Cogmind News

Hope you're all enjoying the latest special release! The timed event has been in progress for 9 days now, but there are still 4 more to go. Since the original announcement was cryptic to avoid spoiling it, today I thought I'd cover a bit of what's included.

The original plans for this mode were somewhat different, as I started imagining elaborate possibilities via scripting and new NPCs with dialogue and whatnot. But I didn't want it to siphon off too much time from Beta 8 development, so scaled it all back to something much more manageable--a bunch of new themed items in the starting area. In the end it took just a day and a half to set up Holiday Mode and add 17 new parts, some with completely new mechanics. (There was also a little visit by an NPC on 12/24, which some players apparently noticed ;))

When you wake, the Scrapyard is filled with Presents.



These essentially work like Scrap found in the caves, in that you can step on them to search through (open!) them and see what's inside.



Here's a list of possible unique presents that appear in various combinations on different days, along with their description:

• Vacation Slip ~~ Everyone needs some time off occasionally.
  
• Tree Searcher ~~ Ah, that feeling when you find the perfect tree... then hack it down.
  
• Elven Gift Factory ~~ Unlimited surprises await your enemies.
  
• Gaudy Lights ~~ They can't hit what blinds them!
  
• 5A-N7A's Little Helpers ~~ Very helpful for you. Not so much for everyone else.
  
• 5A-N7A's Bag of Holding ~~ Don't worry, everything gets bigger again when you take it out.
  
• 5A-N7A's Eye ~~ Spot all those naughty bots from afar.
  
• 5A-N7A's GPS ~~ 5A-N7A was using GPS before there was GPS.
  
• 5A-N7A's Snowblower ~~ Ho ho ho!
  
• RD-1PH's Nose Cone ~~ Being nosy is half the battle.
  
• Winter Coat ~~ Warm and fuzzy. But more importantly, immune to all those pesky programmers who are most definitely not on vacation even though they should be.
  
• Striped Cane ~~ Peppermint is good for making friends. Or with a huge amount you can also pound bots into scrap.
  
• Black Coal ~~ Drop this to the ground and run. Don't look back. You have 10 turns to escape the blast radius (8). So naughty.
  
• Propulsion/Utility/Weapon Slot Expander ~~ Yeah you'll get more slots later, but early presents are good presents.
  

There are other cool presents as well, but they're not unique to the holiday build so aren't listed above.

Various gifts in action...














I've arranged it so that during these final four days all the unique event-only items from the previous will also appear again at some point, in case you missed any.

That said, there is also one item which has not yet appeared on any day! It's also probably one of the greatest. This item will appear on both 12/31 and 1/1, to welcome the new year the only way we know how ;)

Although score data from the event is not being included in the leaderboards, since the lore and achievements you collect during the event do contribute to your player history, Holiday Mode can give you a leg up (or offer new strategies) going after some of the really hard achievements, or exploring more challenging areas of the world. So it's a good opportunity for that, in case you're not using it like this already :P

As stated before you can technically access this event later once Beta 8 is released by rolling back to a previous branch, but if the intent is to contribute to your player data you probably wouldn't want to that too far into the future since it could erase other gains you might've made. (On the other hand if the intent is pure fun then yeah, it'll always be accessible for that :D)

Earlier I mentioned the speed with which this release was put together, and there were some funny side effects of the haste... As a special event on a separate branch of the game without a need to future proof the work, adding content was much faster, but also meant that I wouldn't bother to extensively test all the potential related effects. Quality control was limited to testing individual items to make sure they at least performed as advertised.

Well, the game picked up on the ELF being a variety of Saboteur and began dispatching ELFs along with assaults instead of the usual Imps, which is kinda funny but appropriate (as appropriate as being attacked by an ELF during the holidays can be, anyway :P). Vacation Slips allow you to step outside the normal flow of time, but by doing that it turns out there's no energy generation or heat dissipation and you have to manage as best you can like that for 50 "turns" (they're still good, and at least it's interesting trying to take advantage of them with certain builds!)

