Beta 8 is feature complete :D

It's not ready for release just yet, but a feature freeze is in effect as it goes into final testing. The next release is dubbed "Forbidden Science," and you'll be able to get your hands on this science when it releases the morning of February 12th (my time, which means the evening of the previous day for many players :P). I'll also be getting back to streaming that day and/or the day after.

Today I've got a batch of feature demos to share, mostly interface-related, along with art and other news.


The main new content for Beta 8 having been completed a couple weeks back, since then I've been able to turn my attention towards smaller matters, like a collection of UI options and other QoL features to continue improving the experience. Here we go...

Machine hacks now have context help via the usual right-click or A~Z:



This puts the system on par with the item/robot stat info and the robot hacking system in terms of QoL, and could be useful for new players or infrequent players who may have forgotten certain effects :)

By request, the part swap menu includes a remove button:



With that we'll have five different methods of removing a given part, because having options is nice!

The part swap menu also now shows disabled parts in orange, and includes manual tags added to unidentified parts (which originally only showed in inventory and the item info page):



The advanced autoReadyLauncher option has been super useful since introduced in Alpha 12, and now there's its opposite, autoUnreadyLaucher, to reactivate all weapons when a launcher is removed:



It's a common tactic to only attach a launcher to deal with a specific situation, then swap it out after firing--together these options remove most of the other commands involved in that process.

Active streamctrl robot hacks display a range within which you should stay to avoid losing control of the robot:



We've got three different advanced options for how to display Cogmind's part loss directly on the map: blinking red, blinking red `X`, or part's name in red:



Currently there is no explicit on-map display for that information to avoid potentially interfering with other indicators or tactical information nearby (plus we already have that info reflected in the log, sfx, and parts list), but this could be a pretty useful feature for some players, especially given that the majority of the combat focus has been designed to center around the map view.

Countdown timers for fabricator and repair station processes remain visible outside of FOV! \o/



There's also a log message reporting completion if not in view. Originally the machine would only showed this info while in view, but sometimes it could take a while to finish and players often prefer to leave the area and come back later, but would then be forced to calculate out the approximate turn on which it would be finished. Certainly always showing the info is better, though this wasn't done originally because it's a lot more work to separately record and display hypothetical information! I.e., the machine could be disabled or destroyed but you're not supposed to know that unless it's in view, and it has to keep displaying information as if it were still processing.

Quite a few times I've received requests for an in-game real-time clock. I've held off on it for a while since I wanted to be sure of where it could work in the HUD, and now it's found a home:



It's optional (off by default), and there's also a separate option to show a real-time run timer, for the real-time speedrunners out there.

Energy-adjusting utilities now factor into the HUD's net energy readout:



The Scan window also got some updates, including a new option to have it only show what's currently under the cursor (or kb marker), rather than the usual behavior of retaining the last object shown.



This is not default behavior, however, since keeping persistent data visible has the advantage of not losing that reference info simply by moving the cursor to perform other actions. Not to mention persistent robot scan info will update their heat/integrity values as they change, if they're still present in the window at the time, without having to put the cursor back over them or use some other method to check.

Speaking of easier access to object info, you'll no longer have to open solid terrain info to check its armor value, which appears under its name in the Scan window:



I didn't do this originally because constantly updating the Scan window as the cursor moves around would be really distracting, but later realized I could both avoid that annoyance and provide the info by only loading the terrain info after a short delay! So the cursor/keyboard marker has to be stationary for 500ms before it will show armor for that space.

Machines and other props will also show their armor value in the same place! Remember that you'll probably still want to take resistances into account before attempting to destroy something, but this is a good general reminder and should save some time.

The threshold for overweight calculations is now inclusive rather than exclusive, so everyone gets +1 support before going double/triple/quadruple(?) overweight...



Maintenance intel markers were switched from green to gray, so that they can be easily distinguished from Terminal markers:



I originally chose green since all the maintenance bots themselves are green, but Terminals are also green so if you have both types of intel it can be hard to spot the Terminals unless you deactivate the maintenance intel. In any case, gray is also a reasonable color for a neutral party.

The very last thing I did for Beta 8, since I had some extra time, was add a pair of new alien artifacts for fun, and science :)




The last couple weeks of dev also involved some dedicated bug fixing, clearing out all the reports since Beta 7.

