Cogmind - An Amazing Sci-fi Roboroguelike

In Cogmind there is a specific keyboard only mode you can turn on or off. I’ve tried it a couple of times and love it, but until I can remember all the commands I still use the mouse here and there.

Oh, haha, I thought he was referring to how in Arden games your upgrades improve just small percentages (plus .5% to splash damage, for example) and everything feels a little bland (I liked bionic dues, but the last federation lost me with this…).

The small incremental development upgrades is something I really enjoy thouh. The game always has something new everytime you fire it up.

Bionic Dues is the second best game Arcen Games made, in my opinion, AI War being #1.

I was referring to the incremental improvements in game. Like upgrading your laser .5%. It’s especially bad when said item has 5 attributes all with extremely minor changes.

I love the way arcen supports their games.

Okay a broke down and bought this game and it’s way cool. I’m a bit worried about the start getting same-y after a while since there don’t seem to be too many unique components early on, but otherwise very excited about it.

It took me a while to wrap my head around it. In particular, how to think about it strategically. This post on their forums has a good number of basic strategy videos that helped me figure out what I should be thinking about. If you’re not getting anywhere in the game, I recommend checking them out, they made the game much more enjoyable for me.

Ohhhhh thanks, will definitely watch those!

So from Cogmind I moved to Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, which I tried once but never got into. Now I’m getting hooked on that! Like I don’t have enough things to play!!! At least it did what I wanted - got me off of Cogmind until it’s further along.

My favorite part about this game are the slow motion deaths. As different systems fail, you start rapidly trying to replace them from your inventory, then picking them up from the ground, and ultimately just try and find some nearby hover pieces to throw together so you can successfully run away. But then you come across a stray informer on your way out, and suddenly a police dude catches up to you. In a last ditch effort, you turn on your rocket launcher that you’re generally too nervous to use, and fire. Turns out that structure you’re next to is a nuclear reactor. It explodes taking out those hover jets you just picked up. Police come from all directions and you just start hobbling praying there’s an exit around the corner (there almost never is).

This sounds really cool. Want to wait for an official release though so whatever time I spend with it will be with the best possible version.

Probably a good idea. I’ve had a few goes to check it out, and find it difficult to stop myself from firing up another run… but I want to wait until it’s a bit more done as well. Though it feels complete.

Roadmap says it’s 75% complete, mostly maps and story to come, and 23 weeks dev time remaining.

Grid Sage Games says:

2016 is coming to a close, and so is Cogmind development! Okay, that sounds a bit premature–I’ll be working on the game for a while yet, but the last remaining story elements are very close to completion, and as those are wrapped up along with some accessibility features and whatever other content I can squeeze in, it’s about time to call this 1.0… and then just keep adding stuff for a while as usual :P

This is excerpted from a newsletter.

Cool… I think. :P

Been dabbling on and off, waiting for v1. But if he keeps adding stuff, do I keep waiting?!

Game today entered Beta, whee!

Cogmind is still not truly “done,” but I’ve decided that from here until 1.0 we’ll be calling them Beta releases to signal that while development is still not complete, it’s no longer as early as “Alpha” might imply. This is a huge milestone, technically bigger than the future 1.0 itself, and the switch also reflects a coming change in pace: we’ll be seeing fewer large releases in favor of putting out smaller updates more quickly.

I was hoping this thread was being bumped because the game was finished. So many games on my wait-to-buy-when-it’s-done list. Oh well. I guess I’ll check back in 2019.

At least ‘beta’ means ‘feature and content complete, bug fixes only’!

Doesn’t it? It used to. :(

The author isn’t sure. I think he loves his baby so much, he doesn’t want to see her leaving home ;)

I finally tried this. Love the interface. It’s like a text-base interface from the 80s terminals that kept evolving for the last 20 years in an alternative universe. It looks better in motion that you get from screenshots.

It’s still not out on Steam but you get a Steam key if you buy from his site. Looks like the developer had a concussion so he’s delaying the Steam release to recover, which could be months. (He went right back to work after the concussion at at full speed and then had terrible side effects from that, so now his recovery is going to be slow and require staying away from the computer for long periods of time.)

But it’s a quite complete and polished experience in its current version.

Is it going to Steam on EA, or at 1.0?

It’ll be EA.

Though technically it’s in beta now, the dev considers it “done” as all the story content was finished. But he wants to keep adding more stuff when it’s on Steam - in his words “further development is mostly optional fun stuff”.

According to the roadmap, there’s also some audio, metagame, and accessibility left to do.

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Note there was also a typically lengthy devblog post on versioning schemes as he agonised over all this!

Following Cogmind’s development was like spectating Bizarro Gr****re.

It was so fascinating, sometimes freaky, to read his concerns, his trying to maintain control, and his open way of sharing all of it.

Still need to play the game properly after all this time, though!