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[b_sen]

To explain the extent of the spoilers: the premise of the hypothetical prequel is that you are MAIN.C through the history of the Complex.  Even though there's a lot of Cogmind lore I have yet to uncover, the nature of this premise requires a lot of spoilers.  I won't be tagging individual spoilers within this thread because there are just too many, so if you don't want to see the spoilers, please stick to spoiler-free viewing locations such as the Discord channel and REXPaint thread.

I've made enough of these mockups now to collect the series and associated notes in one place (as nudged by Kyzrati ), so here goes.

Things that would definitely be in the game, in order of creation and original versions (some of these may be updated later):

  Robot design system, as it appears in the very early game to a new player: (original post)



  Fighting the Sigix scouts in Complex 0b1: (original post)



  AI editor system, here showing a very simple AI: (original post)



  Scouts returning with Zhirov's location and displeasure at being found: (original post below, REXPaint sharing post)




Things that might be in the game, in order of creation and original versions:

  New Game creation screen, from Zhirov's perspective.  I debate including this because it breaks immersion and your starting location isn't necessarily that big of a deal when you can make anything out of matter, but even if it were included I would have to redesign it for having separate text and map fonts.  It is the piece that started the series, though... (original posts)




My plan for the series is to complete a "trailer keyframe set" showing off the major systems and why the gameplay is fun - much like the Cogmind trailer.   Remaining planned pieces, in no particular order:

• Boot sequence
• Research management system
• Building on the map and the corresponding "zone of control" expansion
• Part designer incorporating new technologies into parts
• Custom grouping and renaming system, plus automatic grouping + naming configuration
• Fighting Derelicts and taking their stuff to be researched (with the correct implication that you can also take Sigix stuff to research)
• Title screen

I'm also stuck on the title screen because first I need a title. XD  I've realized that before I can settle on a title, I need to decide whether the player is allowed to ignore the Sigix and just build in peace, since that changes the design enough to change the space of reasonable names.  (For example, Hunt for the Ender Dragon would be an exceedingly poor name for Minecraft, because Minecraft allows players to totally ignore the Ender Dragon and still have lots of content to enjoy.)  Cogmind's lore leans pretty heavily towards ignoring the Sigix not being an option (unless Zhirov made a very big mess while cleaning up after being spotted by MAIN.C) - but mechanically, how exactly would the game stop players from ignoring the Sigix short of setting some arbitrary time at which the Sigix stop by anyway or the player eventually running out of planet to build with?  Thoughts on this subject are very much welcome!

[b_sen]

[reserved for game design notes]

[Laida]

Maybe m.c should play the same role there, as the Lord in Stronghold. It means, main.c is the unit itself, and it can be killed by Sigix, and game will over after this. So if Sigix will try to kill m.c (actively enough) in this scenario, it will force player to defend the Complex and fight with them actively

[b_sen]

Maybe m.c should play the same role there, as the Lord in Stronghold. It means, main.c is the unit itself, and it can be killed by Sigix, and game will over after this. So if Sigix will try to kill m.c (actively enough) in this scenario, it will force player to defend the Complex and fight with them actively

I'd already decided in favor of that - MAIN.C can even be killed by Derelicts if you're not careful!   (Though you can't evolve any Derelicts until you've spotted Zhirov, as a lore-appropriate control on minimum game familiarity before you get attacked.)  Neither Stronghold nor KeeperRL let you build yourself a more powerful body and transfer to it, though... XD

MAIN.C having a physical location also works with the "zone of control" concept: your robots (along with walls and floors) all have their own transmission ranges, and your "zone of control" is the places you're connected to by chaining transmissions.  This is the limit on your ability to give orders and receive reports, so walls are for a lot more than avoiding cave-ins!

[Kyzrati]

Nice to see this entire project organized in it's own thread! Quite a fun different way to approach the world and its inhabitants, though I'll also be very interested to see if and what you might change/add if you knew the entirety of Cogmind lore. There's a fair amount of major things going on out there you have yet to discover (not that you must include those ideas--simply sticking to the main premise is probably better for creating the foundation for another game anyway)

At least with respect to a title it's not super urgent since you have a lot of other panels still to work out. With something like a title for which no great ideas suddenly pop out at you, it can be best to just sit on it and occasionally come up with random ideas as you work with other source material. Something might stick

[b_sen]