None were very difficult, although for one in particular I added a visualizer for the Entity (robot) spawn blocking layer of generated maps to confirm a suspected cause of unintended behavior. Technically, on maps belonging to 0b10, most armed enemies are not allowed to spawn within a certain distance of the starting point, but UlyssesB shared a screenshot of exactly that happening on the very first floor. This occurred right around a special encounter room (the part cache), so I initially thought it was simply not blocking spawns to that room. But the engine blocks all random spawning in those areas, so that couldn't be it... Then I checked the actual spawn order and noticed the patrol spawn location (based on its leader) wasn't even in the room itself as I'd thought, but just outside it. This particular encounter happens to clear away the nearby wall as part of its behavior, so what had happened was it cleared the wall, opening the way for a patrol to spawn right there where the wall had been!

The visualizer showing a patrol spawning next to the player:


(the squad leader spawned as the middle 's' there, and the others appear next to them since they're not constrained by that particular spawning rule)

Anyway, in the end the solution was to just additionally spawn-block any walls that are opened up (normally cells that start as walls don't need to explicitly block spawning since walls block spawning anyway!). For comparison this is the fixed version on that map:



And it's a good thing I had a visualizer because the initial solution I coded worked in this particular case but wasn't implemented well enough and still left a potential hole for different patrols (which I wouldn't have noticed had I not activated the visualizer again to look at the results).

For devs, the less here is that data visualization are super useful :)

In another recent happening in dev land, this isn't a bug but more a development goof, but check out this interesting looking "map"



This looks absolutely nothing like what was supposed to happen, but during my first attempt to enter a new area I was working on, something went wrong and I ended up in that place. It was supposed to be a certain static environment, but instead I got a sparse and windy weird cave system.




@nyrdal shared some really cool fan art depicting my winning ninja melee build streamed back in October:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yy3_B8Qg4BY

And Zyalin has graced us with some Beta 8 hype art:



It's based on this song.

Fellow roguelikedev and Cogmind player VedVid pointed out last week that Poland's largest gaming portal did a quick video on "Games without graphics that will consume your life" xD

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nd_nbgvE-Zg

Cogmind is in there, along with other well-known roguelikes such as ADOM, Dwarf Fortress, and Caves of Qud.

And that's it for today. The next announcement will cover the true meat of this release, as we give you... FORBIDDEN SCIENCE!

A note about SITREPs: These are regular progress updates where I often share features coming to the next release, but aren't actually in game yet. Public releases get their own dedicated news announcement and changelogs/release notes, for example with Beta 6 and Beta 7.

There may be other relevant discussion of this SITREP on the GSG forums or r/Cogmind.

Welcome to a new year of Cogmind!



It's been so long in the making I've started to have visions of even grander major updates, and we end up getting Cogmind 2019, Cogmind 2020, and so on until my permadeath, ha.

In the New Year's spirit I streamed Holiday Mode last week on January 1st, building around a very specific weapon available that day (and on New Year's Eve), the RPDS. Some very potent fireworks were on display, including plenty of unnecessary carnage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7eXYtwqp-k

It was an interesting time with different challenges from a more regular run.

FYI an RPDS does... this :D



Or in ASCII:



Remember you can turn back your system clock to start a run on one of those days (or any of the other Holiday Mode days--potential drops are described here), and this feature will be available until the next release.

Note that even now that the event is over, the "ELF" variant bot is still in the regular game. That was an oversight while putting together the new build, in that the regular game picked up on that new bot and replaced the usual Saboteur class Imp with the ELF. Oops xD. They have the same loadout anyway, it's just a different name. Don't let their elfish charms disarm you--they're just as deadly and scary as Imps ever were!


For a long time now I've wanted to do a video that demonstrates how to reliably get through the early game, since it's not all that hard but some players have trouble figuring out how to overcome the various challenges there and end up either having to switch to another difficulty mode or playing the majority of their runs in the early game, which honestly is just the very tip of a much more varied Cogmind experience!

Once you're good at it the first few floors only take maybe ten minutes as you prep for the mid-game challenges, so I wanted to share some of the main tactics that ensure you'll make it through. We've had some other early-game tutorials on video before, but I wanted something of my own that I covered what I thought was most important.

Well we can check that off the list :D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ml0to9JTQqw

I streamed "Pwning the Early Game" this week, and already a bunch of players have been finding it useful, so that's reassuring.

