Cogmind History Log Sample (Patreon)

FINALLY, that history log I've been working on for Cogmind for over a week, and introduced in the last update, is COMPLETE. Well, "complete," I should say, because it's not fully tested and I bet it's got yet more bugs than I've found in my quick test runs so far :P

It's just too huge to test every situation individually, and not as important as something like the achievements (256!) or robot hacks (65!) and other systems where I do test each and every little element to make sure it works perfectly.

It's got over 300 message types, and is working more or less as planned. I've done a few short runs and worked out any obvious kinks, and below you can find the log from my latest jaunt up to -5/Factory.

Branches and anything plot-related will tend to have more of the unique messages, as will late-game content like finding and using cool parts. I'm sure there will be more tweaks to come, though first we'll see what everyone's full runs look like. I'll be releasing this feature along with others in June as part of a Cogmind version for patrons :D

A Note on Grammar

At the end of the message writing and coding process, I went back over it all and did the usual spell check and parsing for grammatical consistency, then decided to remove most articles.

I had most of a system for handling a/an/the/[nothing] before variables like item names, but 1) it wouldn't be perfect in all cases without a lot more hard-coded data (which would take a while) and 2) it wouldn't be consistent with the game text itself, which intentionally avoids that sort of thing in message logs (keeping it more dry/robotic/clinical).

I did kinda like the fact that it reads more like standard English with articles in there, appropriate for the somewhat "story-like" history log, but then for the same reason it also kinda wasted space, adding characters unnecessary for understanding the text and therefore potentially slowing down visual parsing.

Non-variable-based messages, however, retained some of their articles, especially "the" in a number of cases.