, but I'm sure there won't be any complaints there :P. Here's a sample quickStart exit from the Scrapyard in Easiest:


While reworking some aspects of melee damage I went ahead and simplified the resistance and damage modifiers on the status page by only listing those which are non-zero values.


By request, active garrisons now display their dispatch timer countdown directly on the map as long as you have a Signal Interpreter. This information has been available for a while, but previously only by actually inspecting the Garrison Access terminal itself.


Launcher Guidance Computers now block launcher misfires caused by corruption. Being able to more safely keep a launcher equipped while corrupted could occasionally come in handy.


There's now a log message specifically for identifying unknown parts. This'll help both when you're reviewing a log later, and perhaps more importantly when that faulty prototype melts on you and you're left wondering what it actually was xD


Last but oh most definitely not least, robots sending distress signals now animate the range at which they are capable of alerting friendlies. This'll be important because in (only) the default Roguelike difficulty mode I'm removing the position-revealing feature added for Beta 4. I'll talk more about that in the release notes next week.



Another player needed alternative map ASCII at size 16 to more easily distinguish characters on their smaller display, so I added several new options there.

The first is the great Terminus, which I think looks really nice but as a fully sans-serif font may not be that great for the state purpose in particular.


I'm not sure about the other two, but I'll have to get some feedback from those who actually need this feature :). In looking for some size-appropriate serif options I picked these old system fonts from the 80s:

Kaypro


Verite



The wiki now really is chock full of spoilers. Raine's been doing a great job with it and all the items are in there. I mentioned this last time but the data is even more complete now, including even comparison tables.

Robots, machines, walls, lore and whatnot still need to be added manually, so if anyone with the info and know-how is interested in helping out you can email me at gridsagegames@gmail.com to get an account. Ideally you'll also be in our chat so we can coordinate things.

Raine also has the Beta 1~3 score sheets in a database you can use to make pretty graphs here, for anyone curious about stats. (It scrapes all the data, but the publicly available fields are limited unless there are requests for others.)

AND she's also working on a bot for the chat channels <3


In between stories of epic runs, players have been sharing some cool Cogmind-related art over on Discord.

We have a couple images by MojoPoop depicting a Cogmind-DF mashup:




He also created a "Proton Cannon but not" in the style of Cogmind item art:


"Vigilant" - A Hunter by Rylan:


All of these were drawn in my free editor, REXPaint.


Early this week I did a couple more streams, and won this run :D

It was another combat run (of course!), only this time focusing on legs and stronger offense. There's a summary with images on the forums here. The entire run is in two parts on YouTube, -10 to -3 and -3 to the end.

That'll probably be my last stream for a while, since I'll be away from home for most of the next month (but still mostly working on Beta 6) and in early March I'm planning to do a 7DRL I think you'll all enjoy :D. More on that stuff in future updates, though.

Some top players have been thinking of streaming their runs, though, so if you hang out in the Discord you might find out about that. Most of the Cogminds you see high up on the leaderboards are in our chat, and in some cases I'm sure that's how they got up there so fast--there's a lot of wisdom to be found within! Come hang out :D (I'm there every day, too)


The next big thing is around the corner. Beta 5 is another huge release that I'll have out for you by mid-week. It's not quite done as I'm still trying to pack in as many last-minute features as possible and there are a few requested features on the shortlist. Most recently I spent a while on an RTS-style panning option, but doing a good one takes a lot of time so I don't think that'll make the cut (already tons of stuff planned for Beta 6, too xD).

I appreciate if you could leave a review if you've been getting into the game for Early Access and know your way around!

See you with the full Beta 5 announcement before long :D

Beta 5 is mostly done! This was the last full week of prep work, focused on handling as many feature requests as I could fit in (including some of my own :P) while also fixing any new bugs discovered in Beta 4.


One player requested that, as a memory aid, terrain discovered via scanners (or other means) could be displayed differently than that which had actually been visited and seen before. I went ahead and used monochrome "greenscale" to draw those areas rather than the usual darkened colors used everywhere outside FOV.

I like how it looks, plus it's a good excuse to use the old green style I originally used (it was the only/default style before Alpha 13 a year ago!).

Momentum damage modifiers are now precalculated directly next to the melee weapons they affect, so you don't have to do it :P. This is especially helpful when trying to smash, slash, or stab your way through a stubborn door.


Similarly, active Particle Accelerators now show exactly how they affect the damage of your energy weapons (including those stored in inventory in case you want to pull them out for maximum fearsomeness).