Although I normally talk a lot of strategy in my streams, this was quite different from the usual since it was focused purely on the essentials for the first floors. I first spent about half an hour describing most of the main UI and basic mechanics, essentially an intro to the game, then did a slow run through the first several floors, talking about strategy, combat tactics, and different robots, systems, and AI. After that I concluded with four more quick runs through the early game, putting everything learned into action to reliably reach Factory. (There are time stamps in the YouTube description.)


Well, speaking of the early game... let's talk a bit about Beta 8! Why? Because that's its biggest area of focus :D

I haven't really talked about it yet, and while I want to wait until the main announcement to go into details, it's relevant here so let's go.

With Beta 8, in the the early game you'll often have a way to find unique items, and these items can affect your entire play style, if not for an entire run then at least for a while. I mean I guess even regular items and prototypes (and especially artifacts) can already do that for you, but any time unique items are added this is a chance to provide opportunities like that.

For example, among the new items that are being added, there's the PSU Rigger. As per its name, it can be used to rig any power source to explode like a proximity mine. This one's going to be pretty fun to use :D



I can already smell the cheese connoisseurs approaching now...

(Aside: I've actually teased this item in a couple previous screenshots, that and other Beta 8 features, and it's fun to do this without talking about them to see if/who notices ;))

This kind of stuff has always been part of my long-term plan for Cogmind (because having worked on it for over five years now we're apparently not quite yet in the "long term" xD). Basically expanding the game with new ways to experience and interact with the same world, adding smaller amounts of content with outsized impacts on a run, ableit optional, of course. I have tons more item concepts and avenues for obtaining them in various parts of the world, but these things will be introduced over time, mostly after the actual 1.0 (assuming I can still afford it :P).

Now don't get too excited about the Beta 8 gear--you won't be able to pick and choose items, but I can guarantee there are going to be some fun and interesting new experiences coming.

Work on Beta 8 has been pretty smooth lately, just time-consuming as there are some rather complex additions for this update. Some random dev snapshots...

Visualizing the ambient sound from a new area:



Hm, a curious new UI animation, what could it mean? :)




I was chosen for the "Best Developer" award by Spitball Sessions! You can read about that here, and check out their GOTY 2018 podcast. I am honored, and will continue trying to do my best :D. Thanks to everyone for your support (and reviews! they really keep the game going in Steam's algorithms so that I can add more features rather than having to worry about wrapping it up sooner).

And if you're using Proton to play Cogmind, it'd be great if you could contribute to the database.

I guess this is also a notice for those of you who didn't already know: Although Cogmind isn't marked as supporting Linux on Steam, manually activating it for Steam Play does allow you to purchase and download and play normally! There shouldn't be any issues as I've fixed the few Wine-related bugs on Cogmind's side before it even came to Steam, and have added other QoL features specifically for Linux players. (If you do run into the no audio issue there's a workaround--not sure if they've fixed that in Proton itself yet.)

The biggest "Other News" we've got here is that we'll be going on our annual family vacation next week for winter/Chinese New Year. I really wanted to have Beta 8 out by now, but it's still not there yet. Being out of town for a few weeks I won't be streaming for the next month or so, and although it's a long "vacation," technically it's more of a workcation since I'll still be setting up office and doing a fair bit of regular work on Cogmind as well.

It feels really good to be caught up on all the personal and/or non-Cogmind things that were getting in the way these months, though, and to have the Roguelike Celebration behind us, since that trip and preparing for my talk and all the other related work really ate up a ton of time and resulted in the additional backlog of other chores I had to get out of the way xD

A note about SITREPs: These are regular progress updates where I often share features coming to the next release, but aren't actually in game yet. Public releases get their own dedicated news announcement and changelogs/release notes, for example with Beta 6 and Beta 7.

There may be other relevant discussion of this SITREP on the GSG forums or r/Cogmind.

Hope you're all enjoying the latest special release! The timed event has been in progress for 9 days now, but there are still 4 more to go. Since the original announcement was cryptic to avoid spoiling it, today I thought I'd cover a bit of what's included.

The original plans for this mode were somewhat different, as I started imagining elaborate possibilities via scripting and new NPCs with dialogue and whatnot. But I didn't want it to siphon off too much time from Beta 8 development, so scaled it all back to something much more manageable--a bunch of new themed items in the starting area. In the end it took just a day and a half to set up Holiday Mode and add 17 new parts, some with completely new mechanics. (There was also a little visit by an NPC on 12/24, which some players apparently noticed ;))

When you wake, the Scrapyard is filled with Presents.



