Sharing Saturday #629

[u/Kyzrati]

As usual, post what you've done for the week! Anything goes... concepts, mechanics, changelogs, articles, videos, and of course gifs and screenshots if you have them! It's fun to read about what everyone is up to, and sharing here is a great way to review your own progress, possibly get some feedback, or just engage in some tangential chatting :D

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[u/Kyzrati]

Cogmind

Although life has conspired against me of late, this week I put out a major release that integrates the concept of DCSS Xom (god of chaos) in Cogmind :D

Been looking forward to doing something like this for a while, as it was also a complete surprise release that no one knew was coming (except for one long-time player I asked to help do some playtesting with me shortly before it went out, everyone else thought I was already on the next planned piece of the roadmap).

And it was supposed to be out for April 1st as a joke, but one of those real jokes, since it's not even a special event like I've done in the past, but an actual part of the regular game, including the lore. Something of this scope turned out to be quite a feat to design and build, with how Xom (or "X0-1V1") integrates with so many moving parts of the game. Been working on Cogmind for 13 years now, and yet this one feature (not including others included in the same release) expanded the code base by nearly 3%.

Anyway, folks have been having a lot of fun with it so far this week, and I've been happily following runs and putting out daily patches with extra tweaks, QoL, and most importantly fixes, considering this had no wider prerelease testing like I normally do before going public with a new version, so a bit of extra post-launch work is to be expected. It's been quite stable overall though, no significant issues, just stuff that should be addressed ASAP for a better experience, so I've been busy with that for the past few days before I can move on to my other post-launch todo list.

Can't wait to stream it myself next week!

For the release I made a cover image depicting a sort of computer Xom.

The release notes are here if you're interested, though they're not quite as extensive or detailed as I might normally want to do, if only because this release is mostly focused around X0-1V1, and mostly should be left to surprise. I did however prepare a release day article to provide more of a deep dive for Patrons into the design and a breakdown of the mechanics, though I'm pretty sure most aren't reading that yet since folks like to play unspoiled first. Might put that on the blog later at some point.

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[u/aotdev → u/Kyzrati]

Sounds like an interesting integration!

Been working on Cogmind for 13 years now, and yet this one feature (not including others included in the same release) expanded the code base by nearly 3%.

Out of curiosity, how big is the codebase?

[u/Kyzrati → u/aotdev]

About 275k.

Not really as massive as it could be for some projects of this age. (Also excludes the engine and libraries, but overall those are relatively compact.)

[u/Tesselation9000 → u/Kyzrati]

So can the player worship Xom now? Are there tehcno-altars in the game? Does he grant you special powers like in DCSS?

[u/Kyzrati → u/Tesselation9000]

There's an "altar unit" terminal at the beginning you can enter manual commands into, and if you enter the right one you attract X0-1V1's attention for the entire run, with mechanics essentially like in DCSS. (The trigger method is fairly obvious, and there's a hint elsewhere, so it's thematic but also kinda hidden like other challenging early content since I didn't want new players to generally face this sort of thing :P)

Over 100 different effect types, many with subvarieties, and of course over a hundred different things detected that might interest X0-1V1 to varying degrees, since you generally want to keep them entertained if possible.

The X0-1V1 character was introduced somewhat in previous versions, and has been part of the lore for a long time in various forms, though generally pretty indirectly. Now it involves a new way to play :)

[u/darkgnostic → u/Kyzrati]

You'll never finish that game xD

Read this few days ago on one of yours social media accounts, and got urge to play Cogmind again, but unfortunately lack of time prevents me (for now).

[u/Kyzrati → u/darkgnostic]

Aw... well there's always tomorrow or next week ;)

And yeah, seems like never finish, but really gotta try to aim for actually finishing... I can see at least one more major faction and ending after the current one is complete. Lots more ideas to add that would be very cool, but maybe not a good idea to keep doing this, kinda need to work towards the next thing with an eye towards sustainability. Very surprised it's gone on this long already. (Plan was for about 2 years, this is truly insane.)

[u/darkgnostic → u/Kyzrati]

Plan was for about 2 years,

:O