I removed the separate "Game" menu page, simply putting its three buttons on the Basic commands page so they're accessible immediately as soon as you press Escape, also making them easier for new players to find.

There are a number of other changes still coming to the Escape menu system, but this was a relatively easy adjustment that was worth making now.

Thermal/heat transfer weapons that hit overheating robots may now melt their parts as well.


The advanced quickStart option is going to be available at easier difficulty modes, too. I knew there might be minor issues regarding implementation and hadn't looked into them since I previously didn't have much interaction with players not using the default difficulty, so I didn't know whether anyone would actually use it. During Beta 4 I did hear one voice on the matter, though, so here it is! Adding quickStart to Easiest Mode did require swapping out the Sml. Storage unit for a Medium one, but I'm sure there won't be any complaints there :P. Here's a sample quickStart exit from the Scrapyard in Easiest:


While reworking some aspects of melee damage I went ahead and simplified the resistance and damage modifiers on the status page by only listing those which are non-zero values.


By request, active garrisons now display their dispatch timer countdown directly on the map as long as you have a Signal Interpreter. This information has been available for a while, but previously only by actually inspecting the Garrison Access terminal itself.


Launcher Guidance Computers now block launcher misfires caused by corruption. Being able to more safely keep a launcher equipped while corrupted could occasionally come in handy.


There's now a log message specifically for identifying unknown parts. This'll help both when you're reviewing a log later, and perhaps more importantly when that faulty prototype melts on you and you're left wondering what it actually was xD


Last but oh most definitely not least, robots sending distress signals now animate the range at which they are capable of alerting friendlies. This'll be important because in (only) the default Roguelike difficulty mode I'm removing the position-revealing feature added for Beta 4. I'll talk more about that in the release notes next week.



Another player needed alternative map ASCII at size 16 to more easily distinguish characters on their smaller display, so I added several new options there.

The first is the great Terminus, which I think looks really nice but as a fully sans-serif font may not be that great for the state purpose in particular.


I'm not sure about the other two, but I'll have to get some feedback from those who actually need this feature :). In looking for some size-appropriate serif options I picked these old system fonts from the 80s:

Kaypro


Verite



The wiki now really is chock full of spoilers. Raine's been doing a great job with it and all the items are in there. I mentioned this last time but the data is even more complete now, including even comparison tables.

Robots, machines, walls, lore and whatnot still need to be added manually, so if anyone with the info and know-how is interested in helping out you can email me at gridsagegames@gmail.com to get an account. Ideally you'll also be in our chat so we can coordinate things.

Raine also has the Beta 1~3 score sheets in a database you can use to make pretty graphs here, for anyone curious about stats. (It scrapes all the data, but the publicly available fields are limited unless there are requests for others.)

AND she's also working on a bot for the chat channels <3


In between stories of epic runs, players have been sharing some cool Cogmind-related art over on Discord.

We have a couple images by MojoPoop depicting a Cogmind-DF mashup:




He also created a "Proton Cannon but not" in the style of Cogmind item art:


"Vigilant" - A Hunter by Rylan:


All of these were drawn in my free editor, REXPaint.


Early this week I did a couple more streams, and won this run :D

It was another combat run (of course!), only this time focusing on legs and stronger offense. There's a summary with images on the forums here. The entire run is in two parts on YouTube, -10 to -3 and -3 to the end.

That'll probably be my last stream for a while, since I'll be away from home for most of the next month (but still mostly working on Beta 6) and in early March I'm planning to do a 7DRL I think you'll all enjoy :D. More on that stuff in future updates, though.

Some top players have been thinking of streaming their runs, though, so if you hang out in the Discord you might find out about that. Most of the Cogminds you see high up on the leaderboards are in our chat, and in some cases I'm sure that's how they got up there so fast--there's a lot of wisdom to be found within! Come hang out :D (I'm there every day, too)


The next big thing is around the corner. Beta 5 is another huge release that I'll have out for you by mid-week. It's not quite done as I'm still trying to pack in as many last-minute features as possible and there are a few requested features on the shortlist. Most recently I spent a while on an RTS-style panning option, but doing a good one takes a lot of time so I don't think that'll make the cut (already tons of stuff planned for Beta 6, too xD).

I appreciate if you could leave a review if you've been getting into the game for Early Access and know your way around!

See you with the full Beta 5 announcement before long :D

Beta 5 is more than half-complete at this point, and will be out with the next couple weeks. Still plenty more little features to work on, but all the major stuff is out of the way!