Nice to see this entire project organized in it's own thread! Quite a fun different way to approach the world and its inhabitants, though I'll also be very interested to see if and what you might change/add if you knew the entirety of Cogmind lore. There's a fair amount of major things going on out there you have yet to discover (not that you must include those ideas--simply sticking to the main premise is probably better for creating the foundation for another game anyway)

While there are many mysteries left for me to solve in Cogmind, I think the cohesive world and lore help me out in that regard.   (That's also something I very much enjoy in games and other media, and frankly why the premise of "you're MAIN.C" results in a sensible game idea rather than a mess that was clearly patched together around the Cogmind.)  For example, a fair number of those mysteries concern various Derelict factions, so even though I don't know all the intricacies of Derelict evolution, I know that the system should be there (note it darkened as unavailable in the Engineer design mockup) and that from uncovering the histories of all the Derelicts, I would flesh out the system to either match or have differences that are important to gameplay.

I've also already considered and discarded the idea of giving the player ways to research advancements in MAIN.C's own AI, despite the decent chance that Revision 17 is a revision of MAIN.C (whether by Zhirov or by MAIN.C itself, though I don't know why Zhirov would ever leave his old versions of MAIN.C somewhere they could be run outside a simulation - and preferably not even in a simulation), because such a system would either have to be severely limited in ways annoying to players or become the centerpiece of the game.  (Compare the AI self-improvement mechanics in Universal Paperclips, which despite being limited are as much a centerpiece of the game as making paperclips.)

You may also be interested in the win / loss / strategic choice / challenge ideas I have so far:

Loss conditions:

• Core destruction (when occupying a robot) - just as in Cogmind, your core is the hardware housing your AI.
• Terminal system corruption - again for the same reasons as in Cogmind.
• Destruction of the machine you're occupying (if not occupying a robot) - you can't get out of the need to have hardware for your AI somewhere.
• Permanent loss of manufacturing capability (no Fabricators, no Engineers / equivalents that could build more, and no Mechanics / equivalents that could perform an emergency refit on an existing robot to enable it to build a Fabricator) - this is an irrecoverable "walking dead" state unless the player can win with the robots they have, but the eventual end of the run by other means may well be very slow depending on the player's mix of robots, so it should at least give a clear warning that the run is not recoverable.

Win conditions: (behind spoiler tags because they spoil more than backstory)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

• (basic win, bonus points for additional technology delivery) Get a Cogmind to w0 and deliver a functional Sigix ship to the human military on Epsilon Eridani.  Players get as many attempts at this as they can create Cogminds - LRC-V3 seems an awful lot like version 3...
• (extended win) Confront and defeat whoever wants you not to have teleportation technology enough to sabotage your research; unless I miss my guess, this is pre-empting the Cogmind in a w6!
• (extended win, may well be related to the one above if Sigix FTL technology is based on teleportation) Reverse-engineer Sigix FTL technology well enough to build your own complete FTL ships, mass-manufacture those packed full of robots, and take the war to the Sigix! (Not including the space combat itself - that would be yet another game. XD )

Strategic choices:

• Balancing early focus on expansion vs. research vs. combat - expansion improves your manufacturing base, research improves the quality of what you produce, and combat allows you to kill enemies and loot their parts, but they're all competing for the same resources.
• Players who choose to develop combat capabilities very early should logically be able to kill Zhirov on first spotting him, sacrificing some early manufacturing potential to remove his influence from that run (and possibly change some other things, both from a balance perspective and because he never gets to attack MAIN.C in response).

Challenge ideas:

• Timeline Mode: Load up the Cogmind backstory timeline and try to beat it to various milestones.  (This should be just slightly harder than a Cogmind w0 - though that's still a challenge mode in such a freeform game - because ideally the Complexes as they stand in Cogmind should be a reasonable thing to build for a player who understands the mechanics.)
• Escalating War: The Sigix grow stronger over time; crush them quickly, or wait and harvest even better technology to turn against them?

At least with respect to a title it's not super urgent since you have a lot of other panels still to work out. With something like a title for which no great ideas suddenly pop out at you, it can be best to just sit on it and occasionally come up with random ideas as you work with other source material. Something might stick

That's what I've been doing, but usually I get no title ideas until I come up with a great one that sticks.  This time my problem is that I have sticky title ideas, but all of them have major flaws.   I'll see how it goes, but I am very much still taking suggestions and discussion on whether the player should be able to ignore the Sigix.

[Kyzrati]

suggestions and discussion on whether the player should be able to ignore the Sigix.