These essentially work like Scrap found in the caves, in that you can step on them to search through (open!) them and see what's inside.



Here's a list of possible unique presents that appear in various combinations on different days, along with their description:

• Vacation Slip ~~ Everyone needs some time off occasionally.
  
• Tree Searcher ~~ Ah, that feeling when you find the perfect tree... then hack it down.
  
• Elven Gift Factory ~~ Unlimited surprises await your enemies.
  
• Gaudy Lights ~~ They can't hit what blinds them!
  
• 5A-N7A's Little Helpers ~~ Very helpful for you. Not so much for everyone else.
  
• 5A-N7A's Bag of Holding ~~ Don't worry, everything gets bigger again when you take it out.
  
• 5A-N7A's Eye ~~ Spot all those naughty bots from afar.
  
• 5A-N7A's GPS ~~ 5A-N7A was using GPS before there was GPS.
  
• 5A-N7A's Snowblower ~~ Ho ho ho!
  
• RD-1PH's Nose Cone ~~ Being nosy is half the battle.
  
• Winter Coat ~~ Warm and fuzzy. But more importantly, immune to all those pesky programmers who are most definitely not on vacation even though they should be.
  
• Striped Cane ~~ Peppermint is good for making friends. Or with a huge amount you can also pound bots into scrap.
  
• Black Coal ~~ Drop this to the ground and run. Don't look back. You have 10 turns to escape the blast radius (8). So naughty.
  
• Propulsion/Utility/Weapon Slot Expander ~~ Yeah you'll get more slots later, but early presents are good presents.

There are other cool presents as well, but they're not unique to the holiday build so aren't listed above.

Various gifts in action...














I've arranged it so that during these final four days all the unique event-only items from the previous will also appear again at some point, in case you missed any.

That said, there is also one item which has not yet appeared on any day! It's also probably one of the greatest. This item will appear on both 12/31 and 1/1, to welcome the new year the only way we know how ;)

Although score data from the event is not being included in the leaderboards, since the lore and achievements you collect during the event do contribute to your player history, Holiday Mode can give you a leg up (or offer new strategies) going after some of the really hard achievements, or exploring more challenging areas of the world. So it's a good opportunity for that, in case you're not using it like this already :P

As stated before you can technically access this event later once Beta 8 is released by rolling back to a previous branch, but if the intent is to contribute to your player data you probably wouldn't want to that too far into the future since it could erase other gains you might've made. (On the other hand if the intent is pure fun then yeah, it'll always be accessible for that :D)

Earlier I mentioned the speed with which this release was put together, and there were some funny side effects of the haste... As a special event on a separate branch of the game without a need to future proof the work, adding content was much faster, but also meant that I wouldn't bother to extensively test all the potential related effects. Quality control was limited to testing individual items to make sure they at least performed as advertised.

Well, the game picked up on the ELF being a variety of Saboteur and began dispatching ELFs along with assaults instead of the usual Imps, which is kinda funny but appropriate (as appropriate as being attacked by an ELF during the holidays can be, anyway :P). Vacation Slips allow you to step outside the normal flow of time, but by doing that it turns out there's no energy generation or heat dissipation and you have to manage as best you can like that for 50 "turns" (they're still good, and at least it's interesting trying to take advantage of them with certain builds!)

These are the only two issues I know about, and are the kinds of things that normally would've been caught within a day of public testing, but I wanted to surprise even testers with this build, too :)


This week I streamed Holiday Mode, and my normal stream time happened to fall on December 25th so we got to use a somewhat larger selection of Fun Stuff. I focused on the Elven Gift Factory, essentially creating a hovering "Christmas Trapper Build."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6xuoGI62fo

The end part is spoilery since the run headed into part of the extended game, but there's no spoilers elsewhere, mostly just fun and games :)

Actually, the stream even started out with some fooling around in the Scrapyard. You don't normally get such powerful scanning gear in the starting area, so it was interesting to watch the tunnelers at work, then lay a bunch of traps for our uninvited guests...



I'll be doing another Holiday Mode stream next week at the usual time, this one with a dedicated "RPDS build" :)

Last week the Gunslinger run came to its epic conclusion. The final day was super spoilery, but it was by far my highest scoring run ever (115k!). Many robots were harmed in the making of that video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5ML6Gzrc3E

It was so epic I ended up doing a full writeup anyway (with images).