The bulk of this week was spent on a new system of render filters to enable players with specific needs to make visual adjustments to aspects including brightness, saturation, and contrast.

They can do things like create a low-contrast effect, e.g. this one called "Sleepy"

(you might want to open these full size to see them more clearly)

Some ASCII combat in Sleepy mode:


UI interaction in another low-contrast mode, "Autumn"


Of course filters might just be for fun as well. Unless some of you would like to seriously switch over to "swap mode" which reverses the foreground colors for a very different look:


Swap mode in action:


I think swap mode looks even better when combined with one of the low-contrast filters:


Over on the blog this week I covered this system in more detail, including additional demo images and an overview of its implementation. Check out the full article: "Color Customization."


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:



Raine has been doing a great job of importing all our item export data into the wiki. Of course everyone has access to their own item gallery and data exports, including HTML and CSV formats, but the wiki will be good for linking, its sortable tables, attaching public discussion to particular parts, and maybe eventually a bot in the chat channels.

Anyone who doesn't mind can now spoil themselves silly with data, browsing hundreds upon hundreds of items... for example this subset of energy guns:


Each item type has its own box that includes relevant fields for that category.



Remember that Cogmind originated as a 7DRL, and still lots of people play that free version as well. One of Cogmind's best players, GJ, went back and legitimately beat it, becoming one of only two known players to do so, and the only one to do it without the old cheesy mining tactic :P



The 7DRL version wasn't all that balanced towards the end, so if you can kick modern Cogmind's butt and want a different kind of challenge as well as a chance to see a lot of today's items and concepts at their fledgling stages, check it out.

While we're on the topic of 7DRLs, this year's challenge is just around the corner! Any of you participating? Every year I want to, and have tons of ideas piled up from false starts that didn't make it beyond the planning stages because I'm too busy, but I'm hoping this year will be different :P

Beta 5 is more than half-complete at this point, and will be out with the next couple weeks. Still plenty more little features to work on, but all the major stuff is out of the way!


The bulk of this week was spent on a new system of render filters to enable players with specific needs to make visual adjustments to aspects including brightness, saturation, and contrast.

They can do things like create a low-contrast effect, e.g. this one called "Sleepy"

(you might want to open these full size to see them more clearly)

Some ASCII combat in Sleepy mode:


UI interaction in another low-contrast mode, "Autumn"


Of course filters might just be for fun as well. Unless some of you would like to seriously switch over to "swap mode" which reverses the foreground colors for a very different look:


Swap mode in action:


I think swap mode looks even better when combined with one of the low-contrast filters:


Over on the blog this week I covered this system in more detail, including additional demo images and an overview of its implementation. Check out the full article: "Color Customization."


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:



Raine has been doing a great job of importing all our item export data into the wiki. Of course everyone has access to their own item gallery and data exports, including HTML and CSV formats, but the wiki will be good for linking, its sortable tables, attaching public discussion to particular parts, and maybe eventually a bot in the chat channels.

Anyone who doesn't mind can now spoil themselves silly with data, browsing hundreds upon hundreds of items... for example this subset of energy guns:


Each item type has its own box that includes relevant fields for that category.



Remember that Cogmind originated as a 7DRL, and still lots of people play that free version as well. One of Cogmind's best players, GJ, went back and legitimately beat it, becoming one of only two known players to do so, and the only one to do it without the old cheesy mining tactic :P



The 7DRL version wasn't all that balanced towards the end, so if you can kick modern Cogmind's butt and want a different kind of challenge as well as a chance to see a lot of today's items and concepts at their fledgling stages, check it out.

While we're on the topic of 7DRLs, this year's challenge is just around the corner! Any of you participating? Every year I want to, and have tons of ideas piled up from false starts that didn't make it beyond the planning stages because I'm too busy, but I'm hoping this year will be different :P

2018 is off to a great start...



Content! After a couple releases getting up to speed for and after the Steam release, we are finally in the swing of things and it feels great to have been adding new content for almost the entire week. The thing about content is that I always avoid talking spoilers, so I'll have to just give hints and tiptoe around much of what I've been up to :P

I added a dozen new items. New items need art!


Some more examples of what's coming:

I'll say that (aside from one) these are special items you won't find just lying about. (But that also implies...)

Some other mysterious mechanics and animation work...






Another important focus of this week's work was to partially redesign the mechanics surrounding "imprinting" (if you know what that is). I'll talk more about that come the Beta 5 release notes, but for now just know that it got a lot more strategically interesting.