These are the only two issues I know about, and are the kinds of things that normally would've been caught within a day of public testing, but I wanted to surprise even testers with this build, too :)



This week I streamed Holiday Mode, and my normal stream time happened to fall on December 25th so we got to use a somewhat larger selection of Fun Stuff. I focused on the Elven Gift Factory, essentially creating a hovering "Christmas Trapper Build."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6xuoGI62fo

The end part is spoilery since the run headed into part of the extended game, but there's no spoilers elsewhere, mostly just fun and games :)

Actually, the stream even started out with some fooling around in the Scrapyard. You don't normally get such powerful scanning gear in the starting area, so it was interesting to watch the tunnelers at work, then lay a bunch of traps for our uninvited guests...



I'll be doing another Holiday Mode stream next week at the usual time, this one with a dedicated "RPDS build" :)

Last week the Gunslinger run came to its epic conclusion. The final day was super spoilery, but it was by far my highest scoring run ever (115k!). Many robots were harmed in the making of that video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5ML6Gzrc3E

It was so epic I ended up doing a full writeup anyway (with images).

In People Who Aren't Me Streaming Cogmind, check out this great clip from one of MTF's runs xD. So perfect.

And in the last SITREP I mentioned Gold Plated Games' first playthrough of Cogmind. Audish does an annual review series of various roguelikes called "Roguemas," and he selected Cogmind to try among this year's batch, so it was cool to finally be a part of that. His review is here.

While on the subject of reviews, I should mention that POYLBOT-7, the free Cogmind-like I released earlier this year, made a Best Free Games of 2018 list on PC Gamer, so that was pretty cool :D





There's not as much progress to show now, since I'm working on the main plot of Beta 8 (i.e., spoilers :P), though here are a couple things...

I needed to debug a new mapgen feature, and that required having a visual way to quickly tell one cave from another as far as the generator was concerned (for some special cases where logically separate caves might be directly attached to one another), so I added that in real quick.



I've never done a visualization like this but always wanted to after seeing so many other devs produce pretty color-based ID systems. Doing this is pretty easy: Just use HSV coloring and start with a low hue, then increase the hue for each subsequent object by some static amount for each one. Knowing the number of objects in advance also makes it possible to prevent colors from overlapping, since the hue interval can be set based on that known.

For something else I was working on recently I had to look into historical bug reporting figures, and came up with some stats:



There's the Top 10 earners of "bug points," based on some macros run on changelog data. Since the first release in 2015 there have been 460 total reports (including duplicates and simple things like typos, but also of course some major stuff as well) submitted by 118 unique players. These figures exclude the outstanding issues to resolve for Beta 8, which aren't in the changelog yet but I'll be getting to them all at the end of this dev cycle, as usual. Thanks everyone for helping making Cogmind be the best it can be!

The next SITREP will be on 1/12, when I hope to bring to you... I don't know what since I'm working on secret stuff in the meantime, but I guess I'll have to just do some non-secret stuff so I have at least something to show :P

A note about SITREPs: These are regular progress updates where I often share features coming to the next release, but aren't actually in game yet. Public releases get their own dedicated news announcement and changelogs/release notes, for example with Beta 6 and Beta 7.

There may be other relevant discussion of this SITREP on the GSG forums or r/Cogmind.

While the great Beta 8 is still under construction, in the meantime I have something else special for you! In fact a lot of special stuff...



Effective immediately through January 1st, 2019, every day Cogmind will feature different new content, much of it with a notably holiday theme. There are 17 new unique parts, among other "gifts" :D

Unlike my normal announcements I won't be listing the content or showing any screenshots/gifs here to spoil it, but there's some really fun stuff (including new mechanics). Some of the content is randomized in case you start more than one run in a single day, though the majority of the brand new stuff is organized and defined by date. All of the special Holiday Mode content is available right from the beginning of a run though, so there's no going out and searching for it--start up and see it right away.

Much of the content for this update is actually special parts that will only exist for this release, accompanied by a number of rare or unique items that can be found elsewhere in the world of Cogmind but that you may not have encountered before. You'll be able to distinguish between the two because the former don't have unique art, instead using a common placeholder (you'll know it when you see it :P). You don't have to worry about collecting the temporary parts for your gallery (since they won't exist in future releases), although you can technically use this opportunity to help flesh out your gallery of other parts, and of course get further or to new areas with the help of some of these amazing new toys.

Technically you can skip ahead in this event by changing your system date, but in the manner that we normally treat spoilers in the community, if you do this please don't openly share advance info on future content with others in case they don't want to know yet.