Well, from a lore standpoint can you really afford to ignore a superior enemy? What are the realistic alternatives to confronting them?

Not that it's too important--you can find ways to explain almost anything so it instead really comes down to what options should be available to the player and how reasonable it is to offer these in terms of implementation (and how well they fit into the overall theme and functionality).

That said, since this is a prequel, and even in Cogmind's time they haven't actually shown up again yet, it's true you can essentially ignore them for the purposes of the game's timeline and consider the primary enemies to be derelict/other factions already on Tau Ceti IV. Not to mention the ability to add even more as necessary because there are plenty of possibilities and spaces that aren't explored within the world as I built it--a bunch of intentional holes to fill, if you will

MAIN.C could have overcome previous challengers and situations that we don't know much about. Actually this kind of stuff is hinted at in the game as well;)

Aaaaagh all this is making me want to do Cogmind 2 / 3 / 4... xD

Back to the Sigix though, one of the things you'll often want/need in a good game are increasing challenges for the player at various stages, and the Sigix could easily represent one of the later such challenges.

[b_sen]

suggestions and discussion on whether the player should be able to ignore the Sigix.

Well, from a lore standpoint can you really afford to ignore a superior enemy? What are the realistic alternatives to confronting them?

Not that it's too important--you can find ways to explain almost anything so it instead really comes down to what options should be available to the player and how reasonable it is to offer these in terms of implementation (and how well they fit into the overall theme and functionality).

That's what I'm getting at.   The lore says "no way - not only are the Sigix a superior enemy, you have a literal programmed imperative to go deal with them".  However, the mechanics say "do you want to stop players who want to use the game as a programming playground / just enjoy being a robot god, and how exactly would you implement that if you do?"  MAIN.C makes a strategic decision to build fake cities and attract Sigix attention when he's ready, and the player likewise gets to choose when they're ready - which means they may well just never do so (and may even deliberately build only deep underground to prevent Sigix exploration from Earth from discovering them ).  It would be rather unreasonable to say "you have to be ready for the Sigix by time X or you get crushed", and that's really the only way to take that choice from the player.

Moreover, I don't think taking that choice from the player suits the mechanical theme of player-driven complexity.  The game is about crafting an ecosystem to be your empire, about a mind built to have power along with autonomy; merely surviving in the standard mode should not be roguelike hard (though optional non-default modes may rightly be so, as with KeeperRL's Endless Mode).  There are plenty of mechanically appropriate ways to provide incentives and hints encouraging players to take on the Sigix - technologies you know exist from records of the Solar War but can't research without Alien Artifacts (likely including the only ways to get more matter onto Tau Ceti IV), an in-game list of the objectives Zhirov programmed in, Derelicts only going so far in providing technologies and challenges - but these encouragements do allow players to ignore them unless they play for so long that they successfully run out of planet. XD

Unfortunately, I think this closes off all the names alluding to MAIN.C's purpose that would otherwise work, including sticky ones like "Project Seraph".

That said, since this is a prequel, and even in Cogmind's time they haven't actually shown up again yet, it's true you can essentially ignore them for the purposes of the game's timeline and consider the primary enemies to be derelict/other factions already on Tau Ceti IV. Not to mention the ability to add even more as necessary because there are plenty of possibilities and spaces that aren't explored within the world as I built it--a bunch of intentional holes to fill, if you will

MAIN.C could have overcome previous challengers and situations that we don't know much about. Actually this kind of stuff is hinted at in the game as well;)

Oh good, places to insert things for game balance and progression.   Derelicts themselves are quite flexible in that regard - they can range from a smattering of noncombatants enclosed in a frequently-harvested "terrarium" within a player's Complex to enemy communities on Warlord's scale and beyond.

Aaaaagh all this is making me want to do Cogmind 2 / 3 / 4... xD

That means you created an interesting story and mechanics. XD

Back to the Sigix though, one of the things you'll often want/need in a good game are increasing challenges for the player at various stages, and the Sigix could easily represent one of the later such challenges.

They do fit in neatly as a late-game challenge, just better on a player-driven progression.  For example, one of the incentives to create and fight Derelicts (or other enemies) is to harvest parts from them that use technologies the player doesn't yet have, so players who are more confident in their skills will prefer to take on enemies that have a bigger technological edge over them (and in so doing progress faster).  Players should see that the Sigix have quite the technological edge over them from all those locked technologies, and decide what level of numerical superiority to prepare in advance accordingly.

