Hello [Cogmind] World!
In my last update I was pretty vague, mainly talking about having pushed myself rather hard in the first half of the year leading up to Beta, despite some recent "injuries," and that had led to some consequences preventing me from working altogether. In good news, I'm now no longer completely unable to work! And now that I'm feeling a little better, and somewhat stable enough to provide an accurate picture of what's going on, here are some more details:
As some of you may have heard I had a concussion--that was over two months ago now. I basically just took some medicine and worked as usual, but then I got sick and there were... complications. Basically it got really bad, to a point where literally
thinking about anything complex started my head hurting. Sheesh concussions are weird. Then my vision got blurry, which is as problematic as you can imagine...
Overall the symptoms have gotten better over the past couple weeks, and current tests have come back to show there doesn't seem to be anything super wrong, it's just Post-Concussion Syndrome. I still have symptoms, though, they're still interfering with a lot of my work, and they could technically last a while.
As such, because I'm worried that it'll once again get serious while I'm in the middle of preparing, or shortly after, a Steam release (not to mention the associated pressure itself could worsen the problems), I think the best plan is to stay off Steam until I can fully recover, and continue taking it slow while working on little projects.
While I'm disappointed this had to happen now (or at all
), I guess there's at least some good to come of it: Since I can't work for long periods, I've decided the best approach right now is to work on the pile of Cogmind side projects that I
don't usually want to work on--extra stuff that I would probably have to do eventually, but have repeatedly been waiting to address.
If I can't work on something for too long, I may as well pick things I don't want to work on for long! Heh. These are a bunch of features that Cogmind technically should have, but that compared to working on the game proper are not so much fun or even meaningful on a wider scale.
The first I decided to tackle is keyboard layouts and rebinding. Cogmind has nearly 500 commands (internally--not everyone needs or uses all said commands, because there are many duplicates):
As of yesterday I managed to implement a basic handling system for both keyboards and rebinds, and created a config file that allows
Dvorak users to do everything, commands and text entry, natively.
Testing with the Windows on-screen keyboard seems to have it working perfectly:
There's still a lot more to do (next is to test whether this system will work on foreign keyboards...)
Also, because I don't want to leave everyone hanging, instead of waiting until Steam to release the next version as planned, it's been long enough that I should probably do a 1.3 instead! I've been doing a little bit of debugging on the side, along with some content tweaks, so I may as well release them for those of you who are currently Cogminding
No date on that yet, as I'd prefer to add in some new stuff as well, but we'll see. In any case, expect a 1.3.
And in case you didn't see the news, r/roguelikedev is running a summer code-along series where you can join others in learning how to create a roguelike from scratch (it's not that hard!). Check it out 
