Kyzrati

Speedy Mass Combat Testing (debug feature)

Sometimes I need to balance large scale combat between armies. I mean I can certainly make some educated guesses based purely on numbers alone, but in the end there are a lot of factors involved, be they build-based, environmental, event-related, or whatever, so I do have to at least watch entire battles play out from start to finish and see if the final results are within expectations. And of course the process includes a fair bit of randomness, so multiple tests are needed to confirm the ra...

Behold! The return of official Cogmind leaderboards!

They're alive! Mostly.

Unfortunately relying on a third party to handle the leaderboards clearly didn't turn out so well in the end, and with Beta 10 mostly done we really need to get official Beta 9 leaderboards up and running. Not to mention there are plenty of people out there who enjoy either aiming to rise through the ranks, or maybe just browse the leaderboards or other runs to see what others are up to. And of course with Beta 9's incredibly detailed new scoresheets there's even ...

Beta 10 Life

Well I can at least say that for Cogmind progress it sure is a good thing summer will be coming to an end soon enough :P

The summer months are especially tough on development since my son is out of school, meaning more activities and trips, and I also help out with the annual r/RoguelikeDev tutorial. This year there have been some additional speedbumps as well, including that REXPaint 1.50 release I recently did (which ate up way more time than I expected but it was worth it since the l...

Exploring the concept of a Cogmind "overmap"

Lots of games have "minimaps" allowing you to view a greater area than normally visible in the game screen, although (except in maybe a few rare instances) these usually aren't games with displays limited to a strict terminal grid like we have with Cogmind. After all, you can only "zoom" so much given the restrictions of such a grid.

That said, it has certainly been requested multiple times before, so I first explored this possibility about a year and a half ago, just to kinda work thro...

Beta 10 is Getting Bigger

So there's been an unexpected change of plans with Beta 10. As recently as last week I'd intended to put another prerelease version up on Patreon, possibly the last for Beta 10, which included pretty much everything going into the official release.

The remaining goal for that release was to simply clear out the final list of Beta 9 bugs once and for all, and add in a few more little features here and there. I was getting ever so close to the end of that list, with only a few items left ...

REXPaint 1.50 Download w/Three Extended Tilesets

Been two years since I did a full REXPaint release! This was originally going to simply be an incremental v1.05 combining all the little patches I've been putting out since 2018 in response to feature requests, then on a whim I decided to finally try taking a serious stab at supporting extended tilesets (fonts with more than 256 glyphs)...

To be honest I almost gave up part way through since it was getting complicated and I thought maybe it'd be better to wait for the future 2.0 UI expa...

Audio Accessibility Features for Roguelikes

Continuing where we left off with my article introducing Cogmind's new soundscape and its development, here's another explaining the closed caption-like audio log, visible SFX, and other audio options, as well as discussing some parts of the implementation process for these features.

I've embedded it in image form below, but you can also check out the full text on the ...

Expanding the world map in Cogmind... where?

Although there aren't any plans to add new maps in the near term, it's guaranteed we'll see more eventually, at the very least as part of the Merchants Guild update. On the Discord patrons channel yesterday there was a question about how and where new maps might be added, so I thought I'd cover that concept in a more general sense here, just to give an idea of what direction I'm heading.

Deeper Branches

First of all if you've done a fair bit of exploring so far you'll notice tha...

Beta 10 "Surround Sound" Early Prerelease (X2)

Beta 10 is still probably a ways off from release (still lots of fixes to go, plus some new content to add...), but I do have another prerelease for you if you're playing now or want to explore some of the new features.

The main feature of X2 is that we now have SIX new RIF abilities! This means you'll be that much less likely to get a specific ability from among those introduced back in the original Beta 9 (since the pool is now larger), but the new group includes some...

Beta 10 "Surround Sound" Early Prerelease (X1); Plus the new Audio Log!

Yay, a huge milestone finally reached! I'd been putting off the remaining ambient audio content for quite a while for various (good ;) reasons, but now it's reached a mostly complete stage, and the results seem to be pretty sweet. I just streamed my first run Beta 10 today, and felt that for the most part these new sounds do a pretty good job of building up the atmosphere without being too overwhelming.

Here's the current Beta 10 changelog as it stands now:

• NEW: 117 new sour...
  2020-06-02 08:52:22 +0000 UTC View Post

Cogmind's Ambient Soundscape Takes Shape

Woohoo, it seems to be working out so far :D

Pretty much every audible named machine got its own sound effects this week, over 100 of them. I actually did a sudden dev stream yesterday (will be up on YouTube tomorrow) to share the results so far since it would be more fun to do all that walking around in different maps with a few players rather than all alone :P

To recap, the first planned experimental phase of Cogmind's approach to the question of "music" has always been to just ...

May Progress Update

Heh, well I said I wasn't getting into a routine of this sort of post, but it so happens there are a number of different things going on, so here we go again :P

Beta 10

Beta 10 will bring a bunch of new features so it's still early in development yet, but after completing all the drone and AI work I talked about earlier, I've finally started on the last major required feature remaining on the...

My Cogmind Dev Tools

This latest article is a much-expanded version of similar lists I've given out before, complete with samples, anecdotes, and other info. Now it's finally all in one place as a comprehensive look at the tools I'm using, which some of you might find helpful, or to satisfy your curiosity :)

I've embedded it in image form below, but you can also check out the full text on the blog (with all...

Attack of the Drones!

Okay so despite the title here they're not all about combat. In fact, fewer than half of the new drones can actually fight. From a design perspective the goal was to add drones that would be interesting as drones, providing new mechanics or supporting strategies rather than just complementary firepower.

They're all complete now, but before getting into that I did a review of all the drone-related mechanics and made a number of important changes, since these would affect the balance of t...

April Progress Update

Nope, not getting into any sort of monthly routine here, but this is just a collection of random goings on and I needed a title :P

Beta 9.6

As you know, last week I ended up releasing more updates for Player 2, since it's both fresh in mind and I'm currently streaming that (and enjoying it greatly and plan to do more!).

Since then I've actually released a couple of silent hotfixes, so if you're playing and don't have Steam autoupdating (or use the DRM-free version) and wan...

Beta 9.6 "Friends Forever" Prerelease

Time for another quick release! I've been having fun with Player 2, and both myself and other players have been noticing some things that could be better which were already piling up in my notes for Beta 10. But I've already finished streaming some P2 runs and plan to do more starting next week, so while all this AI stuff is still fresh in my mind, and so that further streams can take advantage of im...

Developing Multitile Creatures in Roguelikes

Well that took a big longer than expected! Partially because there was a release just last week, but also because this is Yet Another Long Article (plus everything's a bit slower these days coronavirus impacts...).

I've seen and gotten a lot of questions about multitile creatures over the years, so I thought it was about time to put a lot of this material together in one place to help out other devs. There's always the chance it might get some more updates before it goes public, but it'...

Cogmind Beta 10 Feature Voting Results, w/Drone Concept Work

The voting has finally come to a close, and the results are in:

Drone Overhaul is the winner, so as promised, here come lots of drone updates!

One of the key goals in this area was to remove tedium, but obviously there's lots of room for other kinds of improvements here, not to mention more cont...

Beta 9.5 "Player 2" Early Prerelease (X1)

Player 2 is here! Took longer than expected partially because the virus thing is having a wider range of impacts on daily life than I might expect (even if we're currently better off here than in many other places), but also because because there's a lot of work behind the scenes for this one even if the changelog isn't incredibly long. I've done way more playtesting of this mode than I've ever done before, first of all because it's really fun and interesting, but also because it nee...

New Wizard Mode features and key (Beta 9.5)

There is a new wizard key for Beta 9.5 (attached), as well as some new features related to the new mode.

New console commands:

• "p2_inv": Player 2 mode ally loadout info includes inventory contents (in the some cases late-game loadouts with this setting on may extend outside the visible area)
• "p2_slots": Not really useful to you, but this is a feature I used while building the Player 2 mode AI, outputting to a file lists of prospective slot evolutions, which are weig...
  2020-03-18 09:41:57 +0000 UTC View Post

Thanks, BR Updates, and a sort of 2-player mode ;)

Thank you for a YEAR of support on Patreon! Wow, hard to believe it's been that long already, but it's been so helpful and about time to start allocating some of this to audio resources to finally bring Cogmind to 1.0.

I still haven't started on Beta 10 proper due to all the AI work that's been going on. Recently I've been doing polish and bug fix updates to Battle Royale mode (some of these were announced and discussed on the patron Discord, rather than spamming news about it here :P),...

Cogmind Battle Royale is off, but you can play it here

Sadly the Battle Royale mode I was describing earlier will not be officially released...

I spent a fair amount of time developing the fundamentals to get it playable so I could test it out, and as soon as it was semi-playable immediately realized it wasn't quite going to work, at least not without a crazy amount of additional investment that just wouldn't be worth it for a special mode.

In the ...

Access Cogmind's Real-time "Arcade Mode"

So last year on 4/1 we ended up with Pay2Buy as a special mode, but that wasn't actually the first idea planned for that event. Before going on to build that mode I'd actually tested another that sparked my interest at the time: What would it be like if Cogmind were a real-time game?

Now obviously there are a lot of different ways to potentially go about this, though when it comes to AFD ...

Cogmind + Battle Royale = ???

Remember last year when I was talking about my repeated interest in creating a bot to play Cogmind? Well, it's sorta happening.

Not nearly to the extent I was discussing there, mind you, but these things are best approached one step at a time anyway, and my latest work revolves around a somewhat different project:  Cogmind: Battle Royale.

That's the current concept for AFD2020, i.e. a new special m...

Cogmind Beta 10 Feature Voting

It's that time again, to vote for which of these features you want to see most in Beta 10! As a major release it will of course include many other things, but among the following optional features, I'll implement whichever you all want to prioritize:

• Full mouse UI for machine hacking: A set of mouse-driven menus would be added giving keyboard-free access to every single machine hack, including all (known) manual Trojans/brute force hacks. Technically this menu sys...
  2020-01-16 02:01:00 +0000 UTC View Post

We have stats! (sorta)

So the leaderboards aren't up yet, but with Beta 9.4 behind us I finally had a chance to get into the stat side of things. Again much of this isn't something I can really do on my own given how it's been handled (far outside my realm of expertise), but anyway, I asked Will for some direction and got some tools that have enabled me to make some meager progress in analyzing player data.

Now I'm not sure how things will work in the future, but for now what I have is a program that can read...

Beta 9.4 "Plot Armor" Prerelease

The promised RPGLIKE update is here, bringing with it mostly fixes but also some important balance changes as well. I've designated it as "X1" even though it's not really an experimental release and will likely be the same version that goes out next week aside from having the real version number attached. (Thought I'd keep it different in case something significant does unexpectedly end up changing.)

It should release next Tuesday, and saves are technically compatible ...

2020

A new year!

I haven't actually set a specific roadmap for all of 2020, and the further out we get the fuzzier my plans are, but we do of course have a clear direction: onward to Cogmind 1.0 :P

I can't say that it'll definitely happen this year, mainly because the audio portion has yet to be decided and that can have a significant but unknown impact on the timeline, but if that does go smoothly then the chances of actually calling it 1.0 this year are fairly high.

Ne...

Leaderboards and Player Stats with Protobufs

No, sadly we still don't have operational leaderboards (out of my control...), but the backbone is there, and I'm happy to finally share it all with you! Gonna be nice once the results are actually visible.

Leaderboards and Player Stats with Protobufs on the blog (password "pbdata").

And in image form below:

2019-12-26 02:54:34 +0000 UTC View Post

New Wizard Mode Commands

Just a short update to let you know that I added a couple new commands to the Wizard Mode How-to list for Beta 9.3:

• "xp [XXX]": Give XXX amount of XP in RPGLIKE mode
• "protomatter [XXX]": Drop XXX amount of Protomatter on the ground in RPGLIKE mode

Clearly I needed these for faster testing and debugging while developing this mode last week, and you can now play around...