> BOOTING...
> CORRUPTION=LOW
> IDE=ARMED
> STATUS=LOGGING
Feels great to be back, and the rest has done well for my post-concussion issues. Me and my brain have been humming along at full blast all week since returning, and here's what we've been up to :D
As much as I want to get working on major new features right away, my priority is always to address bugs ASAP. Since a number of rare issues were discovered following the new activity on Steam, I had to spend a few days squashing all those.
I'm happy to report I've now moved on to the
next phase of pre-major stuff: The near-term feature list. A lot of little feature requests and tweak ideas have piled up, and since many of these are both easy to do and already confirmed in my plans, I'd prefer to get most of them out of the way before moving on so we can start the next big things with a clean state. (Plus medium-priority tweaks and whatnot have a way of piling up quickly when untended across multiple versions, and I don't want that to turn into an endless list!)
Robot InfoI've made a few updates to the robot info window, starting with a list of immunities below any resistances they might have (including context help describing each).
The vast majority of robots have no immunities, but without a few immunities it'd be way too easy to cheese to death major NPCs and some-late game robots by taking advantage of basic combat mechanics :P
For example the most common immunity is against critical strikes, because kinetic crit stacks are a super effective way to plow through enemies. Really this immunity just more or less puts major bots on par with you, since you're not that susceptible to crits either! (Not that this immunity is new--immunities have been around since the beginning, but since they only come into play late in the game most of the experienced players have figured this out. But it needs to be made more apparent so I've been wanting to explicitly show immunities for a while...)
Some robots also have previously hidden "traits" which are essentially passive effects. These are not usually all that important to the game and were originally meant to be something to discover--the lore usually mentions them in one way or another. But their details are now fully revealed and explained in a new dedicated window.
In order to make room for all this stuff, I had to put robot Analysis text in a separate window, too, but that's not really needed all that often, so this was a good change, freeing up valuable space to fit more important info! (also technically a few late-game analyses were so long they didn't fit into the robot's window, so this was going to happen eventually anyway)
(the recording shows an immunities button from an earlier test build--they don't have their own button anymore)Although there's context help explaining the meaning of resistance values in Cogmind, which uses an old X-Com method of "damage modifiers," to help new players more quickly grasp the data I'm changing all resistance displays to use the more modern and common system of positive values representing resistances and negative values implying a weakness.
So this applies not only to robots, but all objects with a list of resistances:
Coincidentally I wrote a bit about information transparency yesterday over on r/roguelikedev, where you can also read about how it's approached in some other projects.CorruptionWe have a new corruption effect, which is dangerous but more rare than any of the others.
Not only is it rarer, but I'm also adding corruption thresholds for many effects--so no more misfires at 1%--and this new one has the highest threshold.
For extra fun, corrupted bots also now misfire or outright target random bots.
(this sample image is
not indicative of the intended frequency--I recorded during testing with a 100% chance :P)
This essentially gives yet another boost to EM side effects, but on the flip side Programmers are now capable of resetting some allied bot systems to fully purge their corruption.
MiscellaneousAs requested, pure keyboard players will now have access to comparisons between two or more items on the map.
I seem to have spotted a bug in the new Programmer corruption purge system that caused it to instead attempt to
hack a friend, but I couldn't repeat it so that might still be in there. I'm thinking it was probably the Programmer itself being corrupted and deciding to attack instead of help an ally (under
that new mechanic...), which would be fine :P. In any case, it was fun to try to repeat the bug--spawning a horde of allies and repeatedly zapping them all :D
I fixed a bug with the color-coding in the repair/scan item list when scrolling through more than 26 applicable items--the colors are still pretty with a huge and messy inventory, though :)
Player Raine357 has scraped all 30k+
Beta 3 scoresheets into a database to run queries on them, like this one showing average player damage type distribution throughout the game, demonstrating how all the types become equally viable by the end (EM has additional effects and does only about half damage compared to other weapons).
StreamBy the time I got back, my previous stream linked from the
last SITREP was no longer saved on Twitch, so the first thing I did was stream the weekly seed.
It was a three-hour winning combat run, pretty straight to the end except for a fair bit of craziness as I approached the end and got sidetracked into a bit of trouble before making a typically epic Cogmind comeback <3
There's a summary
here.
I've also (finally) decided to go ahead and upload my streams to
so they don't disappear like that in case some of you want to check them out later!
A QuestionSo I was approached by Valve recently letting me know they'd like to feature Cogmind later this month on the front page for an extended period.
This is great news,
but they also said that to be featured I'd have to do a 25% discount. Technically Cogmind has been available at its current price for eight months now, so even though it's only been on Steam for two of those months, maybe it's about time to allow players to join us at the fairly decent price of $15? That said,
technically I also not long ago promised to not do any discounts greater than 10% during EA (at the time not having any idea that Cogmind would be graced with such attention from Valve :P).
So I've already initially refused their offer on the grounds of that promise from a couple weeks back (yes, a lot of people are calling me crazy xD), but am a bit conflicted because it might be the best choice for Cogmind at this point, since an opportunity like this probably won't be available again.
Any opinions?
(Update: Much of the discussion regarding this took place in the Steam news thread, and I've since updated the previous SITREP with a detailed explanation.)Update When?Progress overall has been good for a week back at the helm so far, though I'm not yet sure how much I want to stuff into the next release. I think it'll be Beta 4 instead of 3.2, but calling it that implies packing in even more features :P
At least according to my old system... I'm still trying to figure out a reasonable way to adjust my dev cycle and other factors to emphasize more frequent updates rather than packing too much into each, but I've always rather liked meaty changelogs.
Anyway, there won't be a public update next week, but depending on progress over the next 4-5 days I might put something out the week after that. More in next week's SITREP :D
Reminder: There's still a couple days left in the first round to vote for Cogmind on IndieDB!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.
