A SITREP?! But it's not Saturday! Feel free to wait until Saturday to read it, but it's here now so let's just all pretend it's Saturday.
Haven't done one of these updates since switching to generally only announcing releases, but it's been a while and there are plenty of people who probably don't check other sources of Cogmind news so they have no idea what's going on... Let's bring everyone up to speed :)
Say Goodbye to 2020Following our Forbidden Lore ARG from last year, I wrote
a post-mortem if you're interested in how that event was designed and panned out.
There's even a
complete ARG walkthrough filled with spoilers, though it does offer a good shortcut to just obtaining all the Cogmind lore locked behind puzzles.
Congratulations to those players who managed to solve the entire ARG!
We also have
Beta 9 stats summarizing the data submitted throughout that release series, including many new topics such as build types and causes of death as enabled by our expansive new scoresheets.
Cogmind 2Just kidding, of course we're still on Cogmind 1 here, but 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 ;)
This year so far I've been testing out experimental features with patrons, keeping the most successful concepts of the bunch while continuing to stream runs in these builds to explore the effects of changes. For example this latest crazy one looking at new infowar utilities (after having made other changes to existing ones in builds prior to this):
Others can be found on
my YouTube channel.
So far we've revisited storage capacity, overweight mechanics, propulsion type balance, and plenty of specific part changes, with plenty more to come. Next up over on the dev blog I'll be covering some of the major changes, beginning with the adjustments to storage and propulsion, followed by a rework of some damage types.
Already though the blog has been covering some of the
new stuff coming to Cogmind, including...
Item searching and filtering:
...perfect for finding just the right part (patrons voted for this one--lots more details and related features demoed in the article).
A map ruler and other overlays:
For the min-maxers out there: No more need to count cells or guesstimate the distance between two positions :)
New infowar utilities mentioned with regard to the stream above:
Dedicated Trap Scanners:
New Structural Scanner behavior:
And the almighty Machine Analyzer:
This is just the beginning...
There's no set schedule for Beta 11's release, since it's by far the most sprawling of any update before it, with less concentrated work in one or two major areas and instead lots of modifications and additions across the board, many of which need to all be integrated into the same update for best effect, but it's hard to say how long that will take given the scope.
Recent EventsMore recently, I've been a bit sidetracked by doing a bunch of official 7DRL reviewing for this year (related streams now archived on YouTube), raising a little more money for development, and also doing a bunch of forced website updating due to a huge PHP upgrade by the host. Unfortunately the latter has made some parts of the wiki inaccessible for now (in particular info for some parts), but aoemica's
Cog-Minder has you covered there :)
Last but not least, you may have noticed we have a little build update for Beta 10.2 available, but there's no changelog for it ;) ;) ;)
