More achievement icons! We've got the final pass on two new categories here.
Special Challenges are probably not quite as obvious...
...whereas Progress-related achievements are more basic and numbery.
I've been talking about achievement "categories" for a while, but haven't gone into detail about what that actually means. Each achievement belongs to a certain category that gives a general idea of what type of achievement it is, determines the color scheme of its icon, and also enables it to be filtered along with others of its category via the in-game UI. There are so many achievements that after I'd formed a tentative list it seemed best to divide them up logically to aid both organization and understanding.
The six achievement categories:
- Mechanics: A group of mostly basic achievements covering common useful tactics and learning about systems. Some of these serve as a way to teach (or at leas reinforce) features, too.
- Style: Specifically play style-related achievements, like combat, stealth, hacking, etc. These are generally earned through normal play using a given style/strategy, and while some might be more challenging or require focus in a certain area, they're not difficult enough to be considered "special challenges " (another category).
- Progress: Personal meta progress like high scores, lore/gallery coverage, and world exploration.
- Challenges: This group doesn't have anything to do with Cogmind's "Challenge Modes," but is simply achievement-specific individual challenges ranging from Tier 1 (not too hard) to Tier 2 (hard) to Tier 3 (pretty hard!).
- Events: Story-related elements. Basically once you've visited every location and exhausted all the branching possibilities of the plot, you'll have all of these. This category is entirely hidden, though, so these aren't achievements to be explicitly sought like a list. You've just gotta explore and use the in-game lore as clues.
- Wins: There are a lot of different ways to win the game, whether achieving unique endings or simply winning by overcoming other challenging scenarios, so these get a whole category of their own.
Death and Taxes
So we've come upon another little speedbump on the way to Beta 6: tax season xD
Taxes have gotten more complicated this year--I have to file in two different countries now, so this'll be annoying. I could try to push Beta 6 out before the second country's deadline, but I'd rather not because the release shouldn't be about just achievements, so it's going to take longer than that!
Just a heads up that there's still lots to do on the list.
P7
I heard from someone this week mentioning that POLYBOT-7 "really helped them understand Cogmind better," so maybe it's worth checking out for that reason, in addition to the fact that it's just an interesting different way to play a modular robot :)
In case you missed it, I released that game last week for 7DRL.
Since then I've also been working on a proper in-depth postmortem about its development, which you may be interested in checking out seeing as POLYBOT-7 is a very experimental alternative approach to the concept of Cogmind. The first two parts are already on the blog:
- Part 1: Preparation
- Part 2: First Days with UI, Aesthetics, and Mechanics
There are tons of details and diagrams/images in there--here are some excerpts:
The source code evolution of all my projects since 2011, which share the same code :P
Redesigning Cogmind's UI layout to meet new needs:
Alternative item color schemes:
In related news, one of our Cogmind experts (surprise surprise it was GJ) won P7 on New Game+++++ mode, which requires winning six times in a row, each run harder than the last.
Next time more on achievements, and an introduction to improvements to low-contrast mode.