I also added a new mechanic that allows me the option to force multiprojectile weapons to spread their shots if appropriate. The ability for builds to stack targeting computers in order to overcome accuracy-based spread mechanics and concentrate multiprojectile volleys on a single target was always a bit of a limitation on some of the weapon designs. Now I can force even a weapon firing "accurately" to randomly spread its projectiles within a designated arc of the target.

I mainly added this feature to enable one of the particularly cool new weapons, but this also made it possible to go back and fix a couple of other weapons which were never quite good enough due to the design limitation. (Previously I couldn't very well make numerous individual projectiles too powerful given that you could easily create a super powerful totally imbalanced weapon with just some targeting.) I'm certainly not converting all multiprojectile weapons over to the new system, just a few special ones that needed it in order to be improved.

It's not a widely used mechanic, but when it's applicable the line-of-fire indicator will let you know with a little cone reflecting the potential spread area.


One weapon in particular which was always a neat concept but in my opinion never really worth using is suddenly going to get a lot more fun :D



After posting the last SITREP I went off to stream the conclusion to the weekly seed, unfortunately losing one floor before the end :/. My fault really, stupid mistakes were made (also giving in to the desire to just blow everything to hell xD). So many pretty launchers...

You can find a quick writeup on the forums, and I also uploaded it to YouTube as Part 2.

Next week is... more new stuff!

2018 is off to a great start...



Content! After a couple releases getting up to speed for and after the Steam release, we are finally in the swing of things and it feels great to have been adding new content for almost the entire week. The thing about content is that I always avoid talking spoilers, so I'll have to just give hints and tiptoe around much of what I've been up to :P

I added a dozen new items. New items need art!


Some more examples of what's coming:

I'll say that (aside from one) these are special items you won't find just lying about. (But that also implies...)

Some other mysterious mechanics and animation work...






Another important focus of this week's work was to partially redesign the mechanics surrounding "imprinting" (if you know what that is). I'll talk more about that come the Beta 5 release notes, but for now just know that it got a lot more strategically interesting.


I also added a new mechanic that allows me the option to force multiprojectile weapons to spread their shots if appropriate. The ability for builds to stack targeting computers in order to overcome accuracy-based spread mechanics and concentrate multiprojectile volleys on a single target was always a bit of a limitation on some of the weapon designs. Now I can force even a weapon firing "accurately" to randomly spread its projectiles within a designated arc of the target.

I mainly added this feature to enable one of the particularly cool new weapons, but this also made it possible to go back and fix a couple of other weapons which were never quite good enough due to the design limitation. (Previously I couldn't very well make numerous individual projectiles too powerful given that you could easily create a super powerful totally imbalanced weapon with just some targeting.) I'm certainly not converting all multiprojectile weapons over to the new system, just a few special ones that needed it in order to be improved.

It's not a widely used mechanic, but when it's applicable the line-of-fire indicator will let you know with a little cone reflecting the potential spread area.


One weapon in particular which was always a neat concept but in my opinion never really worth using is suddenly going to get a lot more fun :D



After posting the last SITREP I went off to stream the conclusion to the weekly seed, unfortunately losing one floor before the end :/. My fault really, stupid mistakes were made (also giving in to the desire to just blow everything to hell xD). So many pretty launchers...

You can find a quick writeup on the forums, and I also uploaded it to YouTube as Part 2.

Next week is... more new stuff!

Steam's winter sale's been going on for a week now, and Cogmind was featured on the front page Thursday (US time) for an entire day. ASCII represent! I'm pretty sure that's first time a 100% CP437 logo image ever appeared there :P



Much of the week was spent dealing with the usual release aftermath--taking feedback, fixing a few minor bugs, planning the next set of features, and working on stats etc.


As with every new major version, the scores and leaderboards from the previous one (in this case Beta 3) have been archived. The leaderboards were reset for the new Beta, and I also compiled some notable player-specific stats from the score data submitted over the past couple months.



You can read the text version here on the forums.

Because the leaderboards have been getting pretty crowded by all our new players, I added section links to the pages. Here's a Beta 3 archives sample:


And new leaderboards sample:



In addition to the usual stats, this time we've got so much data following the Steam release that there's room for interesting comparisons, so I did a more in-depth blog post: "Player Metrics: Stats and Preferences on and off Steam." Within you'll find aggregate data and analysis of tens of thousands of Cogmind score sheets, including both performance and preferences in a dozen graphs. Here's a little collage to give you an idea:




I'm finally back into a bit of streaming, starting earlier this week with a Beta 4 run I haven't quite finished yet. I wrote a summary of what's happened so far on the forums here, and uploaded it to YouTube as Part 1. Wish I had more time to stream--it's fun! Don't want to leave the run sitting too long (we already have a new seed!) so I'll probably finish it up soon, like... today.

