Month: December 2022

Cogmind is now in its 9th year of continuous development, so as usual let’s take a look at the past year of progress in yet another annual review!

Although most of the feature progress I share is in the form of animated gifs, there are a handful of static PNGs as well which I’ve compiled into another collage for a visual overview of 2021:

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

Hourly recording of dev work continues as usual, and the trajectory is similar to last year with more time put towards coding and work on the game itself as opposed to community-facing marketing-type stuff (an angle made easier by the lack of public releases, but we’ll get to that later :P). I’ve been a lot less interested in getting the word out and would rather

Early this year Cogmind celebrated its 10th anniversary since it was first released as a 7DRL, and as the year comes to a close it’s once again time for an annual review to take a quick look at where we’ve been, and where we’re going!

First here’s our yearly dev collage showing off in visual form some of the progress and work since our last review, version 2022!

Selection of images from the past year of Cogmind-related development as posted on this blog, forums, and social media (larger size here).

While lots of cool things have happened this year, I’m a bit disappointed that the past couple months were shattered by health and IRL issues (mostly repeated Covid interruptions), slowing what would’ve otherwise been an even more productive 2022. Technically I put in 7.5% more hours than the previous year, but the total fell 13.7% compared to 2020.

Cumulative hours

For years now I’ve been planning to eventually create a menu for accessing Cogmind’s lesser-used “special commands,” features not only requiring the keyboard, but even all assigned to Shift-Alt key combos. So these rarely needed (but still sometimes useful) features were already pretty clearly grouped together as a unit by their annoying modifier, but ideally they should be easier to trigger, not to mention also more readily available to mouse users.

I waited quite a while to implement this menu, mainly because I wanted to design and build it for a more stable and complete set of special commands, one that we couldn’t really be sure about until later in development (and sure enough these features have been gradually expanding and fluctuating over time, coming to a head in the current Beta 11). In the meantime it wasn’t an especially pressing issue because, again, these aren’t exactly commonly needed features,

Last time I wrote about item variants and randomization in roguelikes, and how Cogmind is purely based on a large set of static items, but more recently I’ve been running an experiment to play with not-so-static items. The entire mechanic revolves around a single new utility: the Scrap Engine.

A new utility is born.

The Scrap Engine operates like the Field Recycling Unit in that in addition to the normal inactive and active states it can also be cycled to COLLECT mode, during which it will “eat” items at the current location. These items are presumed to be disassembled and added to the Engine’s resources in order to be mixed with others and reassembled into new “constructs,” the name for a new category of randomized items. Instead of creating new ones it can also use these resources to modify existing constructs. Although in both cases the results are indeed based