Progress! We're not back to normal yet, but things are at least looking good...
My son was worried about me not being able to work lately, meaning fewer people would buy Cogmind, and in order to help he decided to make ads for me to hand out, which was pretty funny:
(Note we're fine, he's just being cute.) There is a green square there because, as he puts it, "you make your game out of green blocks." Right
On the issue of health, I've managed to raise my working hours to about 35 per week, but that's a far cry from the 60 or so I prefer. The human in me says I should not push it just yet because I'm doing better but still not
better, and the robot in me says "ALERT: Extreme inefficiencies detected, programmers dispatched to enforce milestones." Or something like that
The result is that I can't work on any major features (including the Steam release) because there's a danger of being stopped in the middle of something important, not to mention the more demanding schedule to begin with.
Instead I've been continuing to just pick away at little stuff when I can, and will release a Beta 2.1 next, most likely within a week depending on what I decide to include with it. One thing I know is included (because it's already done!) is the much-requested item info access via the gallery:
Before starting I came up with a better concept for how to provide this information, but it'd be a major feature so I simply implemented this as part of the gallery for now, as expected. This way it "only" took six hours.
(Note that keyboard-only players can access the info via numbers which only appear in that mode.)
One of the important reasons to release Beta 2.1, especially for new players just getting into Cogmind, is that a new feature added in Beta 2
bugged the in-game manual, removing special characters and making some parts of it look weird. (For now I recommend using the manual.txt file or
online version.)
But Beta 2.1 will also come with some other little fixes and balance tweaks as well. As a minor release, it'll appear in the
Beta 2 thread.
In other news, one of Cogmind's earliest LPers from 2015, Sabouts, has
(but has gotten really really rusty after being away for a couple years, as you can imagine), so maybe offer some tips if you see where he could use them. We've also got a couple relatively new players doing LPs as well,
Nuzcraft and
Johnny Jockomoco.
Myself and several others have done the
weekly seed already, with a few wins and a lot of screenshots and some videos, so check those out if you want to see how others are doing in the new Beta