I like to have at least one win per Beta before fooling around with even more suboptimal strategies (my preferred play method itself is not all that optimal :P), so I'm actually going for a win this time. I've just entered the late-game with backing from Zion. We'll see how it goes, but in the past a combination of overconfidence and extra attention due to Zion has always ended my Zionite runs. I more easily win when running solo :P


Tiggerbiggo made a trippy animated version of Cogmind's Steam header image.


Long-time player and self-proclaimed master trapper DDarkray played the "Trapped" Challenge Mode and made a mess of the place.


I should definitely stream some of the new Challenge Modes later. Maybe after I've got my Beta 4 win in. Although maybe I should wait until the actual selection UI is in? They are very tempting, though... (I've enjoyed playing them in the past, but never streamed any of those runs.)

neutral found a crazy bug allowing them to summon nearly unlimited hostile squads to their position!



Today's the final SITREP of the year, but we have 2018 to look forward to! I already mentioned some of the things to come back in my Year 4 annual review, and honestly sales have been going well enough that I think I'll be able to keep adding features for at least the next year. Certainly the idea list is long enough :D

It's going to be a busy 2018. Thanks all for the help.

Next week I'll be working on Beta 5 so we'll have a progress update on that!

Steam's winter sale's been going on for a week now, and Cogmind was featured on the front page Thursday (US time) for an entire day. ASCII represent! I'm pretty sure that's first time a 100% CP437 logo image ever appeared there :P



Much of the week was spent dealing with the usual release aftermath--taking feedback, fixing a few minor bugs, planning the next set of features, and working on stats etc.


As with every new major version, the scores and leaderboards from the previous one (in this case Beta 3) have been archived. The leaderboards were reset for the new Beta, and I also compiled some notable player-specific stats from the score data submitted over the past couple months.



You can read the text version here on the forums.

Because the leaderboards have been getting pretty crowded by all our new players, I added section links to the pages. Here's a Beta 3 archives sample:


And new leaderboards sample:



In addition to the usual stats, this time we've got so much data following the Steam release that there's room for interesting comparisons, so I did a more in-depth blog post: "Player Metrics: Stats and Preferences on and off Steam." Within you'll find aggregate data and analysis of tens of thousands of Cogmind score sheets, including both performance and preferences in a dozen graphs. Here's a little collage to give you an idea:




I'm finally back into a bit of streaming, starting earlier this week with a Beta 4 run I haven't quite finished yet. I wrote a summary of what's happened so far on the forums here, and uploaded it to YouTube as Part 1. Wish I had more time to stream--it's fun! Don't want to leave the run sitting too long (we already have a new seed!) so I'll probably finish it up soon, like... today.

I like to have at least one win per Beta before fooling around with even more suboptimal strategies (my preferred play method itself is not all that optimal :P), so I'm actually going for a win this time. I've just entered the late-game with backing from Zion. We'll see how it goes, but in the past a combination of overconfidence and extra attention due to Zion has always ended my Zionite runs. I more easily win when running solo :P


Tiggerbiggo made a trippy animated version of Cogmind's Steam header image.


Long-time player and self-proclaimed master trapper DDarkray played the "Trapped" Challenge Mode and made a mess of the place.


I should definitely stream some of the new Challenge Modes later. Maybe after I've got my Beta 4 win in. Although maybe I should wait until the actual selection UI is in? They are very tempting, though... (I've enjoyed playing them in the past, but never streamed any of those runs.)

neutral found a crazy bug allowing them to summon nearly unlimited hostile squads to their position!



Today's the final SITREP of the year, but we have 2018 to look forward to! I already mentioned some of the things to come back in my Year 4 annual review, and honestly sales have been going well enough that I think I'll be able to keep adding features for at least the next year. Certainly the idea list is long enough :D

It's going to be a busy 2018. Thanks all for the help.

Next week I'll be working on Beta 5 so we'll have a progress update on that!

Well the big news of the week is already out there--Beta 4. That being released just yesterday, the patch notes already cover most of what I did this week (for example the addition of new Challenge Modes), so I won't have quite as much flashy content to share today :P

Still, there are a few topics to cover...


