Whoa, slow down there, not sure what you mean by "make a section of the manual to describe what it is," since that already exists. It's big, too. And it also very clearly describes how to run the modes, with specific instructions for both non-Steam and Steam players... You don't need to read forums or blog posts or whatever--everything is right there in the manual, which can be read in the game itself.
But more importantly, these modes were added as free expansions to the game just for fun, meant as one-time events. The game architecture was not designed from the beginning to support this feature, they were only started to be added much later, and were always intended to simply be events that only people who played on a certain day or days would get to play (automatically, I might add--no configuration necessary).
There is also a tutorial message coming in Beta 10 that tells players about this sort of thing, in case they're interested in checking them out, but again, these are not meant to be a major part of the experience at all, and as described above special modes aren't even really designed well since they're hamfisted into a game that was designed over many years to have highly balanced systems (which special modes are clearly likely to unbalance
).
I've released other games and things that include .bat files for selecting different modes, but for various reasons have chosen not to do so with Cogmind.
>it's only played by a small minority of the owners.
Small wonder,
Note that my comment was 1) based on data and 2) including play data taken from big releases where the entire point of the release was a special mode
which activates automatically and you actually have to manually disable it.
Most players opt to disable the mode, and many skip playing during these periods altogether, and truly only a minority of players are really interested in them, as we can see from data that
doesn't require players to activate anything at all. But I like experimenting with different things, and some players are really into it, so I add them anyway. In the end they're not going to be a significantly popular part of the game or development, though. I happen to have released a bunch of them during Beta 9 due to how the development cycle shaped up regarding ambient audio and the leaderboards. (I wanted to give long-time frequent players
something new to do rather than wait around for a major release.)
Anyway, it's possible that one day I will create some way to launch them from within the game, but doing so requires completely restarting the game and introduces a bunch of other architectural issues that overall make the game less stable and can be problematic, so I'm not super interested in doing that and even if it is to happen it's extremely low priority. My focus is instead on making the primary intended experience the best it can be.
