Side Quests! (Patreon)

Okay so I'm not adding a whole slew of side quests to Cogmind (YET), but I have been doing a bit of side questing of my own lately, using some extra time to work on a few, well, yeah side questable things. Always nice to have the occasional alternative short-term goal, or more unexpected possibilities arising from new encounters that make everything more interesting than a game of pure survival.

One of these involved what is now one of Cogmind's most complex encounters, involving only a few actors but the fact that some may or may not be friendly, and will respond to what you do, adds a lot more nuance than that normally found in NPC interactions.

I probably could've wrapped that one up in a day less than it ended up requiring, but I was simultaneously shocked and laughing at the very first test run of this encounter, during which one of the NPCs immediately assimilated another, which of course caused even more chaos...

While it would've been much easier to just say okay these bots really shouldn't be valid assimilation targets, it's a funny possibility (and makes sense from a balance perspective), so I decided to run with it. That took a little while to work out.

Anyway, there was yet more new scripting architecture required to support some of that, so although I don't envision myself adding too many such encounters in the future, I'm sure the various new levers and tools will come in handy at some point!

You'll have even more handy tools yourself as well, since I'm still adding to the item pool as necessary, though some of these things will be tough to find:

Also some not-so-handy tools, but cool and no doubt sought after nonetheless:

Beta 14 is coming along well, though it's hard to say if it's still possible to finish the first prerelease by the end of this month. I can say that the first prerelease will include the vast majority of what will be the final Beta 14, not just 25% or 50% like in the last several betas--more like 90%, so you'll be hit with a lot at once. I haven't done the official tally yet (waiting 'til it's complete for that), but your lore% will likely take a serious dive ;)

Actually, now that I think of it this month will be pretty hard to hit considering there's family visiting next week and I'll be away for a good chunk of it... Also one day each week is consumed mostly by streaming:

Streaming

This week I finally finished off the last part of my RIF run (seven parts?!), but I guess it was worth it for the extended RIF "win." I have to put that in quotes because my run sadly cannot appear on the leaderboards, seeing as that special win type was broken by architecture changes in Beta 13 :'(

With that done, next week I plan to take a break from streaming Cogmind to finally try out Path of Achra, which was gifted to me a year ago (I was already planning on getting it at the time!) and more recently reached full release. I will be playing it completely fresh, knowing basically nothing about the game, other than the dev is on our Roguelikes server and it might be more on the puzzle-ish side? (don't tell me more, going in blind!). So that should happen around the regular streaming time, about Monday evening EST.

Side Quests

It's probably also appropriate to mention here that adding a sort of more formal "side quest" system is in the cards for Cogmind, according to my plans actually associated with the Merchants Guild. Essentially it would provide opportunities to take on extra short-term goals for rewards, either specific or more general in terms of building your "standing." Plans for that are still in flux, since it's a ways out anyway, though before that point I'd also like to do a sort of experiment, likely as an event, that would let us first test out the overall feeling of such a system.

For now I'm just sticking to the approach of random lore-related side quests to aid in worldbuilding while offering optional strategic benefits or tradeoffs, though I do try to make them relatively unique, since we don't want all these things to be merely different colors of the same flavor. Definitely still more near-term ideas on that front, which I should probably leave as the final touches to work on Beta 14 while everyone's fooling around with X1, in the interest of getting the core stuff out there sooner rather than later.

Checklist

A big-picture checklist of things completed recently in terms of the new content:

• we're now up to 66 new items to be included in Beta 14 (a good chunk originating from Scraptown, but far from all)

• multiple new NPCs, each involved in new encounters (outside Scraptown)

• multiple new unauthorized hacks (!)

• Recycling mapgen updated, Scrap Engine given a new home

• multiple thematic and strategic links established between Subcaves and Scraptown

• Scraptown itself is taking shape, its full form and static details now complete, as are random inhabitants and dialogue (what remains are a majority of the individual random encounter rooms within, like you find in Zion and Warlord, for example)

• faction relations between the UFD and others

For a little while I was also working a bit on Beta 15 as well, because at its core it's tightly coupled with 14, so that includes some NPCs, dialogue, lore, items, and other code preparation for that.

Definitely less writing these days, and a bit less just hanging out on the server. This particular stretch of work requires a much higher focus to ensure higher quality, because it's quite large and complicated compared to what's come before. The UFD is coming to an 0b10 near you!