Thank you all for the feedback on Beta 3! Obviously we've had a ton of new players come in once Cogmind hit Steam, and that means a few new bugs discovered or little QoL feature requests, which ended up being the bulk of my work on Beta 4.

I maintain several different TODO lists, the most important for upcoming releases being the "Top Priority" list and "Near-term Features" list. I originally hoped to burn through both of them for this release, but the Top Priority list had grown so large that I couldn't possibly make it through both without postponing Beta 4 into next year. Obviously yesterday's package was already a decent-sized chunk of features, so I decided to cut it off at the Top Priority list (now completely empty!), add a few extra bigger "flagship" features (e.g. gallery exporting and more robot info), and ship it.

This means the entire Near-term Features list (and anything else "high-priority" that pops up in the meantime) will become Beta 5. This also means we won't yet be seeing the next roadmap feature as part of Beta 5. (Remember that for the past several years I've maintained a public roadmap that gives a general idea of major features to come.) But in its current state I'm sure I can clear the near-term list with one more release to reach that true clean slate I've been looking forward to.

Either way, in general now that we're settled here on Steam it's time to get back into the swing of things with major version updates, hopefully one each month or so for the foreseeable future.


In case you didn't notice, Cogmind is currently 25% off for Steam's Winter Sale!

If you've read SITREP #4 but not #5 and the discussion surrounding it, you may have not expected that. The discussion has pretty much already played out, but I thought I'd recap here for the greatest transparency possible, and to touch on some related points:

In late November I said Cogmind would only ever be discounted by 10% during EA, as that has always been my plan so I figured I'd make it known. Lo and behold, a mere week passes from that time and someone at Valve contacts me to let me know that they really wanted to feature Cogmind on the main page for the Winter Sale. But they wouldn't do it unless I'd be willing to go from the "typical" 10% I had planned to a higher 25%.

I didn't even think about it I just told them no, since I'd just made a promise to not do that :P

Over the next week everyone I mentioned this to seemed to think I'd gone mad. I refused an offer to be featured on the front page of the world's largest gaming platform during the busiest time of year? Really? The comments started to get me reconsidering, at least finally thinking about it a lot more closely than I did before writing that initial quick response to Valve...

So back in SITREP #5 (and across other social media) I openly requested more input from our current players, and there was resounding support for taking the deal regardless of what I'd just said not long before. Trust is certainly important, and I try to be a reliable person, but as a developer I also have a responsibility to do what's best for the game, and assuming players were in support of it I could see this would be good for the game. I mean sure I could eventually do a -25% sale on my own and net a lot of new players that way, but this is different--Valve could provide a lot of valuable exposure if I'd be willing to do this, exposure Cogmind very likely wouldn't have a shot at later. And in terms of price that honestly wasn't asking too much, which in addition to player comments is why I'd even be willing reconsider in the first place (if they'd said 30-40-50% or whatever I'd laugh). A lot of good indie games even have their base price at $15, and Cogmind has already been available at $18-20 for the past eight months since the story was completed, so it's not at all too soon for what is still a fairly modest temporary discount.

In any case, I'm used to working alone and haven't previously had to consider the potential impact of those outside my own decision-making process, so I guess I've learned an important lesson here xD. As a niche game I fully expected Cogmind to remain relatively obscure and not really appear on Valve's radar as something they'd be interested in promoting, so that possibility didn't even enter my thoughts, but apparently I was wrong!

Sorry for the mistake, and thanks everyone for your support.

Surprisingly one player thought that a slightly bigger discount this soon in EA might mean I'd stop developing. I guess that means I should address this, too :P. Remember that Cogmind has been out for a long while now, and priced at $20 since it was story complete eight months back, so this is not really as quick a discount as it might seem to those only familiar with Cogmind's still short life on Steam.

More to the point, this project is my life. Honestly the real problem will be how to get myself to stop one day, heh. I've been at this for many many hours across years, and at no point was this about making money anyway. I just want to make a good game, and in fact thought I'd like so many others probably just run out of money and have to wrap up the story and be done earlier than I wanted, but so far Cogmind players have been plentiful and generous enough to keep the lights on in the dev studio <3



As stated in the Steam Early Access QA on the store page, I've planned to continue with at least six months of full-time development, but if we can extend that because Cogmind gets a boost of popularity at just the right time, this is good for everyone, current and future players included :)

To further demonstrate, I have a central mega-file in which I organize my lists of past and future features. Check it out below: On the left in green is the public changelog shrunk way down (you can compare its shape by doing the same with the public changelog here) and on the right is my feature TODO list shrunk by the same ratio. Yes, it's gotten that crazy.



