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Cogmind
Asid:
Cogmind is a sci-fi roguelike epic in which you play a robot building yourself from components found or salvaged from other robots. Explore a living, breathing world through turn-based tactical combat, or sneak, hack, and fly your way to victory.
Official Site: Here
Forum: Here
Steam: Here
YouTube: Here
Single-player
Alpha Launch Trailer
About
Experience sci-fi tactical combat and exploration in a procedural world that combines traditional roguelikes with an immersive modern interface like no other. Build yourself from components found or salvaged from other robots. Attach power sources, propulsion units, utilities, and weapons to become a slow tank bristling with weapons, or a fast-moving flier zipping past enemies before they even have time to react, or a stealthy sword-wielding assassin/hacker, or whatever else you can come up with from the salvage you find. The situation can quickly change as you lose components and rebuild yourself from enemy remains. You are the Cogmind. Discover what that means as you explore a living, breathing world ruled by robots.
KEY FEATURES
Build and modify a unique robot from parts found, or enemies defeated
Dynamic character development without XP/grinding
Dozens of robot classes, each with unique behavior within the ecosystem
Procedurally generated world combined with hand-crafted content
Seven different animated endings to uncover
ASCII evolved: Most advanced terminal interface ever
Thousands of particle effects and SFX
Fully destructible environment
PROGRESS
Although currently in Early Access, Cogmind is mostly complete. There are over two-dozen map types, nearly a thousand items, thousands of sound and particle effects, multiple plot lines, hundreds of hand-made locations and encounters, thousands of lines of dialogue, and seven different animated endings to discover. That said, there are many plans to continue expanding the world with features and content, so for now we'll just call it EA :D
(Cogmind has been in full-time development for over four years.)
ROGUELIKE?
Cogmind is a turn-based roguelike, very traditional in many ways (permadeath procedural dungeon crawler built with ASCII in mind...), but at the same time innovates on the genre in terms of both design and accessibility features.
Within you have full mouse control--and full keyboard control! Use only one or the other, or both, and all common roguelike movement methods (mouse, numpad, vi, arrows) are enabled out of the box, no configuration required. Mouse users get drag-and-drop inventory management, and the keyboard is even faster with its multiple command schemes and built-in automation features.
Stealth play is just as viable as straightforward combat, using hacking and information warfare to outsmart the Complex. The lack of an XP system means you only have to use whatever means you can to reach new areas and find new gear to advance.
The world is alive with many types of robots, most of which are actually not hostile to you and have their own duties to carry out.
Map objects are labeled as they come into view, making for less tedious play and allowing you to instead focus on tactics and survival. A large number of other options and useful features are available to customize the UI.
While the most skilled players can reliably win the default mode, easier difficulty settings are available for those with less experience, or less time on their hands :) (advanced players can also attempt to take on the extended end-game!)
Accumulate knowledge across multiple plays, collecting info about previously used items in the ASCII art gallery (over 800 pieces of art!), and collecting lore about the world as you discover its inhabitants and guess at their potential motives, and true capabilities. While there's a rich story to uncover over many runs, know that it doesn't get in the way if you prefer to just strategize and min-max through your roguelikes.
Take on built-in Challenge Modes for a different kind of experience, or to prove just how good you really are.
WARNINGS
Not every game is for everyone, so there are a few things to point out that may affect your interest in Cogmind.
No Hand-holding: Although very accessible and there's both context help and a quick tutorial to teach all the fundamentals, Cogmind invites you to explore a completely unfamiliar world. Observant players will come to internalize many of that world's rules naturally, and as you reach new areas you'll also discover in-theme explanations for everything, seamlessly integrated with the lore. As part of that process you'll often be faced with the post-death challenge of figuring out where things went wrong and why, until you eventually reach a point where you can see danger before it even materializes.
Rampant Item Destruction: Every item in Cogmind can be destroyed, and many of your items will be destroyed. At first this may be discouraging, but once you figure out the basics you'll generally be replacing old and broken parts with much better loot even before you lose it anyway. Building and, more importantly, rebuilding, is a vital part of the experience and what keeps the game dynamic and interesting throughout. Adaptability is key, and amazing comebacks are commonplace.
No Classes, Skills, Etc.: Unlike many other roguelikes and CRPGs in which you may form a sort of attachment to your character class and the levels, stats, skills, and equipment they've acquired over time, Cogmind is defined almost purely by items. And as mentioned those items will be destroyed, so there's not much chance to form that kind of attachment. However, this also leaves room for great flexibility during a single playthrough, flexibility you might want or need to rely on to maximize your chances for survival depending on what locations you visit.
A Different Kind of Game: As a whole Cogmind is quite different from pretty much everything out there, a fact that turns some people off, but others rather enjoy it for that same reason. It can also take a little while to get into, but once past learning the basics and how to reliably overcome early-game areas, the world and its opportunities really open up.
