So what has Grid Sage Games (and by Grid Sage Games I mean me :P) been up to in recent months... Those who follow the dev blog, my streams/YouTube, or Discord will be familiar with most of what I'm writing here today, but I know some of you prefer to get your news here, so let's catch you up!
In the last SITREP wherein I half joked about this being "Cogmind 2," the summary of our next major update is still just as relevant:
"Beta 11 is indeed shaping up to be the sizeable overhaul we always wanted to get to one day (talked about since like 2015 xD), one that revisits lots of parts and some mechanics with an eye towards tweaking and rebalancing to better integrate them into the whole that Cogmind has become--redesigning some, removing others, as well as introducing new ones to smooth everything out where necessary. Basically we're further improving on the experience in so many areas. And although new content isn't the focus of Beta 11, yeah we're definitely getting some of that, too ;)"
Since then the previously mentioned revisiting of storage capacity, overweight mechanics, propulsion balance, and damage types have all been completed, and as promised I covered each of those topics on the blog...
Design Overhaul
On the blog this series is filed under "Design Overhaul," pretty significant game-changers coming to Beta 11 which you can read about in their respective articles:
There's Design Overhaul 1: Capping Inventory, which might sound like a nerf when framed with just those two words, but in practice ends up being a buff in most cases due to how things were changed ;)
Design Overhaul 2: Propulsion took quite a while to nail down due to that topic's complexity and far-reaching implications of any changes, but eventually settled on a significant flight and hover rebalance, leg upgrades, overweight penalty changes, and other tweaks here and there.
Design Overhaul 3: Damage Types and Criticals would have to be the one which boils down to the most "pure fun," adding a wide variety of critical strikes and other new related mechanics to further differentiate weapons and their damage types.
In with the New
On the completely new stuff front, for Beta 11 I finally got to add something I've been imagining for years: a way to view a sort of historical robot traffic data as a form of potentially useful intel. I go into how this data is calculated and presented in "Desire Paths" for a Robot World.
A WIP screenshot (the path system later became purple in practice):
The whole "desire path" thing came about as part of yet another infowar expansion, the Active Sensor Suite. Yes we already significantly expanded the infowar game in Beta 11, but you can never have enough infowar!
Active sensors have a number of big advantages and big drawbacks which you can read about in more detail here.
Just follow the purple brick road...
Even the content of primary maps is getting a bit (okay a lot) of love in this version, the first such addition being freighter dispatch events, which I detail in Spicing Up Primary Maps 1: Cargo Convoys.
As part of that article, to explain some concepts (but mostly for fun :P) I put together a sample Cogmind world map in which 1 pixel = 1 cell. It's just one permutation, of course, since there are different possibilities for a number of these connections, plus the ability to revisit other versions of the same map in a single run etc. (The map is also incomplete since it leaves out a number of areas considered redacted-level spoilers, though a full spoilers version is available via a link in the article.)
As if escorted convoys weren't enough, we're also getting more classes of 0b10 combat bots, because what's better than having new types of hostiles trying to stop you? ...perhaps aside from finding new toys to deal with them, but don't worry we've got that covered, too ;)
Right now I'm in the middle of reworking the fabrication system, which is looking promising and should add more strategies to the mix.
Cogmind Three
So what do we do once Cogmind Tw--I mean Beta 11 is finally done? Well, first of all of course we release it :P (no I still don't know when that'll be)
But seriously, that's going to be the beginning of a period of pure expansion, and mark a return to more reasonably-sized updates that don't take ages to complete xD
At this point I can announce that thanks to support from patrons, Beta 12 will feature a new mini-faction, the Unchained, which have so far appeared only in bits of lore here and there, and were further described in last year's Forbidden Lore ARG.
And assuming we reach the review threshold I mentioned back in 2019, which now seems possible, as promised that will trigger a new content update which will become the focus of Beta 13, built around a new faction of derelict scrappers with unique tech :D (another of those mentioned in the ARG)
(Note the Merchants Guild is still waiting on the sidelines, but they will happen as a much bigger expansion later on.)
Community
As usual I've been streaming Cogmind runs to introduce and test these new features, among them
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tkY0Jwykoc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhCYve2wASc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws-vORyIEkg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gw1_BezQqQ
Some patrons have also been streaming their experiences, and will likely be sharing more, including Tone, Luigi, Plexion, Runia, Vectis.
Tone and MTF in particular did a co-op stream all the way into the extended game playing through a sort of tailored ARG which filled in a bit of hidden lore that people didn't uncover in last year's ARG. It was epic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ3aEfsZpvM
aoemica has been busy continuing to improve Cog-Minder, the Cogmind reference and theorycrafting tool.
Most recently aoemica added part comparisons:
And a build simulator with link sharing:
Also a heads up for some of you who might be interested: Cogmind player Runia is offering unofficial-but-sanctioned third-party merch in the form of 3D printed bots! Having discovered pretty much all the in-game bots and converted them to 3D form, he's been honing his craft and polishing his Fabricator over the past months, and it's been fun to see the results of this work (including printing these while streaming Cogmind :P)
An older shot from a few months ago showing some of Runia's bots (some since refined, and more added):
You can find Runia with us on Discord (where I also hang out every day as I work on Cogmind). I look forward to getting some of these myself eventually :)
Now it's back to work in the fabrication mines...