Progress is good! Feels great to have all the cave foundation work done in Alpha 7, so Alpha 8 and 9 can be about more new content than anything else :D
Alpha 8 is about 50% done--there's still another whole new map to do, and I should probably do another blog post soon because it's been a while since the last one. Actually, here on the forums I haven't yet mentioned that latest post, which discusses how Cogmind generates and populates caves (http://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2016/03/generating-populating-caves/). It's spoiler free so check it out if you're curious about some of the technical and design decisions.
You might've seen elsewhere that I did a fun April Fools joke about "Cogmind as an RTS."
big.gif
(https://i.imgur.com/T7Ra3kG.gif)
It was made using some debugging features I use to stress test the game before releases.
Well, that joke got me thinking about some things, and something serious came out of it :P. So as of Alpha 8 we'll have real-time FOV updating. Your field of view will be updated
as each obstruction is destroyed, especially meaningful for explosions so you can better see them expand:
(https://i.imgur.com/zvugi3B.gif)
The original behavior, if you'd noticed, is to update only after a single animation or action is completed, as seen here (same scene):
(https://i.imgur.com/eWKWQla.gif)
Back to work!