• This version's saves are not compatible with the original Beta 7.2 (the save version had to be increased in order to allow this update to add a bunch of content). As usual you can just finish your current run before updating, or if on Steam and it automatically updated yours you can use the legacy branches to roll back and finish your previous save/run first if you like (or do it later).
  
• You CAN earn achievements while this mode is active! This might be another reason to play it ;)
• Holiday Mode does not upload scoresheets (these runs will therefore not appear on the leaderboards).
  
• Holiday Mode is incompatible with challenge modes (if any are active, the challenge takes precedence).
  
• Holiday Mode ignores the advanced quickStart option.
  
• Holiday Mode will automatically activate for new runs started in this 12/20~1/1 period, but requires that you've played at least 10 runs before! We wouldn't want to confuse new players too much :P. If you haven't hit the 10-run requirement and want to force Holiday Mode anyway, you can run Cogmind with the "-forceHoliday" command line parameter. Note that even then it still requires that you've done at one run behind the tutorial mode, having made it to the smaller version of the Scrapyard (technically you can get around this requirement as well by turning off the tutorial in the options, but I wouldn't really recommend jumping right in to the special mode without first having done a few regular runs to learn the basics!)
  
• If it's activating automatically but you want to play "regular Cogmind" during this event period, run the game with the "-noHoliday" parameter to turn it off (or, again, roll back to the previous release via its legacy branch).
  

You may notice the version number is still Beta 7.2. That's because this special release was developed using a completely separate branch of the game, as this allowed me to prepare this for you all very quickly without worrying about taking my normal (internal) steps to future proof the whole thing with good documentation and clean code. Despite the amount of stuff in here, it only took a day and half :) (Don't worry, though, I did test everything and it seems to be in working order!)

So this is technically not the same branch that Beta 8 is being built upon, and this content and other related changes made to the game to support it will disappear with the next release. There is no changelog--as far as future players are concerned, it never happened ;)



The opening area might be a bit overwhelming. To quickly get set up, you could follow these general steps:

• Open up everything you see
  
• Attach any alien artifacts (these are consumables)
  
• Fill your power and propulsion slots (try to avoid using airborne propulsion, though you can stash it away for later)
  
• Attach any Storage Unit(s)--there'll be at least one lying around (and maybe a special one!)
  
• Collect most utilities and weapons (especially any that are clearly new and use the placeholder "holiday art" I mentioned earlier)
  
• Go have fun!
  

Note that a small portion of the items may not be amazing, since those are randomly chosen from among existing items, but a lot of the items for each day were handpicked, especially all the special new ones.

Thanks for being a great community, enjoy the holidays :D

Art, mechanics, streams, IndieDB Top 100, long lost friends... the year ain't over yet!

Quite a few new items coming to Beta 8, still adding yet more:



Most of these were actually appended to the art preview selected for the "Year 5 of the Cogmind" annual review, though one of those is previously unseen.

While we're looking at art, check this out:



Anyone remember what that is? After its removal back in early 2016, it's finally making what is likely to be a much-anticipated comeback among players who've used it before ;)

I've been working on a whole bunch of stuff for Beta 8, though most of the new content is under wraps until the release. Instead I can show this mysterious animation as updated for compatibility in optional low-contrast modes:



But there are also some interesting new mechanical developments to get specific about. Let's dive right in...



I always wanted a simplified propulsion system in Cogmind, which is why from the very beginning (2012!) propulsion itself has had no mass, regardless of whether active or inactive. This makes it much less complicated to juggle even more propulsion considerations on top of all the other parts you have to think about.

Of course it also resulted in the interesting side effect of so-called "propulsion armor," or sometimes attaching useless deactivated propulsion simply for its coverage and integrity. As a pretty unique quirk to Cogmind's systems that you can learn to use to your advantage in some situations, I've never felt a strong need to do anything about it.

Then suddenly some weeks ago I wasn't even thinking about this topic (or even propulsion) at all and for some reason the idea of adding a "drag" mechanic popped into my head. I liked the principle of having inactive non-airborne propulsion slowing down flight and hover, and started to like it even more as I continued thinking about how this could indirectly help further differentiate treads and aid heavy combat builds. With a new mechanic to limit certain kinds of propulsion armor and the potential for temporarily cheesing tread-specific benefits, treads could be buffed such that it's easier to make extremely "tanky" builds with lots of treads, which almost become a build's armor, among other benefits.