The former completed content already behind us (quite a lot!) weighs in at 1,978 lines, whereas the latter collection of fun and feasible ideas I've come up with is a massive 4,517 lines o_O. Don't read too much into the numbers (it's not a very accurate representation of feature count, and definitely not all of that will be done, anyway), but seriously I have a ton of cool stuff I'd love to add if possible. For every mechanic, item, robot, feature, or whatever I implement another two pop up in line behind it xD

Anyway, hopefully the extra exposure will mean good things for Cogmind in the long term (I still imagine it's too niche, but who knows we'll see....). Right now I actually have no idea which day it'll be, but one of these days in the Winter Sale we'll see Cogmind on the front page's lower section.


I'd love to be doing some streaming now, but I'm still coughing a fair bit, plus still spending upwards of 10 hours per week in the hospital so there isn't as much time left after that and all the dev work :(. Also the best time to stream is my morning (evening time in the US), but recently mornings are when I do my hospital stuff, which also ended up being every day of this week xD

I'd probably be streaming around now regardless, just because it's been a little while, but also have family visiting for a few days. I'll be looking to stream in the next few weeks but I still have to prioritize health and dev so no promises there :P

I did finally manage to get Cogmind's "box art" changed on Twitch, though, so instead of a question mark we now get something cooler!



I put this together rather quickly by tweaking some existing assets and could do a better job of it, but Twitch always shrinks this down pretty small and it works fine at those sizes. If fixed up it would look pretty neat on a physical box, hm...


If you're new to Cogmind, know that with each new major version release the leaderboards are reset, so that'll be happening quite soon. The Beta 3 leaderboards will be retired and archived and we can start fresh with Beta 4!

Next week I should also have some stats to share with you. You can see old sets of stats linked from the Archives at the bottom of the leaderboards page, but this time will be extra special because we have all the new stats from Steam players! Who knows what interesting meta discoveries await within...

Happy holidays and see you around!

Well the big news of the week is already out there--Beta 4. That being released just yesterday, the patch notes already cover most of what I did this week (for example the addition of new Challenge Modes), so I won't have quite as much flashy content to share today :P

Still, there are a few topics to cover...


Thank you all for the feedback on Beta 3! Obviously we've had a ton of new players come in once Cogmind hit Steam, and that means a few new bugs discovered or little QoL feature requests, which ended up being the bulk of my work on Beta 4.

I maintain several different TODO lists, the most important for upcoming releases being the "Top Priority" list and "Near-term Features" list. I originally hoped to burn through both of them for this release, but the Top Priority list had grown so large that I couldn't possibly make it through both without postponing Beta 4 into next year. Obviously yesterday's package was already a decent-sized chunk of features, so I decided to cut it off at the Top Priority list (now completely empty!), add a few extra bigger "flagship" features (e.g. gallery exporting and more robot info), and ship it.

This means the entire Near-term Features list (and anything else "high-priority" that pops up in the meantime) will become Beta 5. This also means we won't yet be seeing the next roadmap feature as part of Beta 5. (Remember that for the past several years I've maintained a public roadmap that gives a general idea of major features to come.) But in its current state I'm sure I can clear the near-term list with one more release to reach that true clean slate I've been looking forward to.

Either way, in general now that we're settled here on Steam it's time to get back into the swing of things with major version updates, hopefully one each month or so for the foreseeable future.


In case you didn't notice, Cogmind is currently 25% off for Steam's Winter Sale!

If you've read SITREP #4 but not #5 and the discussion surrounding it, you may have not expected that. The discussion has pretty much already played out, but I thought I'd recap here for the greatest transparency possible, and to touch on some related points:

In late November I said Cogmind would only ever be discounted by 10% during EA, as that has always been my plan so I figured I'd make it known. Lo and behold, a mere week passes from that time and someone at Valve contacts me to let me know that they really wanted to feature Cogmind on the main page for the Winter Sale. But they wouldn't do it unless I'd be willing to go from the "typical" 10% I had planned to a higher 25%.

I didn't even think about it I just told them no, since I'd just made a promise to not do that :P

Over the next week everyone I mentioned this to seemed to think I'd gone mad. I refused an offer to be featured on the front page of the world's largest gaming platform during the busiest time of year? Really? The comments started to get me reconsidering, at least finally thinking about it a lot more closely than I did before writing that initial quick response to Valve...

