There's lots going on, and I even have a new Cogmind-like experience to share with you :D
StyleHere's the second category of achievement icons, somewhat fewer than the
previous one.
That's the "style" category, reflecting somewhat more basic achievements that essentially fall under different build strategies.
Also with regard to achievements, I mentioned last time that I wanted to cover the topic of which ones to "hide." It seems not all games even take advantage of the ability to hide achievements, but I think it'll be useful in at least a couple ways. My starting point was to basically say that all achievements are
unhidden, but if there's a good reason to hide one then do so. There seem to be two good reasons:
- Anything related to the plot. There are a ton of story-related elements to uncover, and all of them will be found naturally and/or discovered by following clues in the game, so there's no reason to spoil any of these here. These achievements basically serve to recognize that you've hit that plot point at least once.
- Stuff that would be fun to recognize, but boring to aim for. I've included a handful of achievements which would be either too easy or too tedious if you know about them, but you're bound to get them one way or another naturally over time, so I plan to hide those.
There's certainly the other approach of
hide all achievements, then perhaps unhide the ones that really need to be known or else no one is likely to ever find them. (Some of the explicit challenges are pretty tough and you
do need to aim for them.)
Someone previously mentioned outright hiding them all, though as shown before the
in-game achievement UI will be able to filter out locked achievements, so you can pretty easily avoid those if you're in the camp that wants everything hidden up front.
Of course, which route to take with these is harder for you all to make specific suggestions on unless you know the achievements, but I don't want to release the full list until deciding precisely which ones should and shouldn't be known in advance xD
Personally I like the idea of using unhidden achievements to explicitly get players to try out different styles, among other purposes, which is why I started with the unhidden route.
In any case, I'm always listening if any of you have a different take (or the same take :P).
I'm sure I'll end up writing a long blog post about this later detailing the system and reasoning, but now while it's still being implemented is be the best time to ask for input :)
CommunityOne of our experienced flight players, Pimski, has started a video guide for flight!
Part 1 is here.
Nuzcraft continued his series of short systems tutorials with another on
"Energy."b_sen has been sharing more fan art done in
REXPaint, exploring what the world is like before Cogmind, and from 0b10's point of view.
Warning, some name spoilers in text.
The second one there depicts the complex under attack, and you can read more about it
here.
POLYBOT-7For some weeks now I kept reminding you all that I'd be participating in this year's 7DRL challenge, and that finally happened last week. It happened and produced a
pretty cool little game :)
In a week I took Cogmind Beta 5, ripped it apart, and rebuilt it into a lighter, faster coffeebreak version. Our Cogmind tile artist
Kacper even did a great new tileset for it!
Technically it was built from a post-Beta 5 version, so it includes some of the new upcoming Beta 6 features like multithreaded data loading and RTS panning (although the latter is deactivated by default in the config).
I should point out that POYLBOT-7 is
not a Cogmind demo, nor does it even play much like Cogmind! But anyone interested in Cogmind's style (perhaps you all? :P) might enjoy it.
To see what it's all about, check out the full
release announcement on the blog, which also includes more screenshots. We already have a channel for it on the
Discord if you want to talk with other Cogmind fans who are playing it.
It was a tiring but productive week, and Cogmind itself even benefited from this 7DRL in a number of ways, not least of which because my mangling of the source code to repurpose it uncovered some deeply hidden bugs (even some down at the engine level!). Really it's all just stuff that could
theoretically cause trouble at some point but hasn't yet, but hey they were things to fix nonetheless!
POLYBOT-7 also resulted in improvements for some of Cogmind's optional visual effects, but I'll talk more about that bit next time.
On my blog I'll also be sharing a detailed postmortem about the 7DRL week if you're interested in that sort of thing, covering whole process from inception to completion and everything in between.
OuchUnfortunately I had to push myself rather hard to get this 7DRL out there, and my doctor is out for three weeks so I can't get the same level of treatment I normally do, so my concussion has become somewhat... bothersome again.
The effects have been with me for almost a year now, and it would be really nice to finally get rid of this thing so I need to be careful not to push it quite too hard in the next few weeks to avoid messing up the long term plan!
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. But feel free to post replies here, too :)
