Beta 7 stats are in :D
You can read all about general stats, wins, run length, RIF use, and robot hacks over on the forums here.
Exiles and Golems
My new stream series has found its title, and we're in the middle of an Exiles Golem run. Unlike many of my past runs, this one's kinda spoilery if you've never been to the Deep Caves :P
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FVDs5ElcBc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3y5bbEs92pw
On that note, Valguris posted a new guide for a 2-propulsion flight hacker golem (included the extended game). It's a pretty extreme build and I'm not doing that--mine's more of a traditional blow-everything-up golem, but we're certainly seeing a lot of really unique builds recently, especially after the Beta 8 content expansion.
MTF has been streaming a lot of Cogmind, too.
and Rylan over on Discord drew a great depiction of MTF's Beta 8 "swarmer build" (another crazy new build!) being chased down on stream in Cogmind's extended game. This new build based on some Exiles tech really chewed through the end game though. (The pink one is a powerful ally.)
Dev Stuff
This week on the blog I posted a huge article on level design in Cogmind, taking the Exiles map as an example to share a complete rundown of the process and explain how it integrates with gameplay.
A Change of Pace?
I've been strongly considering starting a Patreon to accept subcription support, but I'm very undecided at the moment...
I think having something like that in the long term will be important for future Cogmind development seeing as I do a lot of extra releases without putting them into some kind of DLC, though the original plan was to maybe start that after 1.0. That said, it would take a while to build up a Patreon (or even see whether it's viable), so it might make more sense to start now.
In fact, it could even enable development of more features before 1.0, which might be better in the long run than leaving some of my ideas for later, when they're potentially less likely to happen. I have a lot of fun plans for Cogmind which I'm sure you'll enjoy one day, but I can see it also being advantageous to have all this extra stuff in the game before it reaches 1.0, if only because it'll be better received then, right? :)
In the end, I may be a commercial dev but I don't run my "business" in a commercial fashion, so that'll start to hurt in the long run. (The smart money-oriented approach would've been to release Cogmind as 1.0 by now, and collect content updates into one or more large DLCs, but I want to avoid DLC!)
So I'm thinking about possibly discontinuing the normal SITREPs and instead changing up the format in which I do things, with ideas including:
- splitting out some some special design and progress topics to put them on the blog instead of hiding them in SITREPs
- giving patrons advance access to blog posts
- including extra dev stuff I don't normally talk about, for example even more future plans rather than always talking about features after they're already implemented :P
- possibly some voting/polls
- possibly some little rewards
- free access to older Cogmind builds?
It'd also be less spammy than repeatedly posting public updates to Steam and elsewhere :P
I'm not really a fan of gating content, so maybe it could even just be a completely open/public thing with no gating at all, although I imagine this would mean less potential support. Starting simple could be nice, though.
I mean, it's almost cliche to think about it, but if only a portion of Cogmind owners pitch in just $1~2 each month, it really adds up and great things are possible :D
Anyway, still just thinking about it, wondering what others think...
PS: I wonder how many readers get the SITREP title :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 7 and Beta 8.
There may be other relevant discussion of this SITREP on the GSG forums or r/Cogmind.