[b_sen]

On further research and reflection, even other games that do have their premises be "you're an AI with an overriding non-ignorable goal" and take their names from it, such as Endgame: Singularity and Universal Paperclips, don't actually require players to advance towards that goal - they just don't have other content, so the name is still reflective of the content and players generally aren't motivated to just do nothing.

Appropriate comparison games not in that mold also seem to have come to the same conclusion.  Dwarf Fortress lets players avoid "the clowns".  Minecraft puts the Ender Dragon out of the way and behind mid-game combat challenges, even for players who don't enable the "I don't want to fight" options of Peaceful difficulty and/or Creative Mode.  KeeperRL is quite player-paced in the default Campaign Mode (with an appropriately rolled starting map, but how to get one is common advice given to new players), and as of Alpha 24 also uses a system where successful fights provide technology.  Even some 4X games allow players to remove the player-level enemies; Civilization IV doesn't enforce having any enemy civilizations, so both games against Barbarians (equivalent to fighting only factions already on Tau Ceti IV) and games of solo civilization management are valid if nonstandard options.

The mechanics rule - there's no good way to stop the player from just never summoning any Sigix, and even "But Thou Must" elements are really only suited to linear segments of RPGs.  Apparently the combination of sandbox systems and AI characters with key goals motivating them to take those systems on the exponential growth curve is unusual, though. XD

We can also compare "description punchlines": the short section that may or may not be a tagline, but performs the same function as "You are the Cogmind. Discover what that means as you explore a living, breathing world ruled by robots."

• If the Sigix were not ignorable and the game was designed accordingly, the corresponding "punchline" would be along the lines of "You are Project Seraph.  Create humanity's angels."  It sounds like a MechWarrior campaign game where you program the BattleMechs to operate autonomously, which is a fine game idea but not this game idea.
• By contrast, the current sticky "punchline" for this game is "Bring your world to life."  Again, the emphasis is on player control and choice, which lines up with the mechanics.

[Kyzrati]

Heh, coming up with taglines before the name?

Yeah allowing players to summon them as the only way they arrive offers a nice choice, but really any game can become so much more, or something very different to different players, once you add 100% optional content like that, and the amount one can add is almost limitless given unlimited time and resources, or a game that is purely a thought experiment anyway

(Lore-wise, technically the Sigix could arrive anyway, looking for their lost ship that never reported back )

[b_sen]

Heh, coming up with taglines before the name?

Well, the taglines are sticking before the name!    And in this case, "bring your world to life" fits quite neatly into my trailer plan.

Yeah allowing players to summon them as the only way they arrive offers a nice choice, but really any game can become so much more, or something very different to different players, once you add 100% optional content like that, and the amount one can add is almost limitless given unlimited time and resources, or a game that is purely a thought experiment anyway

Sufficiently open and sandboxy games are like that as a genre, and in this case I'm fine with it because player-designed robots are going to make the game very different to different players anyway, even among players who do intend to fight the Sigix.

(Lore-wise, technically the Sigix could arrive anyway, looking for their lost ship that never reported back )

Yes, once you signal Earth to provoke the sending of that ship you would logically be on something of a clock, so you want to make sure you come out of taking down that ship with enough research and manufacturing power to quickly exploit Sigix technology - as with the rapid expansion of Complex 0b10 - but what about players who just never signal Earth? 

[b_sen]

Trying my hand at animation, here with scouts reporting back that they found Zhirov and Zhirov is not very happy about it:



This came out of testing a "zone of control" mockup and noticing from previews that the idea was complex enough to require multiple mockups to properly introduce.  So I wanted to first depict a situation where robot transmissions were important and very visible (to show why zone of control matters), and discovering Zhirov is a great event for that.

There are a lot of attention-getting HUD animations because I wanted this type of event to get noticed even if the player is looking at a different area of the map, or doesn't have the map visible at all (because they have one or more menus fully covering it).  Zhirov's visit to edit MAIN.C's memory also makes a good way to introduce players to the possibility of invasion alerts, because Zhirov isn't quite as hostile as the later invaders, but the strategic choices the event offers the player are large enough to warrant the alert.  (Later invasions will generally come after the player knows about the invading faction, so their hostility should be clear.)

In making this, I also noticed that the prequel is more reliant on its logs than Cogmind, and so the log text animation must be faster.  Indeed, it's not even necessarily meant to be perceived as an animation in gameplay, as long as it does its job of getting players to read the logs; several of the UI animations shown here follow the same principle of being informative and fast over being flashy.