What a launch week! Thanks for your continued support, and welcome to all our new players!
Our
leaderboards are now packed with over 700 unique Cogminds fighting their way to the surface. We've got lots more players and data than that, but note that you have to set your name in the game options menu in order to appear. (Even if you weren't aware of that, this week I changed the leaderboards code to retroactively associate you with your old anonymous scores if you do choose to name/rename yourself.)
With help from streamers, some articles, and no doubt the launch discount, Cogmind lingered at or near the top of a number of Top Sellers charts, even making the Steam front page for a little while. Gonna have to save that screenshot for history :)
Cogmind was pretty prominent in the Early Access category, and even did very well in the Indie and Strategy categories alongside mostly no-EA games. For the first week Cogmind also sat on the first page of popular games tagged "rogue-like" (along with a very nice lineup of... roguelites xD)
I was occasionally taking screenshots and recording performance data, which I hope to later use to write some kind of article on the process, but honestly I didn't have much time to really follow that stuff closely. Throughout the first ten days of release I was completely buried in emails, various forums, and social media, responding to players and others with questions or wishes.
CoverageCogmind has been recently played by a number of LPers, among them:
- quill18 streamed some Cogmind and has been uploading it to YouTube
- has an ongoing LP series
- does as well
Some of Cogmind's regular players have been uploading videos, too, which you may find helpful:
- recently uploaded a Getting Started Tutorial
- nuzcraft (who records all our weekly seeds, too :P) also shared some quick Survival Tips
- , one of Cogmind's best players, recorded a full combat win with Beta 3
- I'll hopefully be streaming next week--I always play combat (and currently hold #5 on the leaderboards, so I'm not terrible :P)
On the publication front, there haven't been too many pieces yet, although a number of websites are planning to do something in the coming months, and Cogmind will even appear in a major gaming print magazine in Europe next month.
I did an
AMA on r/gamedev last week if you want to check that out.
ProgressThere's still more to do in the transition from non-Steam to Steam development, so progress will be a little slow for a bit here, but there is a ton of game in there for everyone to explore, and it's been through years of expansion and polish so that should keep you occupied for a while ;)
As one would expect with exposure to any sizeable new group of players, the top priority is to address any little accessibility needs as possible, so that's primarily what the first update will entail. (Fortunately there aren't too many of those!)
For those of you who haven't previously been following my work, know that I had a serious head injury about half a year ago and it has been an obstacle ever since. That's the reason Cogmind came to Steam a little later than planned, but I wouldn't have released on Steam if I wasn't already on the mend. While still not back to normal, I have at least finally found treatments that are working (and most importantly enable me to work at all! :D). I have no idea how much longer it'll take--brains are weird like that, but for now I still have to spend about 10 hours per week in the hospital and that eats into potential dev time. I've still been managing a good 45 hours or more per week, and that's enough to keep things humming along.
This week dev time has been spent organizing plans for content and features for the earliest updates based on feedback so far. That's in addition to the already extensive plans I had already prepared xD.
Now that we're on Steam, because it's not too hard to implement and I presume a number of players want it, the first thing to see to is Steam cloud support.
One cloud prerequisite is that I split Cogmind's configuration file into at least two parts, so I did that yesterday. In fact, it's now three files.
Two of these, system.cfg and options.cfg, are comprised of automated settings or those controlled from the in-game options menu. Advanced.cfg is the one that contains special toggles or tweaks only modifiable via that file. With the next release I'll also be including descriptions of what each of those advanced options actually does :) (quite a few have been accumulated over the past couple years, mostly used by players who've been around for a long time, or asked for them in the first place)
Anyway, it's all the same stuff we have now, just stored in different files to facilitate user-friendly cloud saving.
I'll be updating you with informative SITREPs at this time each week--see you around :D
Since a lot of the relevant SITREP discussion happens on Steam rather than in the forums, for reference here's a link to this same news on Steam.
