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!
It's a Mystery
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:
There's More Where That Came From
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"?
The Gunslinger
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).
Extended Cogmind
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.