As announced
before, development is on a short pause right now as I take care of some business-side Cogmind issues, plus some time visiting family on the other side of the globe.
To recap, last week
Beta 3.1 went out on what was certainly an odd release day I've never tried before. There's not much online activity on weekends, especially Sunday, so it's not a great day to release. This time I didn't have a choice since the new version had to be out before going on this trip, while also leaving enough time to deal with issues should any arise. At least the release went smoothly so that rather than dealing with any issues I could start working on the next few things on my list!
I didn't get started immediately, however, instead
streaming some Cogmind on the date of the update. This is something I've always felt like doing in the past, but also always felt like I needed to be ready to react to release issues, or even just comments. I had released privately a couple days early, though, and it was doing fine so I figured it'd be okay to be away for a stream. Plus I really wanted to play, and we have a lot of new players now so it'd be good if I could get in another stream before leaving. I ended up streaming for five hours with the "biggest" turnout ever, peaking at over 30 viewers. It was an unusual day for me to stream, but if I can I'll try again for a weekend stream in the future.
As for the stream, this time I just wanted to try some different crazy strategies, expecting to die and play a few runs in the same vein, but surprisingly that one run went on for five hours and I made it to the last map, anyway, despite all the handicaps from the non-optimal decisions along the way. Was fun
(I had only a few utility slots to work with!)
Regarding the 3.1 release, one of the main features was Steam Cloud support, but I noticed that even though I'd enabled it in the Steamworks options and it was working normally, the fact that a game has this feature is
not shown on the store page unless you manually set that in the page options. I only learned this a couple days later after finally getting a reply from Steam support. I had completely forgotten that was even a setting, because of course it's not on the cloud settings page... Hopefully that didn't confuse anyone, but yeah Cogmind has cloud support.
A couple of fun things following the release...
DDarkray converted one of the greatsword ASCII art pieces to a cursor for use with the new custom cursor feature:
I was reading through a bunch of the reviews and came across this pretty funny section in one of them:
That's one way to put it
As usual, I like to record events and report on them, hopefully learning something in the process, so to culminate this fun and informative process of launching on Steam, I put together an in-depth postmortem: "
Data and Thoughts from a Month on Steam." Some interesting and useful discoveries were made.
The store page got 236k visitors in the first month...
So if you're interested in behind-the-scenes details like that, check out the post for all kinds of graphs to explore. Cogmind is 10% off for the Steam Autumn sale right now, so it'll be interesting to see how that data compares to what I have so far. (Most people tend to buy Steam games when they're on sale...) Note that while Cogmind will occasionally have 10% discounts during Early Access,
they'll never be more than 10%.* (Also, the same discount is available from both Steam and direct from my site--I'll always mirror discounts for DRM-free version.)
(*While I hate to break explicit promises like that, shortly after this news I was contacted by Valve offering some preferred placement on Steam's front page during this year's Winter Sale--the platform's busiest time of the year--if I'd be willing to do a 25% discount. I initially refused, but after opening this up for discussion and talking to players about it for a while, I found that even among current owners support for taking the offer was unanimous. Of course the exposure will be good, and it's true that guaranteed placement on Steam's front page is a hard deal to pass up... While the timing would've been perfect if I'd been able to release to Steam back before summer (the "no injury" scenario xD), technically Cogmind has already been available at $18-20 for the past eight months, so temporarily making it available at $15 seems okay. Note that future discounts will still generally be 10%, at least during EA.)In other roguelike news, if you're interested in the genre's history, Slashie has done some great research into the
origins of the term "roguelike". Read about how someone suggested this genre be called "sucrpgs"
. He presented his findings at the most recent Roguelike Celebration which unfortunately I couldn't make this year but it's funny because that was only 10 days ago and I am near San Francisco right
now xD (I gave a
which you might be interested in)
I won't be back for another week, so our next SITREP will be in a couple weeks so I have more progress to talk about!
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.
