A change of pace for 2023? (Patreon)

So Polymind turned out pretty nicely! I streamed that once so far (now on YT channel), and even released another balance update for it yesterday since I finally had some real playtesting done, and wanted to get that out while the official event period was still early enough that it'll make a difference for the stats going forward, not to mention all the folks playing it over the holidays, of course.

Yeah we're gonna have stats :D. Guess I'll be doing a blog post on it, writing a bit about the design and other related topics while also looking at the resulting data.

I was getting pretty burned out by the unexpected pacing required to put Polymind out there by the start of the holiday season, but a day off after 11.2 went out left me restored enough to squash some bugs, put together an update, and do a bunch of other related work this week!

Ideally the whole thing should've initially come together a good week sooner, giving us time to play with it here and do some more tweaking before a wider release, but I guess I started too late for the eventual scope of this thing. (There was a certain Cogmind card game concept that got in the way, followed by adding extra systems to Polymind to make it even better, and also those pesky controllable multitile robots...)

The Great Mergening

So unlike other special events in the past, which I've simply developed on top of what version I had completed before, launched the event, then continued developing the next version from there, seeing as how we already have a lot of Beta 12 stuff going on, things I couldn't properly release together with an event, (or wasn't ready to do so without the rest of Beta 12), the project is in an unprecedented state at the moment: Both 11.2 and 12 X5 have branched their own ways off of Beta 11.1.

This is pretty normal for many programmers, of course, especially when working in a group, but for me it's actually a first! That means I get to play with merging all the 11.2 files and code with our otherwise more advanced 12 versions...

(Someone made the funny observation that if you play Beta 12 at the moment, because the build date is earlier, instead of the normal "you're playing a prerelease" it will tell you there's a "newer" release out, which is actually 11.2, because it only goes by build date instead of caring about the version number. Just an interesting little fact.)

Obviously the intent here is to keep Polymind playable in future versions, plus because I knew it was headed in this direction, during the past few weeks I've also been making more general improvements to the code that will also need to be reflected back in Beta 12, so it's not quite all been purely Polymind development.

To do this I'll be using a nifty program called Meld, which allows for three-way merges so it can identify what changed from 11.1 to both 11.2 and Beta 12, and put it all together (with manual help, of course, since it's basically just a special type of text-comparing program that can't follow any logic so it could theoretically screw things up if left to automatically do everything).

Comparing files across multiple Cogmind versions:

I've only just started playing with it, not quite ready to merge, but it's neat! Here's another example looking at code differences:

Maybe one day some of the tech from this mode will even feed back into the main game, who knows, or I'll at least revisit and expand it further with the other ideas I had but knew there'd be no time to complete. But anyway, it'll be there in Beta 12 for you.

The Path to 1.0

I haven't really given significant consideration to when to actually release 1.0, and having done the Year 9 review already made some other predictions about 2023, but in recent weeks have been reconsidering the current approach.

Basically (in case it wasn't obvious xD), Cogmind expansions have been simply getting bigger and bigger over the years, and taking longer and longer to release. This is actually a great thing in terms of overall quality, giving enough time to properly build, tweak, balance, and polish bigger chunks of interconnected content and systems at once before it's actually been widely released.

I guess if Cogmind weren't a full-time commercial project that would still be the way to go.

Currently though, while Cogmind doesn't sell terribly during these increasingly lengthy periods with no release, there's definitely less activity overall, and also few reviews, which are kind of a lifeline for indie games, so I think it may be about time to switch things up again (on that note, if any of you haven't left Steam reviews yet, that'd be great to do so if you get a chance, though I'd be surprised if many of you haven't).

Honestly this situation is also part of why I used to release more special events, to interject some alternative releasing in between working on bigger things, although that approach comes with its own drawbacks and I've been shying away from it more recently as I try to focus more on the main game world.

So back to pacing, the new idea is to maybe increase the pace of normal releases by shrinking each one, breaking Beta 12 (which has just kept ballooning in size xD) into multiple pieces and even maybe work towards calling 1.0 the version which includes all the planned Beta 12 content (and then some, like we need a ton more achievements filled in before 1.0).

We could have the Scrap Engine and Garrison/ECA update as a standalone thing, followed by a couple new maps in their own version (Scraptown!), and the other planned map (and new ending) after that. This doesn't really change the overall content of Beta 12, mind you, just how it's built and released. Although I would prefer to work on all of "Beta 12" at once, I'm no longer sure it's a sustainable idea in terms of revenue (and reviews, which impact revenue :P).

Here I should emphasize that the mention of "1.0" isn't intended to have any new or different implications for longer-term development--like Unchained/Beta 13 stuff and the Merchants etc would still be a thing, they'd just be a post-1.0 thing in that scenario. It's just a name, so maybe it would happen and maybe it wouldn't... the more important takeaway is probably a splitting of Beta 12 into more reasonable-sized chunks.

So that's an update on what I've been thinking about for 2023 already...

I'll actually be out of the country for a few weeks starting towards the end of January (the first time in three years!), though even then will still be around and doing some work off and on. In the meantime, time for blog posts, Polyminding, and getting back to Beta 12!

Edit: Oh yeah, have this gif I generate anew each year for various purposes, this time again for our r/RoguelikeDev annual sharing event: