Kyzrati

Beta 11 X7 Prerelease - Don't Get Cut

It's that time again, for Yet Another B11 Prerelease :)

This time we're focusing on QoL and new bots, primarily to finalize the Heavy class after gaining some experience playing with those game-changers. However, I haven't really gotten any feedback on the X6 Active Sensor paths yet, so didn't add those into the remaining maps yet.

I'll go over the big stuff in more detail further below after the changelog...

Changelog

The full changelog included within has been upda...

Fabrication Rework Concept

Last year while discussing a bunch of big things that might happen in Cogmind's overhaul, the use of Fabricators came up and Pimski, among others, had some interesting ideas and summary in the relevant forum thread. Since then I've thought about it off and on, but never really came up with a compelling solution for what I agree with is an area that could use improvement. Well the ...

A less Heavy X6

So I put out a couple updates very shortly after the initial X6 release to fix some major bugs that had slipped through, but this new update definitely deserves its own post...

Last Friday I wanted to rush the first X6 build out the door without enough time to do more than an hour or so of testing it in actual play scenarios, and surprisingly during my time doing that I did not have a chance to notice a couple of really nasty bugs that meant Heavies were totally imbalanced.

Beta 11 X6 Prerelease - Fun and Death

Each of these prereleases makes significant enough changes to be a whole release of its own, and this one is not holding back in that regard (imagine what people are going to think when they're hit with the full Beta 10~11 transition all at once xD).

Technically the changelog for X6 isn't especially long since a lot of the biggest features are merged into a few short entries as they're new and would require more space to introduce than a changelog can provide. Besides, it's always nice ...

Roguelike Dev Tutorial Event & 7DRL 2021 Reviews and Videos

Just some quick news on what's going on lately for those of you who may be interested but missed the initial announcements or aren't following community news in other places:

RoguelikeDev Does The Complete Roguelike Tutorial

Over at r/RoguelikeDev we've started our annual tutorial/code-along event, where we've got everyone from complete programming beginners to seasoned devs...

Introducing the Active Sensor Suite

More infowar?! YEP.

Are you ready for this 3-slot destroy-on-remove utility with multiple new mechanics? You tell me...

The Active Sensor Suite (let's just just call them "active sensors," or "AS," shall we? :P) lets you see the desire paths I wrote about in the previous post. The actual current in-game descri...

"Desire Paths" for a Robot World

desire path (n.) - a planning term referring to a path made by walkers or cyclists, as opposed to one that is officially planned

For years I've always been interested in making some kind of utility that allows you to see paths that were traveled by robots, partially because it just seems like a neat thing to do, something which would also probably look cool :)

Of course if ...

Cogmind Wizard Mode Update (Beta 11 through X5)

Recent Beta 11 prereleases have added a few wizard mode features, and although I was going to wait until closer to the official release to do a bigger announcement, or at least wait until there was more, it's been a while so might as well notify you of what we have right now :)

All commands have been merged into the wizard mode reference guide, and we're still using the same key. Here is a lis...

Beta 11 X5 Prerelease - Memes this way

X5 is here with quite a few mechanical tweaks, including an equal helping of nerfs and buffs--tears and ecstasy for all!

One of the bigger changes noticeable throughout a run is that pretty much all thermal weapons have been buffed as mentioned in my last article on damage types, a change which came about because I wrote that article and wanted to make sure to round out all the related features :P 2021-06-04 08:09:01 +0000 UTC View Post

PC Gamer Interview RE: Roguelikes

A writer for PC Gamer was recently looking to interview people knowledgeable about the roguelike genre and community at large, so got into contact with a few individuals including myself, who I guess might be a relatively reasonable option :P

I have no idea when or if the article will actually be published, or what will be included, but in general with topical interviews like this the idea is that participants answer a bunch of questions, even in great detail, and there ends up being ma...

Design Overhaul 3: Damage Types and Criticals

Whew that was a long one... finally wrote up all the details regarding the new damage and crit stuff that I've been streaming lately, covering the reasoning behind it along with other development tidbits, including one bit that's still to come in X5 ;)

Beyond this, my entire schedule this week has been completely upended by the fact that over the weekend we went into serious Covid lockdown for the first time, and as of just hours ago all students are being sent home for at least the nex...

Beta 11 X4 Prerelease - Get yer crits

X4 is ready :D

A lot of combat architecture stuff was fiddled with to get all these new crit effects working, so it's not impossible there are issues here and there, although as usual I tested everything individually and it seems to be working as intended so far.

More likely is that there are potential balance issues, but I didn't try to iron that out much yet, just going with what seemed to make some sense. We'll see if/how the system gets abused and adjust as necessary.

Al...

Oops, now crits are reborn, too? :P

So last time I talked about KI cannons and the new mechanics they'll be getting. Well one thing led to another (okay, dozens of others xD) and now the entire critical strike system is being redone. Having a special critical effect for KI cannons alone would be pretty inconsistent, and the original simple critical strike system was built for the 7DRL, after all, without concern for future expansions and the balance...

Kinetic Cannons Reborn

I've been talking about KI cannons getting an update for a while now, but so far have only discussed the real changes cursorily on Discord without going into many details. Part of the reason behind that would be that I wasn't completely sure of the details to begin with :P

I have a lot of notes on the matter and I don't imagine quite everything in those notes will become reality, but my most recent thoughts on the topic are looking quite likely, so I thought I'd share those here.

...

Beta 11 X3 Prerelease - Mechanical Renaissance

"Mechanical Renaissance." I've come up with what will probably be the official name of Beta 11 once it releases, and today we've reached yet another milestone on the road towards that goal!

The new utilities I wrote about in the latest blog post (pw: "machinesense"), so I won't repeat that stuff here except to remind that now you can try out the new Machine Analyzer, Structural Scanner, ...

Infowar Expanded

Beta 11 details! This time we're specifically talking about some of the features I've finished for the next prerelease build, which will be coming soonish, but first I need to spend an unknown amount of time converting my entire website over to a much newer version of PHP before the host's looming deadline (which hopefully doesn't break compatibility with anything... but probably will... but one can hope xD).

Once that's complete I'll continue work on Beta 11 X3 and try to get ...

Beta 11 X2 Prerelease

Hm, only just earlier today finished sharing info about several of the new map overlays, and here they are in a new build! Had to have it ready for that stream tomorrow ;)

Changelog

The full changelog included within has been updated as usual, but here's a list of the changes since the last prerelease:

• NEW: Added FOV overlays mode to view FOV of all hostiles, or for indivi...
  2021-02-08 13:54:59 +0000 UTC View Post

New informational map overlays

Oops, got a little sidetracked :P

So a collection of map overlay ideas has been building up in my notes over time, and last week I felt like experimenting with one of them for a bit. Well that started to turn out fairly well, and I ended up continuing along with several at once.

While I had intended to continue with the rebalance work following the last stream, instead at this point we have some new features to play with: a more powerful volley data visualizer, a map ruler for mea...

Beta 11 X1 Prerelease

Let the fun begin! So I streamed the first version of Beta 11 today and there was of course a ton of discussion surrounding the changes, and now you can all try them out for yourself. Though I'm sure much of the focus will be on the beginning of our rebalancing efforts, this release does include other completed Beta 11 work like a number of fixes as well as the item search and filtering features. (As usual any runs in this prerelease version are included on the separate 2021-01-22 14:29:53 +0000 UTC View Post

2021, Unchained

It's a new year! And going into this year, I'd like to thank everyone for your support--we even just recently hit the next funding milestone :D. Assuming it stays at or above this level (which I imagine to be likely based on previous trends), this means the Unchained really are coming to Cogmind O_O

More on these traitorous bots below.

Catching Up

We're a little further behind than I expected at this point, first due to a higher-than-expected amount of stuff going...

Item Searching and Filtering

The patrons have spoken, and the features are complete! We now have some more advanced UI features that are really going to make browsing through lots of items much easier. To celebrate (and educate :P), I've put together a new article about how these features work...

I've embedded it in image form below, but you can also check out the text version here. The password for access i...

Cogmind 2020 ARG Post-mortem

The ARG post-mortem is complete, taking a look at how the ARG event for Halloween 2020 was conceptualized, built, played, and received.

I've embedded it in image form below, but you can also check out the text version here. The password for access is "unchained".

Cogmind 2020 Forbidden Lore ARG Walkthrough

So this is a blog article that's actually not coming until late this month, after I put up the event post-mortem which will talk a lot more about how it was conceptualized, built, played, and received.

But I thought some of you might be interested in having a sneak peek at the full walkthrough now, either for some extra hints if you're still doing it, or because you're curious about the puzzles and/or lore. Even for those of you who've already completed it, there's also some co...

Cogmind Beta 11 Feature Voting Results (+)

Thanks to everyone who participated in the feature voting--the final results are in!

We have a very clear winner, the new on-map item searching and filtering feature I mocked up earlier this month. Again, it'll look something like this.

I'll be refining the design and actually building it soon en...

Item Search & Filter Mockups

In the images for this post you'll see a collection of four older mockups that were mostly done last year when I was thinking about how to best organize a dedicated filtering UI that could appear over the top consoles on demand to allow you to filter the labels in real time.

The iteration at the bottom was the final one I arrived at, but since then I've been thinking more about the potential for a search feature and how that could be even more flexible to allow for both searching an...