In People Who Aren't Me Streaming Cogmind, check out this great clip from one of MTF's runs xD. So perfect.

And in the last SITREP I mentioned Gold Plated Games' first playthrough of Cogmind. Audish does an annual review series of various roguelikes called "Roguemas," and he selected Cogmind to try among this year's batch, so it was cool to finally be a part of that. His review is here.

While on the subject of reviews, I should mention that POYLBOT-7, the free Cogmind-like I released earlier this year, made a Best Free Games of 2018 list on PC Gamer, so that was pretty cool :D




There's not as much progress to show now, since I'm working on the main plot of Beta 8 (i.e., spoilers :P), though here are a couple things...

I needed to debug a new mapgen feature, and that required having a visual way to quickly tell one cave from another as far as the generator was concerned (for some special cases where logically separate caves might be directly attached to one another), so I added that in real quick.



I've never done a visualization like this but always wanted to after seeing so many other devs produce pretty color-based ID systems. Doing this is pretty easy: Just use HSV coloring and start with a low hue, then increase the hue for each subsequent object by some static amount for each one. Knowing the number of objects in advance also makes it possible to prevent colors from overlapping, since the hue interval can be set based on that known.

For something else I was working on recently I had to look into historical bug reporting figures, and came up with some stats:



There's the Top 10 earners of "bug points," based on some macros run on changelog data. Since the first release in 2015 there have been 460 total reports (including duplicates and simple things like typos, but also of course some major stuff as well) submitted by 118 unique players. These figures exclude the outstanding issues to resolve for Beta 8, which aren't in the changelog yet but I'll be getting to them all at the end of this dev cycle, as usual. Thanks everyone for helping making Cogmind be the best it can be!

The next SITREP will be on 1/12, when I hope to bring to you... I don't know what since I'm working on secret stuff in the meantime, but I guess I'll have to just do some non-secret stuff so I have at least something to show :P

A note about SITREPs: These are regular progress updates where I often share features coming to the next release, but aren't actually in game yet. Public releases get their own dedicated news announcement and changelogs/release notes, for example with Beta 6 and Beta 7.

There may be other relevant discussion of this SITREP on the GSG forums or r/Cogmind.

While the great Beta 8 is still under construction, in the meantime I have something else special for you! In fact a lot of special stuff...



Effective immediately through January 1st, 2019, every day Cogmind will feature different new content, much of it with a notably holiday theme. There are 17 new unique parts, among other "gifts" :D

Unlike my normal announcements I won't be listing the content or showing any screenshots/gifs here to spoil it, but there's some really fun stuff (including new mechanics). Some of the content is randomized in case you start more than one run in a single day, though the majority of the brand new stuff is organized and defined by date. All of the special Holiday Mode content is available right from the beginning of a run though, so there's no going out and searching for it--start up and see it right away.

Much of the content for this update is actually special parts that will only exist for this release, accompanied by a number of rare or unique items that can be found elsewhere in the world of Cogmind but that you may not have encountered before. You'll be able to distinguish between the two because the former don't have unique art, instead using a common placeholder (you'll know it when you see it :P). You don't have to worry about collecting the temporary parts for your gallery (since they won't exist in future releases), although you can technically use this opportunity to help flesh out your gallery of other parts, and of course get further or to new areas with the help of some of these amazing new toys.

Technically you can skip ahead in this event by changing your system date, but in the manner that we normally treat spoilers in the community, if you do this please don't openly share advance info on future content with others in case they don't want to know yet.

• This version's saves are not compatible with the original Beta 7.2 (the save version had to be increased in order to allow this update to add a bunch of content). As usual you can just finish your current run before updating, or if on Steam and it automatically updated yours you can use the legacy branches to roll back and finish your previous save/run first if you like (or do it later).
  
• You CAN earn achievements while this mode is active! This might be another reason to play it ;)
  
• Holiday Mode does not upload scoresheets (these runs will therefore not appear on the leaderboards).
  
• Holiday Mode is incompatible with challenge modes (if any are active, the challenge takes precedence).
  
• Holiday Mode ignores the advanced quickStart option.
  
• Holiday Mode will automatically activate for new runs started in this 12/20~1/1 period, but requires that you've played at least 10 runs before! We wouldn't want to confuse new players too much :P. If you haven't hit the 10-run requirement and want to force Holiday Mode anyway, you can run Cogmind with the "-forceHoliday" command line parameter. Note that even then it still requires that you've done at one run behind the tutorial mode, having made it to the smaller version of the Scrapyard (technically you can get around this requirement as well by turning off the tutorial in the options, but I wouldn't really recommend jumping right in to the special mode without first having done a few regular runs to learn the basics!)
  
