Previously I was spending a lot of time planning for, deciding on, and making icons for achievements, while this week I actually started implementing them :P
The plan was to get them all done this week, and of 256 I finished 204 so far, but didn't quite make it to the end of the week in good enough condition to actually finish xD. On Thursday some random lady on a bike ran into me (I was stationary), seriously spraining my right wrist so I'm suddenly one-handed right now and working more slowly... (typed all this on one hand, I did!)
I do have the final set of icons to share though! This is the "wins" category--yeah there are a lot of different ways to win :D
I'm thoroughly testing all achievements to keep them as polished and bug-free as you'd expect from a Cogmind release. It's kinda fun to quickly come up with the right tests via the debugging features... Here's an example I happened to record where I was running a bunch of Decoder Chips at once.
Of course to facilitate testing I also needed to see achievements as they're earned, so that part of the UI is in place now as well. Achievement icons and names pop up over the map as they're earned.
They're also recorded to the message log.
(As you'd expect, these features are adjustable in the config.)
AFD Mode
This week some of you may have noticed we had a little surprise event where all the parts turned into random launchers.
On Steam it was only mentioned in the form of a semi-announcement in the discussions board (although it was a top-level announcement on my forums, r/Cogmind, and Twitter).
Honestly I didn't have anything planned for April 1st this year, but Cogmind Let's Player nuzcraft asked me about it that morning and got me thinking. I had a couple hours free and decided to really really quickly implement "AFD Mode." It was pretty fun and I'd like to do more of this kind of thing in the future, though as usual there are other important priorities right now so I dunno when.
If you missed the day itself and still want to try it out, with the latest version of Cogmind (it was a stealth update, still just called "Beta 5") you can temporarily set your system clock to April 1st to fool it into loading that mode ;)
Need More?
If you're still reading and would like a lot more to browse, in case you missed it before I've also published my entire POLYBOT-7 postmortem, about the time spent converting Cogmind into another game, as a single article over on Gamasutra. They even featured it on their front page, which was pretty cool :D. Altogether it's a... 10,000-word 45-image/diagram "novelette!"
Have a bonus gif of one of the things I was working with this week, watching AI bot trails off in the darkness as they build a new map (which is revealed at the end).
Next week is going to be almost entirely about achievements UI work!