I'm back! It was well worth taking the break to participate in this year's Roguelike Celebration, which was awesome as always. You can read (and see!) all about the event in the summary on my dev blog.
I gave the opening talk, "How to Make a Roguelike," which touches on most of my roguelike-related projects, but more importantly should help guide you down the path to creating one of your own, plus it talks about (and shows!) a bunch of other neat roguelikes as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jviNpRGuCIU
I'm now super energized and ready to get cracking on Beta 8. This past week I've already started chipping away at the next release, but that was just debugging a few rare new issues. Next week it'll be time to add fresh new features :D
There's always more to be working on, that's for sure. PlasticHeart has illustrated what that's like :P
That said, we'll get to requests a little later--the next couple weeks of work is top secret stuff no one knows much about ;)
Chop Chop
Now that I'm home again, it was also time to fire up the stream and smash some bots. Quite literally this time as we did a melee run! It was my first serious full melee run and *gasp* we won \o/
I wrote up a summary on the forums (w/images) and VODs are available on Twitch if you want to have the chat commentary, or you can also see them on YouTube.
The route for the part 1 was pretty circuitous as we headed into the caves to get some benefits to make surviving the late-game easier:
Anyway, that was a victory by randomly pieced together melee build, and it was already pretty deadly (we got the Melee Specialist achievement!). More focused players can build out their selection of utilities with a bit of fabrication and become practically unstoppable (melee is a reliable strong way to deal with the extended end game).
Getting Steamy
A couple days ago I realized that as of this week Cogmind has already been on Steam for one year! Time flies when you're doing releases :)
That brings us to a total of three and half years of major public releases, five of which have happened since the EA launch last October. Ever since I first wrote it, the Early Access notice on the store page has always indicated "at least six months" of EA, and that fact has yet to change so I've never updated it.
It's still true today :P
There's plenty more to come, though one general trend I've noticed which might still affect pre-1.0 development is that despite the early discussion we had here about whether or not to change the default difficulty setting, I'm starting to think it'd be a better idea to not completely scare off some potential new players with the way things are now.
By default Cogmind is meant to be a challenging game, one that can be learned and very reliably won by those who get good at it. It's done that job well, and for others there are always lower difficulty settings to get more out of the game with less experience, although there is also a separate group of players in the middle who would probably enjoy the game a lot more if they didn't play on the default difficulty, but refuse to change the settings because actively lowering a difficulty setting is not something as many people are willing to do in video games!
At this point it's probably worth experimenting with a lower default difficulty, forcing players to make a choice to raise the difficulty only if they consider it too easy. This change would be accompanied by renaming the difficulty levels as well. Merely changing the feeling of those settings and how players interact with them will probably be better for everyone.
There are alternative approaches that can work well, like having no default and making the choice part of an explicit menu before the first play (or before each run), but that's not compatible with Cogmind's hyper focus on immersion.
On a similar note, we could even add some sort of so-called exploration mode? (Even easier than the current easiest mode, not really meant as much of a challenge at all.) I mean we're almost certainly going to get a form of Wizard Mode eventually anyway, a feature found in many traditional roguelikes, and that's no different from having a dedicated mode where combat is even easier and the world is much easier to explore. This could somewhat lift the veil of mystery surrounding portions of the story by expanding the number of players who experience its intricacies, but technically at this point pretty much everything has been discovered by at least some players who've explored every nook and cranny...
Well that was a bit of a diversion...
Anyway, back to the main idea (the duration of Early Access in case you forgot xD), we should probably try to hit 1.0 sooner rather than later so that there's still some money left for post-1.0 updates. Although with Cogmind the distinction between Beta and "released" is almost arbitrary at this point, we'll probably get a new batch of of players for 1.0 and they'll naturally be hoping for more updates in the now-typical "games as a service" environment. Heck, I'm certainly happy to keep at this for years to come. Sadly I don't think we'll hit the review threshold I announced earlier as a way to indirectly fund the new faction and its maps and mechanics, but maybe we'll find another way. I've been considering alternative ideas for funding down the line, but that's definitely a topic for the future.
Thank you all for your continued support during this year on Steam, here comes another one :D
Beta 7 Notice: Following the release, Phragmented has updated the PDF manual in both standard and booklet form. The latest can be downloaded from the forum thread.
A note about SITREPs: These are regular progress updates where I 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.