Another crazy productive week, and the next update is mostly complete! Here's an overview of features that have come together in just the past few days...
Friendly MaterialsI'm making some pretty significant adjustments to the first main map. I've considered a complete redesign, but that would take much longer (plus I'm not sure it's necessary given other plans I have for the early game), whereas what I've done with it so far in a single afternoon will already have quite an impact on the experience.
A sample layout in my mapgen design program:
Most notably it's shrinking. By 44%.
Of course the contents are for the most part scaled down correspondingly, the net result being an even quicker floor through which to pass for that first evolution. As a bonus, both that map and other Materials areas will now come with the occasional better stockpile.
A sample -10/Materials in the new style, as seen fully revealed in game:
Crunchy DataWe've been talking about it for a long time, and it's finally happening: You'll be able to export your item gallery collection!
As with lore exporting there are three format options, each more suitable for a different purpose. With item stats available outside the game you can theorize builds to your heart's content, run analysis on the items, or do whatever you want with the data. Data!
Our
wiki users are mostly set up to automagically create and update wiki pages based on export data, so we'll finally have an up-to-date wiki without requiring much manual work
. Maybe we'll even get a bot for the chat channels that can draw from the wiki to respond to queries about certain items. We have players who are veritable dictionaries of Cogmind item stats, but they're not always around
The TXT export is probably not all that useful, but I included it for completion sake. One benefit is that it only lists values relevant to each specific item, so if you're looking for stats on just one item rather than seeking to compare it to others, the TXT output is pretty good.
CSV is for the data crunchers.
HTML will be most useful for the average player, dividing your items by slot type and showing only the set of stats relevant for that category of items. There's even a table of contents with links to each section
QoL, of CourseThe main focus of this release has been to clear the todo list of all the high-priority items, many of which involved quality of life improvements. I'm happy to say I've taken care of every single one (whew!). Some of the highlights...
Operator-summoned reinforcements now trigger an ALERT message, meaning it will also appear over the map with the alarm sfx, even if they're out of view. This makes it easier to get a handle on what's happening with regard to that situation.
Also in the transparency and tactical information department, robots calling for help now reveal the location of the robot they're calling! This'll be a game-changer for tactics, as well as helping new players figure out what's going on.
Similarly, calling for help or reinforcements from a garrison reveals that garrison's location.
By request I've added an option to use alternative map ASCII, giving it a more traditional roguelike look with Terminus rather than Cogmind's default square sci-fi font. (This will only include size 18 at first, but I could add more later.)
A new advanced option shows core damage popups as actual core integrity rather than a percentage.
Broken inventory parts are listed in red on the swap menu to distinguish otherwise duplicates.
I finally changed the behavior whereby a robot label could follow a robot out of view. Not that it was something worth abusing, and I actually knew about this and left it that way for the past several years because removing it also sometimes removes semi-valid info, but under extreme circumstances it obviously looks weird
As part of this update I also have both the lore and gallery UI actually showing the file path and name of the export, so you know it happened and where to retrieve the results.
Top 100Cogmind made the Top 100 indies of 2017 over on IndieDB! Thanks to everyone who voted, and if you could,
vote again for the final round which is open for a few more days.
Beta 4I've confirmed the next release is definitely a Beta 4 (not 3.2), although haven't yet settled on a specific day. I can say that I'm wrapping up feature development--mostly just stress testing remains, so it'll probably be done within a week. That said, I'd rather stick to my habit of early/mid-week releases, so I'll
probably end up holding onto it until the week after next. In any case, if that happens it'll of course also mean an extra couple days for me to pack in even more stuff
Our SITREP for the week is titled after some data shared in my
Year 4 of the Cogmind report. For a look at some of the highlights of 2017, and a glance at 2018, check that out if you haven't already.
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.