Not Suitable for Small Screens: Due to the game design, the screen is always divided into a minimum of 80x60 spaces that make up the "terminal grid." This means when played on a physically small screen, such as that of a laptop, each space will be relatively small and some players could have trouble comfortably seeing the details. Zooming is not supported by the engine. You can test what Cogmind will look like on your screen of choice here: http://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/ui_preview.html (Note that ASCII mode is easier to see at smaller sizes, but it's understandable that three-quarters of players prefer the default tiles mode anyway :P)
Asid:
SITREP Saturday #16: Business as Usual
24 MARCH - KYZRATI
More achievement icons! We've got the final pass on two new categories here.
Special Challenges are probably not quite as obvious...
...whereas Progress-related achievements are more basic and numbery.
I've been talking about achievement "categories" for a while, but haven't gone into detail about what that actually means. Each achievement belongs to a certain category that gives a general idea of what type of achievement it is, determines the color scheme of its icon, and also enables it to be filtered along with others of its category via the in-game UI. There are so many achievements that after I'd formed a tentative list it seemed best to divide them up logically to aid both organization and understanding.
The six achievement categories:
Mechanics: A group of mostly basic achievements covering common useful tactics and learning about systems. Some of these serve as a way to teach (or at leas reinforce) features, too.
Style: Specifically play style-related achievements, like combat, stealth, hacking, etc. These are generally earned through normal play using a given style/strategy, and while some might be more challenging or require focus in a certain area, they're not difficult enough to be considered "special challenges " (another category).
Progress: Personal meta progress like high scores, lore/gallery coverage, and world exploration.
Challenges: This group doesn't have anything to do with Cogmind's "Challenge Modes," but is simply achievement-specific individual challenges ranging from Tier 1 (not too hard) to Tier 2 (hard) to Tier 3 (pretty hard!).
Events: Story-related elements. Basically once you've visited every location and exhausted all the branching possibilities of the plot, you'll have all of these. This category is entirely hidden, though, so these aren't achievements to be explicitly sought like a list. You've just gotta explore and use the in-game lore as clues.
Wins: There are a lot of different ways to win the game, whether achieving unique endings or simply winning by overcoming other challenging scenarios, so these get a whole category of their own.
Death and Taxes
So we've come upon another little speedbump on the way to Beta 6: tax season xD
Taxes have gotten more complicated this year--I have to file in two different countries now, so this'll be annoying. I could try to push Beta 6 out before the second country's deadline, but I'd rather not because the release shouldn't be about just achievements, so it's going to take longer than that!
Just a heads up that there's still lots to do on the list.
P7
I heard from someone this week mentioning that POLYBOT-7 "really helped them understand Cogmind better," so maybe it's worth checking out for that reason, in addition to the fact that it's just an interesting different way to play a modular robot :)
In case you missed it, I released that game[kyzrati.itch.io] last week for 7DRL.
Since then I've also been working on a proper in-depth postmortem about its development, which you may be interested in checking out seeing as POLYBOT-7 is a very experimental alternative approach to the concept of Cogmind. The first two parts are already on the blog:
Part 1: Preparation[www.gridsagegames.com]
Part 2: First Days with UI, Aesthetics, and Mechanics[www.gridsagegames.com]
There are tons of details and diagrams/images in there--here are some excerpts:
The source code evolution of all my projects since 2011, which share the same code :P
Redesigning Cogmind's UI layout to meet new needs:
Alternative item color schemes:
In related news, one of our Cogmind experts (surprise surprise it was GJ) won P7 on New Game+++++ mode, which requires winning six times in a row, each run harder than the last.
Next time more on achievements, and an introduction to improvements to low-contrast mode.
Asid:
SITREP Saturday #17: LOW_CONTRAST
31 MARCH - KYZRATI
It seems I never run out of achievement stuff to show... because, well, yeah there are 256 of them xD
Here's the finalized icons for the second to last category: events and story-related elements!
Achievement work is progressing nicely. Yesterday I pretty much finished the internal framework, and also implemented most of the new related UI features (except for the main achievements UI). But I haven't yet recorded anything to share there, so it'll have to wait for a later SITREP. (We have pop-ups on the map when achievements are earned, as well as a new section next to the end game stats window if any new achievements were earned at the end of the run. All animated, of course :D)
LOW_CONTRAST
Remember POLYBOT-7[www.gridsagegames.com]? Well it was quite the detour, but as mentioned before Cogmind benefited from it in a number of ways, one of those I haven't talked about yet being enhancements to low-contrast mode.
The "LOW_CONTRAST" renderFilter option I added in Beta 5 has been getting some use among players, though it was always kind of a hackish thing in the first place. Lots of Cogmind code and scripts assume the background is black, but I went in and changed that assumption in a number of places where it was more accessible. All of these improvements came as a result of efforts to polish the distinctive look of POLYBOT-7, which uses a low-contrast aesthetic by default. For example:
Path visualization is now much more visible. (All sample images are using the SLEEPY preset.)
full post here
Asid:
SITREP Saturday #23: Community 0b110
Cogmind - Kyzrati
There's been a fair amount of achieving going on in the past 10 days :)
Of our 256 achievements, so far all but 31 have been earned by at least one player. That's 87.9% of the total. At this point the highest achievement rate by individual players is around 66%.
Looking at the top of the global achievements list...
