Thanks, BR Updates, and a sort of 2-player mode ;) (Patreon)

Thank you for a YEAR of support on Patreon! Wow, hard to believe it's been that long already, but it's been so helpful and about time to start allocating some of this to audio resources to finally bring Cogmind to 1.0.

I still haven't started on Beta 10 proper due to all the AI work that's been going on. Recently I've been doing polish and bug fix updates to Battle Royale mode (some of these were announced and discussed on the patron Discord, rather than spamming news about it here :P), which has been modified in place so it's always available from the link in the original post (also always in the Projects depot for Sage+ supporters). Over the past couple weeks the 9.4-BR release has gotten 9~10 updates, the most recent of which was just today.

Yes, the negative Protomatter bug has been fixed (including for RPGLIKE in future releases), but more importantly a lot of the updates have involved making the AI better at build management.

These improvements are actually a side effect of my continued work on the same AI for a different event. That's right, we've got another one in the works, and it's 1) mostly done now, and 2) fun :D

Player 2

All the foundational AI work from earlier is really paying off in so-called "Player 2" mode, where you have a fellow "Cogmind" with which to brave the challenges of 0b10.  Just imagine, a friend building themselves alongside you, fighting alongside you, getting into trouble alongside you... There is a lot of interesting new strategy involved here.

For convenience I've also built a new UI (in the usual place where special mode windows go) showing their movement type and speed, class, and giving access to their loadout, as you can see here:

The loadout window is persistent so you can just leave it open if you prefer (or close it temporarily if it's getting in the way of something you need to see).

Here's another shot from me and my buddy on our latest run, having just reached -3/Research:

For AI tweaking and debugging purposes I can see their inventory contents (grayed), but while playing you won't normally see that. They do know how to use their inventory effectively (well, not as effectively as a player can, but overall they're pretty decent!).

There are a number of characteristics unique to this mode, but the most important to know is that your two cores are linked--damage to one is applied to both, so you're essentially sharing a single core. Again, yet more interesting strategic implications here, and this adds a lot to the fun. It's kinda like an escort mission, but exactly who is escorting who might change from time to time ;)

I'll be releasing Player 2 sometime this month for you to try out, but for now it's still missing some key elements.

Battle Royale Dev Discussion

Over on the blog I put together some coverage of Battle Royale mode, mostly a collection of different things I've written here on Patreon before, although there are some new details filled in, like the pseudocode behind this type of AI (including essentially both BR/P2).

7DRL

As you might know, 7DRL is in full swing this week, though this year I'm not participating. I'm sure there'll be a lot of great little new games to come out of it, and wonder which will become something even bigger and stick around for years to come :P

I've been helping advertise and facilitate the event, though in the interest of focusing on my own work I probably won't be reviewing this year, unless that's something a lot of people would like to see (it takes about a week out of regular work time to do a good job of that).

Even if you're not participating, there's a version-frozen free release of the pretty cool  "DragonRuby Game Toolkit"  you can check out. It's a fast, simple-to-use, engine that supports hot loading, and they've already got a little stub ready to go if you want to use it for a simple roguelike :D

A full run-down of the engine can be found here.