So all treads, legs, and wheels will come with a new stat, "drag," which kicks in only when these parts are inactive while airborne. Note the addition of a new stat here doesn't lengthen the item info, just takes the place of the "mod/extra" stat where appropriate ("mod/extra" is only used for airborne propulsion, so that same stat slot for non-airborne propulsion is instead "drag," essentially how some weapons may have a Heat Transfer stat or a Spectrum, but not both). Also note that drag values are not all over the place--they're actually static by propulsion type.

Now, balance-wise, the idea behind drag is not to prevent propulsion armor completely (in which case it could just be blocked!), but instead simply have a speed cost associated with it, one that some players might be willing to pay under certain conditions.

Here's a demo of the mechanic in action:



As with any brand new mechanic, we'll have to see how everyone responds with their builds, but in short, treads will become that much more unique (especially compared to legs, which have always offered similar capabilities), and propulsion armor won't be so common anymore. (Drag will not impact core movement, by the way!)



Drag is liberating. It's introduced a lot of design freedom to make treads shine at what they should do best: Enable you to effectively crush hordes of bots. (Okay well literally crushing them under your treads is already possible, but you know what I mean :D)

To that end, treads will be better putting their generally massive integrity to work protecting your other parts, gaining about 40 coverage each. This pushes average tread coverage much closer to that of light armor, and armored treads will be about on part with light armor in terms of how well they shield other parts.

On the offensive side, each tread slot gives a 2% bonus to accuracy. So the average tread build will have something like 6-8% better accuracy for all weapons, or even 10%+ for those going with a truly tanky build using a greater number of treads defensively as well (or to carry a ton of stuff--we might be seeing more... really heavy stuff in the future ;)).

Treads will also have a reduced overweight penalty (though still not as good as wheels).

In the end there are a lot of strategic implications here. As a combat player I know I can't wait to take a Beta 8 tank out for a spin :P



Over the past couple weeks we've had several people stream their first runs of Cogmind, with the community around to help and enjoy that initial experience all over again.

Tone, a seasoned roguelike player generally found playing NetHack, streamed his very first Cogmind run while myself and a bunch of other Cogmind players were hanging out there for much of it. Here's the first day, and here's the second. (I hear the videos will probably be up on YouTube later, at which point I'll update with more links.)

Although it was his first run he, uh, won :P. Many (most?) viewers had already won before so there was certainly a fair amount of backseating, but it was a fun slow crawl spanning more than 13 hours (unusually long for a Cogmind run, but the whole thing was all streamed, after all, and he was learning on the way). It also got plenty hairy in a few places. First run and all :)

I also continued my ongoing stream run this week, Part 3 of Cogmind the Gunslinger:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJqjn1qOW8E

WARNING: Unlike most of of my streams, the entirety of Part 3 is super spoilery--front to back special late-game events and branches.

The stream actually included a first for me as well, as it headed into one of the few areas of the world I've personally never explored before!

During Part 3 I achieved the bounty set by MTF, who challenged me to confront a certain rare late-game enemy. True to his word, MTF immediately purchased 4 copies of Cogmind to hand out on stream :D (MTF says this might happen again in some future run, I'll just have to keep my game in top shape, unlike my earlier RIF stream which got crushed late in Factory before I could reach the bounty location xD)

While watching the stream, Zyalin drew my combat build, with a twist :P



Zyalin says:

This is Bounty-Bot-7
made up from a recycled sentry core
Upgraded by the powerful KYZ-Guidance-Unit for real-time insider knowledge
and comes with a Backseat-Mounted MTF-Combat suite for maximum bounty potential

Last week Gold-Plated Games also checked out Cogmind for the first time, with both myself and the community in tow (unexpectedly :P). Fun times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cagixNfrTi4



Thanks to all of you who voted, Cogmind is in IndieDB's Top 100 :D (for the fifth year in a row)

Voting for the Top 10 started this week (and votes have been reset), but I don't think it's really worth bothering to compete against the really big mainstream games for those slots. Anyway, you can vote again and/or check out all the other indie games.



