Welcome to a new year of Cogmind!
It's been so long in the making I've started to have visions of even grander major updates, and we end up getting Cogmind 2019, Cogmind 2020, and so on until my permadeath, ha.
In the New Year's spirit I streamed
Holiday Mode last week on January 1st, building around a very specific weapon available that day (and on New Year's Eve), the RPDS. Some very potent fireworks were on display, including plenty of unnecessary carnage.
It was an interesting time with different challenges from a more regular run.
FYI an RPDS does... this :D
Or in ASCII:
Remember you can turn back your system clock to start a run on one of those days (or any of the other Holiday Mode days--potential drops are described
here), and this feature will be available until the next release.
Note that even now that the event is over, the "ELF" variant bot is still in the regular game. That was an oversight while putting together the new build, in that the regular game picked up on that new bot and replaced the usual Saboteur class Imp with the ELF. Oops xD. They have the same loadout anyway, it's just a different name. Don't let their elfish charms disarm you--they're just as deadly and scary as Imps ever were!
PwnageFor a long time now I've wanted to do a video that demonstrates how to reliably get through the early game, since it's not all that hard but some players have trouble figuring out how to overcome the various challenges there and end up either having to switch to another difficulty mode or playing the majority of their runs in the early game, which honestly is just the very tip of a much more varied Cogmind experience!
Once you're good at it the first few floors only take maybe ten minutes as you prep for the mid-game challenges, so I wanted to share some of the main tactics that ensure you'll make it through. We've had some other early-game tutorials on video before, but I wanted something of my own that I covered what I thought was most important.
Well we can check that off the list :D
I streamed "Pwning the Early Game" this week, and already a bunch of players have been finding it useful, so that's reassuring.
Although I normally talk a lot of strategy in my streams, this was quite different from the usual since it was focused purely on the essentials for the first floors. I first spent about half an hour describing most of the main UI and basic mechanics, essentially an intro to the game, then did a slow run through the first several floors, talking about strategy, combat tactics, and different robots, systems, and AI. After that I concluded with four more quick runs through the early game, putting everything learned into action to reliably reach Factory. (There are time stamps in the YouTube description.)
Not Spoilers Well, speaking of the early game... let's talk a bit about Beta 8! Why? Because that's its biggest area of focus :D
I haven't really talked about it yet, and while I want to wait until the main announcement to go into details, it's relevant here so let's go.
With Beta 8, in the the early game you'll often have a way to find unique items, and these items can affect your entire play style, if not for an entire run then at least for a while. I mean I guess even regular items and prototypes (and especially artifacts) can already do that for you, but any time unique items are added this is a chance to provide opportunities like that.
For example, among the new items that are being added, there's the PSU Rigger. As per its name, it can be used to rig
any power source to explode like a proximity mine. This one's going to be pretty fun to use :D
I can already smell the cheese connoisseurs approaching now...
(Aside: I've actually teased this item in a couple previous screenshots, that and other Beta 8 features, and it's fun to do this without talking about them to see if/who notices ;))This kind of stuff has always been part of my long-term plan for Cogmind (because having worked on it for over five years now we're apparently not quite yet in the "long term" xD). Basically expanding the game with new ways to experience and interact with the same world, adding smaller amounts of content with outsized impacts on a run, albeit optional, of course. I have tons more item concepts and avenues for obtaining them in various parts of the world, but these things will be introduced over time, mostly after the actual 1.0 (assuming I can still afford it :P).
Now don't get
too excited about the Beta 8 gear--you won't be able to pick and choose items, but I can guarantee there are going to be some fun and interesting new experiences coming.
Work on Beta 8 has been pretty smooth lately, just time-consuming as there are some rather complex additions for this update. Some random dev snapshots...
Visualizing the ambient sound from a new area:
Hm, a curious new UI animation, what could it mean? :)
Other NewsI was chosen for the "Best Developer" award by Spitball Sessions! You can read about that
here, and check out their GOTY 2018 podcast. I am honored, and will continue trying to do my best :D. Thanks to everyone for your support (and reviews! they really keep the game going in Steam's algorithms so that I can add more features rather than having to worry about wrapping it up sooner).
And if you're using Proton to play Cogmind, it'd be great if you could
contribute to the database.
I guess this is also a notice for those of you who didn't already know: Although Cogmind isn't marked as supporting Linux on Steam, manually activating it for Steam Play does allow you to purchase and download and play normally! There shouldn't be any issues as I've fixed the few Wine-related bugs on Cogmind's side before it even came to Steam, and have added other QoL features specifically for Linux players. (If you do run into the no audio issue there's a workaround--not sure if they've fixed that in Proton itself yet.)
The biggest "Other News" we've got here is that we'll be going on our annual family vacation next week for winter/Chinese New Year. I really wanted to have Beta 8 out by now, but it's still not there yet. Being out of town for a few weeks I won't be streaming for the next month or so, and although it's a long "vacation," technically it's more of a workcation since I'll still be setting up office and doing a fair bit of regular work on Cogmind as well.
It feels
really good to be caught up on all the personal and/or non-Cogmind things that were getting in the way these months, though, and to have the Roguelike Celebration behind us, since that trip and preparing for
my talk and all the other related work really ate up a ton of time and resulted in the additional backlog of other chores I had to get out of the way xD
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 Steam or r/Cogmind, but feel free to post replies here, too :)