It's mostly what we'd expect, although worth pointing out it's kinda funny that The Most Popular Achievement will unlikely ever actually reach #1. Uninvited Guest in particular is an achievement that everyone will get on their first run, and technically speaking we'll always have new players joining who haven't yet finished a run to get the, um, "most popular" :P
Crack Shot and Storm Trooper are also both very common scenarios when just starting out (especially Storm Trooper among beginners who haven't yet learned how to maximize accuracy).
All these are pretty basic achievements though--all the really fun stuff is still a lot lower on the list as different players aim for different goals. We'll look at some of those another time.
I may also later add the global percentages to the in-game UI for players connected to Steam.
Speaking of achievements, remember that collage I made for the Beta 6 release? Just a fun gif related to that: To create the background I added a debug command in the game's console which creates a new window over everything and randomly fills it with achievement icons, automatically saving a whole bunch of screenshots that I could then pick from.
Trippy, eh? :D
Data Miner
As usual following a major release, I've collected a bunch of stats to share.
You can read all the details on the forums. http://www.gridsagegames.com/forums/index.php?topic=205.msg7691#msg7691
It'll be fun to look at achievement progress across the entirety of Beta 6 once the next release is out, but let's not get ahead of ourselves xD
Community <3
Our community has been quite active lately! (And not necessarily tied to this particular release :P)
A group of expert players have begun collaborating on a sort of detailed "complete guide" to Cogmind. There's nothing to show yet, but it's taking shape. It's also going to be chock full of spoilers.
The spoiler-free "guide" I wrote, a.k.a. the 60-page manual, has also been reformatted to a very nice PDF version for Beta 6 by Phragmented.
It's available as both a standard PDF document with chapters, and a printable booklet. You can download both here. http://www.gridsagegames.com/forums/index.php?topic=1128.0
For the community of Japanese players, PlasticHeart has shared with us his guide for preparing for a flight/hover run. He then even translated Valguris' quick guide to the early game (the original is a useful read if you are relatively new to the game). Cogmind itself doesn't support translations, but from what I've seen even having the manual translated has brought in new players from Japan.
There's been a fair number of players streaming this week, including... me :). I was going to stream last week but a household emergency put a stop to that, so this week it was finally time for some Beta 6. I streamed twice, a single run spread across two days, and won it. Just barely. In epic fashion. So it was definitely worth it :D. It got pretty slow at certain points with all the talking and strategizing, but we came out on top in the end. There's a full summary of part 1 and 2 on the forums, including links to YouTube.
zxc also spent a while streaming and uploaded his 701-turn speedrun to YouTube. Speedrunning is in vogue again now that there are a couple of achievements for it :P
Probably the community news with the biggest OMG factor is that Ape3000 has continued expanding and refining his wonderful player progression graphs yet further, and they now include everyone on the leaderboards! Some more samples:
There are over 20 graphs for each player. Check your own progress on the website. (Don't bother looking at mine, because unlike most players I don't migrate my data between versions and have always started with a fresh build each release :P)
As a reminder: If you don't want to upload your score data you can still create the graphs yourself if you can run the scripts found here. https://github.com/Ape/cogmindgraph
After 6 Comes 7
Fortunately there's a ton to play with in Beta 6, because Beta 7 will probably take a while.
Lots to do with the new robot hacking system (still in planning stages), but there are also some external factors at play...
Rather than working on Cogmind, I've already had to spend much of my dev time this week dealing with the new GDPR thing coming out of the EU. This involved lots of research and subsequent updating of my website, forums, blog, mailing lists, etc... At least it's a nice initiative and a worthy cause.
Anyway, yay that's mostly done at this point, but next week I'll be consumed by... taxes.
As you can see the upcoming week is going to be pretty boring :/
For this reason I'm going to skip next week's SITREP and focus on getting these and other annoying chores out of the way before really focusing on the next release. I'll still be around in chat, though, and will almost certainly stream again before the next SITREP, so maybe I'll see you there :)
Cogmind made a Top 100 indie games list http://www.indiegamewebsite.com/2018/05/11/the-100-greatest-indie-games-of-all-time/ . There are so many good games out there now that these lists are pretty subjective, but hey I'm not gonna complain! (Sure has been a while since Cogmind had any coverage from any major news outlet, though xD)
Today also marks the third anniversary of Cogmind's public Early Access program! With other games this might not be something worth celebrating, implying that it's taking forever to finish the game, but Ive put in over 6,000 hours of work in that time, and although it would've been appropriate to launch 1.0 last year I decided not to. For the time being I'd rather just keep making major additions to the game for free, which makes more sense to do under EA rather than "full release." After all, traditional roguelikes that keep getting updates for a long time are great, and it's hard to stop working on this when there are so many more ideas and it's "only" been five years so far :P
There may be other relevant discussion of this SITREP on the GSG forums. http://www.gridsagegames.com/forums/index.php?topic=1137.0
Asid:
Year 5 of the Cogmind
By Kyzrati | Published: December 5, 2018
It almost seems unbelievable, but were already pushing into our sixth year of full-time development!
Once again its 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. Heres an image collage to get us started :D
Selection of images from the past year of Cogmind-related development as posted on this blog, forums, and Twitter. full mega size here
Read on
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