Steam's Winter Sale is coming up next week, and as usual Cogmind will be 10% off. (Not 25% like last year--Valve doesn't plan to feature Cogmind on their front page like they did last time, so as per my promise I'm sticking to only 10% discounts during EA.) Of course the discount is mirrored on both Steam and my own site.

The sale isn't the only thing coming up next week though. Stay tuned for something special for everyone ;)

A note about SITREPs: These are regular progress updates where I often share features coming to the next release, but aren't actually in game yet. Public releases get their own dedicated news announcement and changelogs/release notes, for example with Beta 6 and Beta 7.

There may be other relevant discussion of this SITREP on the GSG forums or r/Cogmind.

(Cross-posted from the devblog here--follow link for better formatting.)

It almost seems unbelievable, but we're already pushing into our sixth year of full-time development!

Once again it's time to look back over the past year at our progress, which in 2018 includes several major releases, other roguelike happenings, and our first full year on Steam. Here's an image collage to get us started :D

Selection of images from the past year of Cogmind-related development as posted on the dev blog, forums, and Twitter (full mega size here).



This year we hit a pretty surprising milestone: Over 10,000 hours of work on Cogmind!

Cogmind Monthly Development Hours, 2013.7-2018.11. (The color coding is for different aspects of development tackled each month, the subject of a future in-depth article to come at a later time.)

The tally at the end of November just edged past that mark to reach 10,062. In Year 5 I added another 1,690 hours, which is 17.4% less than the 2,046 hours of 2017. Work on the game itself totaled 763 hours this year, compared to 896 hours of community-related work (purple). That's a 1:1.17 game-to-community ratio for 2018, compared to 1:1.10 last year. The lower ratio, as well as overall decrease in hours, can both be attributed to a number of factors:

• Prior to Steam I did occasional small progress updates on the forums, but shortly after the Steam launch there were community requests for frequent news, so I decided to try even more regular reports in the form of "SITREP Saturday." This does mean I have to spend more time preparing these updates, though I'll admit they've been crucial in helping the dev process seem more alive and driving more sales to... keep development going xD
  
• I've also been streaming more! And over this past year have even started uploading most of the videos to my YouTube channel. This, too, is taking more time out of direct development, but I'll also admit it's been beneficial in a number of ways, like helping new players learn more about the game, sometimes attracting new players, and giving me more chances to play and walk through everything that's going on, which sometimes leads to balance changes or new content. I mean I'm going to play anyway, so may as well do it online to get the other benefits, too, right? :) (it's also been a lot of fun just hanging out with the community, but technically it still counts as "work"!)
  
• Even now, 19 months after it happened, The Concussion continues to be a drag on development. Dealing with it still requires a fair number of hours spent on hospital visits every week for treatment, and I have no choice but to sleep more than I normally would each day. Altogether these hours come out of direct dev time, since I can't reasonably reduce the amount of community involvement without taking a clear hit in terms of revenue :/
  

The biggest chunk of total usable hours that were instead allocated elsewhere went to POLYBOT-7, although technically that has indirect benefits for Cogmind as well, since it's a somewhat similar game and got some decent attention. I'll talk more about that later.

All that said, 2018 has certainly been a very productive year. According to the graph, November actually saw more work on the game proper than any single month since April 2017, the month right before the major Beta 1 release--from this you can probably tell that the upcoming Beta 8 has a decent number of fresh goodies ;). And this year we finally got to a number of major features required for 1.0, making good progress checking off the last remaining bits of the roadmap, alongside other additions.



Although there were only four major releases in Year 5, every one pushed Cogmind forward in a big way.

Beta 4 and Beta 5 piled on tons more QoL, improved the early game, and reworked imprinting to make it a much more interesting strategic choice. Then the following two releases took longer than any had before...

Beta 6 was the achievements update, where we got a non-Steam-reliant system including 256 achievements spread across six categories. You can read more about their design here.

Don't worry, that's not all. We've got more where that came from ;)

Most recently Beta 7 finally replaced the placeholder robot hacking system that's been in there since 2015, which I'd dubbed the "last major system" we'd need before heading to 1.0. I'm pleased with how it's turned out (better be--it took forever to design and implement!) Some further adjustments were made in Beta 7.1, and we'll probably get some more robot hacks eventually, but for now you can play with the 65 already in there :D

We also had a little fun for April Fool's this year, the kind of thing I'd like to do again... On that note, be on the lookout for another special intermediate update at some point this month, hopefully not long before Beta 8 itself lands.

