![\"cogmind_development_year_5_small\"](\"https:\/\/www.gridsagegames.com\/blog\/gsg-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/cogmind_development_year_5_small.jpg\" "\\"Cogmind")
<\/a>Selection of images from the past year of Cogmind-related development as posted on this blog, forums, and Twitter (full mega size here<\/a>).<\/p><\/div>\n This year we hit a pretty surprising milestone: Over 10,000 hours of work on Cogmind!<\/p>\n Cogmind Monthly Development Hours, 2013.7-2018.11 (click for crisper full-size version). (The color coding is for different aspects of development tackled each month, the subject of a future in-depth article to come at a later time.)<\/p><\/div>\n The tally at the end of November just edged past that mark to reach 10,062. In Year 5 I added another 1,735 hours, which is 15.2% less than the 2,046 hours of 2017. Work on the game itself totaled 763 hours this year, compared to 896 hours of community-related work (purple). That’s a 1:1.17 game-to-community ratio for 2018, compared to 1:1.10 last year. The lower ratio, as well as overall decrease in hours, can both be attributed to a number of factors:<\/p>\n The biggest chunk of total usable hours that were instead allocated elsewhere went to POLYBOT-7<\/a>, although technically<\/em> that has indirect benefits for Cogmind as well, since it’s a somewhat similar game and got some decent attention. I’ll talk more about that later.<\/p>\n All that said, 2018 has certainly been a very productive year. According to the graph, November actually saw more work on the game proper than any single month since April 2017, the month right before the major Beta 1 release--from this you can probably tell that the upcoming Beta 8 has a decent number of fresh goodies ;). And this year we finally got to a number of major features required for 1.0, making good progress checking off the last remaining bits of the roadmap<\/a>, alongside other additions.<\/p>\n Although there were only four major releases in Year 5, every one pushed Cogmind forward in a big way.<\/p>\n Beta 4<\/a> and Beta 5<\/a> piled on tons more QoL, improved the early game, and reworked imprinting to make it a much more interesting strategic choice. Then the following two releases took longer than any had before…<\/p>\n Beta 6<\/a> was the achievements update, where we got a non-Steam-reliant system including 256 achievements spread across six categories. You can read more about their design here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Don’t worry, that’s not all. We’ve got more where that came from ;)<\/p><\/div>\n Most recently Beta 7<\/a> finally replaced the placeholder robot hacking system that’s been in there since 2015, which I’d\u00a0dubbed the “last major system” we’d need before heading to 1.0. I’m pleased with how it’s turned out (better be--it took forever to design<\/a> and implement!) Some further adjustments were made in Beta 7.1<\/a>, and we’ll probably get some more robot hacks eventually, but for now you can play with the 65<\/a> already in there :D<\/p>\n We also had a little fun<\/a> for April Fool’s this year, the kind of thing I’d like to do again… On that note, be on the lookout for another special intermediate update at some point this month, hopefully not long before Beta 8 itself lands.<\/p>\n An assortment of 2018 progress gifs!<\/p><\/div>\n So what other peripheral activities was I up to this year instead of working purely on Cogmind?<\/p>\n Well, 2018 is only the second time I’ve participated in 7DRL<\/a> since creating the first iteration of Cogmind back in 2012. You can read more about that, and the game itself, in the original release announcement<\/a>. One could say it’s a Cogmind-like ;)<\/p>\n POLYBOT-7 box art.<\/p><\/div>\n It really ate up a ton of time, though, which is kinda funny because it’s suppose to be a “7-day” roguelike xD. All told I took a month off for that including planning, the week itself, and writing a massive postmortem<\/a>. I’m very glad to have done it, and would love to do more 7DRLs, though I’m thinking it’s probably a better idea to skip 2019 in the interest of getting Cogmind to 1.0.<\/p>\nDevelopment Time<\/h1>\n
![\"cogmind_monthly_development_hours_201307-201811\"](\"https:\/\/www.gridsagegames.com\/blog\/gsg-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/cogmind_monthly_development_hours_201307-201811.png\" "\\"Cogmind")
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Features<\/h1>\n
![\"cogmind_achievement_icon_matrix_256\"](\"https:\/\/www.gridsagegames.com\/blog\/gsg-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/cogmind_achievement_icon_matrix_256.png\" "\\"Cogmind"){kind=icon}
<\/a>![\"cogmind_year_5_gif_collage_small\"](\"https:\/\/www.gridsagegames.com\/blog\/gsg-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/cogmind_year_5_gif_collage_small.gif\" "\\"Cogmind")
<\/a>Cogmind-ish Stuff<\/h1>\n
![\"polybot_box_cover\"](\"https:\/\/www.gridsagegames.com\/blog\/gsg-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/polybot_box_cover.png\" "\\"POLYBOT-7")
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