So back in SITREP #5 (and across other social media) I openly requested more input from our current players, and there was resounding support for taking the deal regardless of what I'd just said not long before. Trust is certainly important, and I try to be a reliable person, but as a developer I also have a responsibility to do what's best for the game, and assuming players were in support of it I could see this would be good for the game. I mean sure I could eventually do a -25% sale on my own and net a lot of new players that way, but this is different--Valve could provide a lot of valuable exposure if I'd be willing to do this, exposure Cogmind very likely wouldn't have a shot at later. And in terms of price that honestly wasn't asking too much, which in addition to player comments is why I'd even be willing reconsider in the first place (if they'd said 30-40-50% or whatever I'd laugh). A lot of good indie games even have their base price at $15, and Cogmind has already been available at $18-20 for the past eight months since the story was completed, so it's not at all too soon for what is still a fairly modest temporary discount.

In any case, I'm used to working alone and haven't previously had to consider the potential impact of those outside my own decision-making process, so I guess I've learned an important lesson here xD. As a niche game I fully expected Cogmind to remain relatively obscure and not really appear on Valve's radar as something they'd be interested in promoting, so that possibility didn't even enter my thoughts, but apparently I was wrong!

Sorry for the mistake, and thanks everyone for your support.

Surprisingly one player thought that a slightly bigger discount this soon in EA might mean I'd stop developing. I guess that means I should address this, too :P. Remember that Cogmind has been out for a long while now, and priced at $20 since it was story complete eight months back, so this is not really as quick a discount as it might seem to those only familiar with Cogmind's still short life on Steam.

More to the point, this project is my life. Honestly the real problem will be how to get myself to stop one day, heh. I've been at this for many many hours across years, and at no point was this about making money anyway. I just want to make a good game, and in fact thought I'd like so many others probably just run out of money and have to wrap up the story and be done earlier than I wanted, but so far Cogmind players have been plentiful and generous enough to keep the lights on in the dev studio <3



As stated in the Steam Early Access QA on the store page, I've planned to continue with at least six months of full-time development, but if we can extend that because Cogmind gets a boost of popularity at just the right time, this is good for everyone, current and future players included :)

To further demonstrate, I have a central mega-file in which I organize my lists of past and future features. Check it out below: On the left in green is the public changelog shrunk way down (you can compare its shape by doing the same with the public changelog here) and on the right is my feature TODO list shrunk by the same ratio. Yes, it's gotten that crazy.



The former completed content already behind us (quite a lot!) weighs in at 1,978 lines, whereas the latter collection of fun and feasible ideas I've come up with is a massive 4,517 lines o_O. Don't read too much into the numbers (it's not a very accurate representation of feature count, and definitely not all of that will be done, anyway), but seriously I have a ton of cool stuff I'd love to add if possible. For every mechanic, item, robot, feature, or whatever I implement another two pop up in line behind it xD

Anyway, hopefully the extra exposure will mean good things for Cogmind in the long term (I still imagine it's too niche, but who knows we'll see....). Right now I actually have no idea which day it'll be, but one of these days in the Winter Sale we'll see Cogmind on the front page's lower section.


I'd love to be doing some streaming now, but I'm still coughing a fair bit, plus still spending upwards of 10 hours per week in the hospital so there isn't as much time left after that and all the dev work :(. Also the best time to stream is my morning (evening time in the US), but recently mornings are when I do my hospital stuff, which also ended up being every day of this week xD

I'd probably be streaming around now regardless, just because it's been a little while, but also have family visiting for a few days. I'll be looking to stream in the next few weeks but I still have to prioritize health and dev so no promises there :P

I did finally manage to get Cogmind's "box art" changed on Twitch, though, so instead of a question mark we now get something cooler!



I put this together rather quickly by tweaking some existing assets and could do a better job of it, but Twitch always shrinks this down pretty small and it works fine at those sizes. If fixed up it would look pretty neat on a physical box, hm...


If you're new to Cogmind, know that with each new major version release the leaderboards are reset, so that'll be happening quite soon. The Beta 3 leaderboards will be retired and archived and we can start fresh with Beta 4!

Next week I should also have some stats to share with you. You can see old sets of stats linked from the Archives at the bottom of the leaderboards page, but this time will be extra special because we have all the new stats from Steam players! Who knows what interesting meta discoveries await within...

Happy holidays and see you around!