An assortment of 2018 progress gifs!



So what other peripheral activities was I up to this year instead of working purely on Cogmind?

Well, 2018 is only the second time I've participated in 7DRL since creating the first iteration of Cogmind back in 2012. You can read more about that, and the game itself, in the original release announcement. One could say it's a Cogmind-like ;)

POLYBOT-7 box art.

It really ate up a ton of time, though, which is kinda funny because it's suppose to be a "7-day" roguelike xD. All told I took a month off for that including planning, the week itself, and writing a massive postmortem. I'm very glad to have done it, and would love to do more 7DRLs, though I'm thinking it's probably a better idea to skip 2019 in the interest of getting Cogmind to 1.0.

I also took part in this year's Roguelike Celebration, which while technically only a couple days long also requires that I travel around the world, so there's that plus the fact that I need to arrive even earlier to avoid serious jet lag, and then I combined it with a bit of vacation to make the trip more worthwhile. Such a great event, and although my talk wasn't focused on Cogmind in particular, being about roguelikes did of course still provide a few opportunities to mention my own work. Beyond the actual attendees, the video of that talk was watched over 6,000 times in its first month o_O

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jviNpRGuCIU

And although it didn't really take much time, I did finally release a new version of REXPaint, one of my primary dev tools and one that's used by quite a few other devs and artists. I do have bigger plans for it, including putting out a sizable 2.0 one day, but don't want that to interfere with Cogmind development so keep waiting until at least Cogmind 1.0 is a thing.



As usual I've been writing a lot--documenting events, analyzing things, sharing knowledge...

One of the highlights this year is being featured as the front page main article on Gamasutra three separate times!

• Workflow and Design Behind Creating One Game from Another in a Single Week (7DRL Postmortem)
• Designing and Building a Robust, Comprehensive Achievement System
• How to Make a Roguelike

These are all articles originally serialized on the Grid Sage blog which I then merged into larger single articles for that site.

As mentioned earlier, this year I've also been putting together a ton of progress reports for the forums/Steam. We're up to 40 SITREPs now...

A whole bunch of SITREPs...

In addition to the blog and these other outlets, I've continued hosting the r/RoguelikeDev FAQ Friday discussions. #69 through #76 are all from this year, and you can check them out for writings on topics like Packaging and Deployment, Map Memory, Movement, Procedural Generation, and Consumables.



While Cogmind may have been on sale for three and a half years now, it's only been on Steam for a little over a year. I haven't been doing any business-related articles like I used to, not since the launch post-mortem from November 2017, though I did take a stat-heavy look at player metrics on Steam. (It was nice to get that out of the way before GDPR this year convinced me to change Cogmind stats back to being opt-in only, meaning that any data we collect now is only a minority of the total.)

Today I've put together a graph showing how sales on Steam have been trending over time:

Cogmind sales history on Steam, Oct 2017~Nov 2018. Note: Sales off Steam are excluded here, but I mirror all discounts on my website, and the relative amount of revenue from direct sales pretty consistently hovers between 10-15% of all revenue, because yeah a lot of people buy games through Steam but Valve takes a huge nearly one-third cut of revenue from games sold on their site!

Sales are decent considering it's already been a year, though you can clearly see the total volume shrinking. Apparently I need to do more major releases paired with visibility rounds :P ("Visibility rounds" are Steam's option for developers to show a game off to more people a limited number of times during its lifetime, and which must be paired with a significant update.)

Or I guess just doing discounts like 25%+ would likely bring in a lot of revenue, although I don't really like the potential long-term impact that can have, not with a game as niche as Cogmind. I'm being as conservative as possible here... Besides, I already promised to keep the occasional discounts to 10% during EA, so not much room to maneuver there ;)

I did have that single two-week 25% discount at the end of last year in exchange for Valve giving me free front-page publicity for a day during that period, so it's good to see what kind of impact those things can have (I wrote about this on TIGS).

