It's been a busy month! As planned, Alpha 15 will take longer to complete than the average update, but then it is going to be finishing the story, after all, and in a pretty grand way with multiple endings and animations to go with them :D
I wouldn't want to spoil the details, but I have been recording some snippets of works in progress over the weeks and it's nice to be able to share at least some progress on that front!
Mapgen visualizer.
"Tracking."
A closing-type animation I won't be using, but recorded anyway.
Broken animations are fun, too :P
"Does this mapgen seem off to you?"
"Yeah that's not quite right, either..."
"Still?"
Recording during WIP stage.
Trying to get my particle engine to do dusty wind across a pixelated ground.
A little radar animation thing.
A neat animation effect that can be achieved by fading out the foreground of a box character while simultaneously fading in its background.
Zoomed out view of all the animation scripts I wrote on just one day xD (out of weeks...)
On the side I've been working on various other non-animation features as well:
Keyboard autotargeting will conveniently "forget" intentionally destroyed machines.
Machine resistance info will be free (no Structural Scanner required).
Keyboard players will also have access to wall/door armor/resistance info (no good way that I can see yet to give mouse users access to this same information).
TREAD CRUSHING! :D
All treads can do it, some better than others :P
Aside from the chance to instakill when ramming robots, using treads to ram also offers full protection against self-damage and destabilization.
Oh yeah, and if you use legs while ramming you can possibly just kick them out of the way and take no damage either (the victim takes no extra damage, just the usual mass-based ramming impact damage):
With five legs the chance is 100%... Outta my way!
Game over buttons rather than having to hit Space/Esc.
I've always been somewhat annoyed at the long string of numbers that make up a random seed, and yesterday I came up with a fun to way replace them. Taking a cue from gfycat, Cogmind's random seeds are now actual words, or more specifically a combination of three words, two adjectives followed by a noun. The result of each is a fake item name, because the individual words are all sourced from the game's item list itself! It's pretty fun :)
Sample list of random seeds (click for full size).
There are plenty of combinations possible so there is effectively no loss of randomness. It's just a better, more human, way to handle seeds. Plus I'm sure they'll be cause for the occasional laugh!
Since the last update I also wrote a new article, Dissecting a Cogmind Changelog, analyzing the most recent update's changelog for some interesting finds that also reflect my typical dev process:
Composite diagram excerpt.
This month I also just passed the 7,000-hour development threshold :D
And now back to work on that final map...
What's that Payload indicator for? I've never seen anything as intriguing in recent months when it comes to UI design, and I hope it makes it into the game somehow. It looks SO COOL!
That I... can't say :)
Most of what I've really been doing for the past few weeks has been secret stuff, unfortunately, so I've been sharing just bits and pieces here and there, occasionally adding a few little features on the side that I *don't* have to keep secret.
In general I like my games to have tons of little things for players to gradually discover over time, so I avoid talking about spoilers. There are things that even players logging hundreds of hours over the past couple years haven't discovered yet :D
I'm so glad you're progressing well with this! I can't wait until it's fully released. On a seperate note what are the chances of you returning to work on X@COM after Cogmind is finished & released/fully patched? :D?
Actually never mind I've just read comments on the X@COM website about how you want to continue, I didn't read that far down previously and know you'd like to continue working on it. Anyway, thanks again for all your work on this awesome game and best of the luck with future projects.
Hey Omegakill--yup, totally still going full speed ahead with Cogmind! Sure are a lot of things to take care of, but hey it's moving along and getting better every day so I won't complain :P
Originally was going to be five, but now I'm adding a *sixth* ending next week, haha.
And what you read about XCOMRL still stands. I would still love to get back to it. The main problem in the short term is that I don't think it's commercially viable, meaning I can't really put any significant amount of time into it right now. But that's exactly what it needs, the Cogmind treatment where I can invest years of full-time work! So unfortunately I can't seriously consider getting back to it until I have enough stable revenue from other games... (just barely scraping by right now xD)
Hey, I fully understand, it's the smarter option to finish off a game that's going to (hopefully) generate some nice funds for you (you certainly deserve it!), besides I don't think the people waiting for the full release of cogmind would appreciate me asking, or you taking the time, to finish XCOMRL lol.
Either way I'm eagerly following both projects and wish you luck.
There's a good chunk of fans out there who would really like me to go work on XCOMRL, so you're definitely not alone! I don't want to keep everyone (nor myself :P) waiting forever, just too bad it's so expensive to make deep games, even on the cheap :P
If I were *smart* I'd make a series of smaller 1-year games so that revenue could start stacking up to support bigger projects. That's actually what Cogmind was *supposed* to be, a shorter game before getting back to XCOMRL or something else bigger, but apparently I am incapable of making non-epic games. Haha, oh well!
Thanks for the support :D