• If it's activating automatically but you want to play "regular Cogmind" during this event period, run the game with the "-noHoliday" parameter to turn it off (or, again, roll back to the previous release via its legacy branch).

You may notice the version number is still Beta 7.2. That's because this special release was developed using a completely separate branch of the game, as this allowed me to prepare this for you all very quickly without worrying about taking my normal (internal) steps to future proof the whole thing with good documentation and clean code. Despite the amount of stuff in here, it only took a day and half :) (Don't worry, though, I did test everything and it seems to be in working order!)

So this is technically not the same branch that Beta 8 is being built upon, and this content and other related changes made to the game to support it will disappear with the next release. There is no changelog--as far as future players are concerned, it never happened ;)


The opening area might be a bit overwhelming. To quickly get set up, you could follow these general steps:

• Open up everything you see
  
• Attach any alien artifacts (these are consumables)
  
• Fill your power and propulsion slots (try to avoid using airborne propulsion, though you can stash it away for later)
  
• Attach any Storage Unit(s)--there'll be at least one lying around (and maybe a special one!)
  
• Collect most utilities and weapons (especially any that are clearly new and use the placeholder "holiday art" I mentioned earlier)
  
• Go have fun!

Note that a small portion of the items may not be amazing, since those are randomly chosen from among existing items, but a lot of the items for each day were handpicked, especially all the special new ones.

Thanks for being a great community, enjoy the holidays :D

Art, mechanics, streams, IndieDB Top 100, long lost friends... 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.

While we're looking at art, check this out:



Anyone remember what that is? After its removal back in early 2016, it's finally making what is likely to be a much-anticipated comeback among players who've used it before ;)

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...


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!)


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 ;)).

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 :P


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. (I hear the videos will probably be up on YouTube later, at which point I'll update with more links.)

Although it was his first run he, uh, won :P. 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 :)

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJqjn1qOW8E

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 :P



Zyalin says:

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 :P). Fun times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cagixNfrTi4


Thanks to all of you who voted, Cogmind is in IndieDB's Top 100 :D (for the fifth year in a row)

Voting for the Top 10 started this week (and votes have been reset), but I don't think it's really worth bothering to compete against the really big mainstream games for those slots. Anyway, you can vote again and/or check out all the other indie games.



Steam's Winter Sale is coming up next week, and as usual Cogmind will be 10% off. (Not 25% like last year--Valve doesn't plan to feature Cogmind on their front page like they did last time, so as per my promise I'm sticking to only 10% discounts during EA.) Of course the discount is mirrored on both Steam and my own site.

The sale isn't the only thing coming up next week though. Stay tuned for something special for everyone ;)

A note about SITREPs: These are regular progress updates where I often share features coming to the next release, but aren't actually in game yet. Public releases get their own dedicated news announcement and changelogs/release notes, for example with Beta 6 and Beta 7.

There may be other relevant discussion of this SITREP on the GSG forums or r/Cogmind.

(Cross-posted from the devblog here--follow link for better formatting.)

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 the dev blog, forums, and Twitter (full mega size here).


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


Cogmind Monthly Development Hours, 2013.7-2018.11. (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.


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!


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

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

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.


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!

• Workflow and Design Behind Creating One Game from Another in a Single Week (7DRL Postmortem)
  
• Designing and Building a Robust, Comprehensive Achievement System
  
• How to Make a Roguelike

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.


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. 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!


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!

Another mini-update while Beta 8 is still under construction! While small, there's some very important stuff in here, and the good news is saves are compatible so you can switch immediately even if you've got a run in progress to take advantage of the improvements :D

While I was originally planning to include some quick fixes along with a different special release scheduled for later this month, last week a newly-introduced machine hacking bug was discovered, and I just couldn't let that one sit out there in public for so long. For Beta 7 I had changed up the machine hacking behavior to improve consistency for those using a fair bit of hackware (in particular System Shields and the like), but in the process inadvertently made it more difficult for those without hackware to do much at machines! So if any of you combat players have been shaking your fist at all those early failed machine hacking rolls, it's rightly so, and I'm happy to say things are back to normal now :D. Well... they're back to normal (actually, even better than before!) if you update to Beta 7.2, which I recommend you do immediately.