Financially we're doing okay, but I'm starting to get worried about next year. This won't change much with regards to development plans since it was already about time to start aiming closer to 1.0 anyway, though I can see it keeping me from straying too far from that goal in 2019 :P

Special thanks to Shogo, Joshua, Wladimir, Gary, and others for your generous donations this year to help keep development going!



If possible I'd like to reach 1.0 next year! So first we're going to get an action-packed Beta 8, then I'll switch gears to focus on features that must be done by 1.0 (which is just a milestone, by the way, not the end of the road!).

There are absolutely tons more optional features I'd like to add, but I'm pretty sure I won't be able to safely fund development past another year of EA. We haven't yet hit the review threshold I was hoping for, at least not in Steam terms (we've passed the threshold, but they don't count reviews from non-Steam purchasers :/). I mean, yeah we could've hit it already if I'd only released on Steam rather than via direct sales so long before, but to be honest this wouldn't have been a net positive because a huge chunk of Alpha revenue would've gone to Valve rather than me, making it hard to put so much time into polishing, so I'm glad things have worked out as they have so far.

But anyway, who knows, we may still hit it if I take too long to finish 1.0 ;)

Many thanks to everyone who's left a review so far--we've definitely got a much higher review-to-sale ratio than your average game on Steam <3

As for the release date, "next year" is a pretty broad target, though I can get a little more specific for you: We're going to get at least several more Betas before reaching 1.0, so it's unlikely to happen before Q4. Of course, if it gets too late I may have to avoid the holiday season and end up pushing it into 2020. October would be an okay month, but I'm not too keen on releasing in the months shortly after that. Anyway, we're flexible here :)

Lots of fun toys coming in 2019!

Another mini-update while Beta 8 is still under construction! While small, there's some very important stuff in here, and the good news is saves are compatible so you can switch immediately even if you've got a run in progress to take advantage of the improvements :D

While I was originally planning to include some quick fixes along with a different special release scheduled for later this month, last week a newly-introduced machine hacking bug was discovered, and I just couldn't let that one sit out there in public for so long. For Beta 7 I had changed up the machine hacking behavior to improve consistency for those using a fair bit of hackware (in particular System Shields and the like), but in the process inadvertently made it more difficult for those without hackware to do much at machines! So if any of you combat players have been shaking your fist at all those early failed machine hacking rolls, it's rightly so, and I'm happy to say things are back to normal now :D. Well... they're back to normal (actually, even better than before!) if you update to Beta 7.2, which I recommend you do immediately.

The good news is saves are compatible with Beta 7.1.

Let's see what else we get with this update...

• NEW: Relay Coupler base value higher based on depth
• NEW: Robots flash when hit by projectiles (toggle in advanced.cfg: flashProjectileVictims)
• MOD: Tweaked composition of squads attacking W base
  
• FIX: Machine hacking was more difficult than intended in Beta 7/7.1 [Suslik]
• FIX: Armor Integrity Analyzer effect protected user's armor rather than helping during attacks on armored targets [kiedra]
• FIX: Researcher pre-attack warnings would not always trigger if certain utilities were attached (broken by Beta 7.1) [Raine]
• FIX: Advanced option alwaysWarnAboutResearchers description missing from manual
  

Robots now flash when hit by projectiles. Some kind of explicit hit feedback was requested not too long back and although it's not a feature I personally need in my runs, I must admit it's been well-received by those who've seen it so far, so here it is!



(Ignore the fact that enemies just sit there and take it--that's just using debug mode to demo the feature :P. Also, they're not really dying because I'm intentionally using a somewhat weak weapon against late-game Programmers.) It's on by default, but like many QoL features you can toggle it in the advanced options if it bothers you for whatever reason.

You can see this and other features discussed in my 7.2 stream from earlier today, during which I continued the gunslinging run:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEkWzEk5c9Q
It feels really good as a combat bot to be able to do some free hacking again ;). Part 3 will be streamed next week at the same time, and the run is hot--we've met up with just the right allies to basically own the late-game, plus have an amazing loadout of our own (don't examine this at full size if you want to avoid a few little spoilers):



As a little bonus for Beta 7.2, I know from experience that the new RIF system introduced in Beta 7 and expanded in Beta 7.1 is still a little tough to rely on in the late-game, so I've also added a new formula that gives bonus value to Relay Couplers based on depth. The further you get, the better the couplers, regardless of their source.

Enjoy! :D