The good news is saves are compatible with Beta 7.1.

Let's see what else we get with this update...

• NEW: Relay Coupler base value higher based on depth
  
• NEW: Robots flash when hit by projectiles (toggle in advanced.cfg: flashProjectileVictims)
  
• MOD: Tweaked composition of squads attacking W base
  
• FIX: Machine hacking was more difficult than intended in Beta 7/7.1 [Suslik]
  
• FIX: Armor Integrity Analyzer effect protected user's armor rather than helping during attacks on armored targets [kiedra]
  
• FIX: Researcher pre-attack warnings would not always trigger if certain utilities were attached (broken by Beta 7.1) [Raine]
  
• FIX: Advanced option alwaysWarnAboutResearchers description missing from manual

Robots now flash when hit by projectiles. Some kind of explicit hit feedback was requested not too long back and although it's not a feature I personally need in my runs, I must admit it's been well-received by those who've seen it so far, so here it is!



(Ignore the fact that enemies just sit there and take it--that's just using debug mode to demo the feature :P. Also, they're not really dying because I'm intentionally using a somewhat weak weapon against late-game Programmers.) It's on by default, but like many QoL features you can toggle it in the advanced options if it bothers you for whatever reason.

You can see this and other features discussed in my 7.2 stream from earlier today, during which I continued the gunslinging run:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEkWzEk5c9Q
It feels really good as a combat bot to be able to do some free hacking again ;). Part 3 will be streamed next week at the same time, and the run is hot--we've met up with just the right allies to basically own the late-game, plus have an amazing loadout of our own (don't examine this at full size if you want to avoid a few little spoilers):



As a little bonus for Beta 7.2, I know from experience that the new RIF system introduced in Beta 7 and expanded in Beta 7.1 is still a little tough to rely on in the late-game, so I've also added a new formula that gives bonus value to Relay Couplers based on depth. The further you get, the better the couplers, regardless of their source.

Enjoy! :D

IndieDB has begun voting for Indie of the Year 2018, and I'd appreciate it if you head on over to the Cogmind page and give it a click!



The voting happens in two phases, first (now) just to determine the Top 100 group, then those 100 compete for one of the Top 10 spots. It's not really worth going for a top 10 slot since there are too many games with huge following that compete for those (it's a popularity contest, after all, and Cogmind's audience is pretty niche!), but I'm pretty sure we can make the Top 100 again. Cogmind has been in the Top 100 for several years now thanks to fans helping vote it past the first round, which is pretty good considering there are well over 10,000 games on the platform. Thank you! (This is nice as a fairly easy way to get a little extra exposure when we've got as much support as we generally do.)

Registration isn't required.

I won't be posting a dedicated reminder about the next phase, but will mention it in the news assuming Cogmind makes it past round one.

(Also if you haven't done so yet, for those of you with Cogmind on Steam, leaving a review is really helpful! (We're also working towards a specific goal ;)))

(Also, on IndieDB go vote for your other favorite roguelikes that have an IndieDB page--you can vote for more than one game!)

This week I'll be posting my annual dev review, so be on the lookout for that :D


Many thanks to everyone for your votes! We made it into the Top 100 :D

Once again, from here there are a number of extremely popular games which will vie for the Top 10 spots so I don't think we stand much chance competing for those, but the voting continues... (you can vote again, and also check out all the other games that made the cut)

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!


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 :)

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 ;)



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:










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

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"?




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):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3H9ieNSXVA

Part 4 (summary w/images):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O55GDc0_P4k

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).


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 :P. 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.

A note about SITREPs: These are regular progress updates where I often share features coming to the next release, but aren't actually in game yet. Public releases get their own dedicated news announcement and changelogs/release notes, for example with Beta 6 and Beta 7.

There may be other relevant discussion of this SITREP on the GSG forums or r/Cogmind.

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 ;)

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...


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



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!




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 :P




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 :P



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 :P)



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" :)



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


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!).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1HJ38I8xuw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3H9ieNSXVA

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 ;)



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.)


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 :)

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 :P





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!

A note about SITREPs: These are regular progress updates where I often share features coming to the next release, but aren't actually in game yet. Public releases get their own dedicated news announcement and changelogs/release notes, for example with Beta 6 and Beta 7.

There may be other relevant discussion of this SITREP on the GSG forums or r/Cogmind.