What's on the "final stretch" to Beta 9? (Patreon)

Well sheesh, the changelog for Beta 9 is already longer than any before it, and it's still not out xD

As I've mentioned in some places, this is because I don't really want Cogmind to be without leaderboards for one or more releases, and a number of the new features I've been working on ideally need to happen together rather than split out across multiple releases, hence the delay.

Good news is I can finally see the end of the tunnel, and it's a glorious feeling. Technically there's still a lot to do, but it's more or less all mapped out and clear now, as opposed to before where there were still so many unknowns.

For one, as of last week I've completely gone through all the debugging work that needed to get done for Beta 9--everything about Beta 8 that's been reported over the previous months is fixed up. I've also done all the tweaking that needed to happen, mostly related to late-game challenges.

There are three major features remaining on the TODO list, and Beta 9 is done:

Rebranded difficulty modes

The difficulty modes will be rebranded to better handle player expectations, naming them Rogue/Adventurer/Explorer rather than the current default/easier/easiest, and as part of this everyone will get a new menu front and center the first time they start the game, explaining each.

Here's a mockup I've been working on:

(It's not implemented yet, the seeming interaction comes from me swapping REXPaint layers while moving the cursor and recording--there will also be animation involved)

I originally started with a horizontal mockup with squarish buttons since I think that overall layout is more suitable for this sort of thing, but these ideas didn't pan out because there are too many words to fit in.

This rebranding also includes a few new features, such as arbitrary save-load for Adventurers/Explorers. A mockup of one of the several access methods, in this case new buttons on the game menu:

I'll be doing a dedicated blog post (actually probably two) on this topic later.

Siege tread mechanics

I already went over this in the previous post, but haven't started on it yet. See there and provide feedback if you have any more comments. Once it's implemented I think I'll want to do a stream on that one :)

Online database

Yep, the same old big feature which has been the main reason for holding back Beta 9, because it's kind of a huge thing :P

At least the scoresheets have been done for a while, now it's time to turn to the online portion. I'm happy to report that I've gotten WinINet doing everything it needs to do in order to support the new features, mainly successfully transferring text strings and binary protobuf data. It was kind of a pain to figure out but I can't use libcurl or other widely adopted solutions because they 1) require newer versions of C++ and 2) greatly expand the game size (which is kinda funny considering they're just for connecting to the internet, compared to the tons of assets and content in Cogmind...). Windows API being backwards compatible into the stone ages can be such a convenient thing!

The protobuf definition for stat uploading is also complete, weighing in at 1759 lines, although there's still a lot of work to do for the online features. Still, I feel a lot better now that the foundations are in place and the tasks ahead don't seem quite so foreboding anymore. This period has been especially problematic for me because it's way outside my comfort zone, plus it's not something I'm super interested in or really understand very well, making it hard to build and maintain momentum.

Still no time table to release, primarily because I'm not familiar with this online stuff and it's being built with outside help so I don't have anything on which to base a reasonable prediction, but in any case while that marches along on the sidelines I've still got the other features to attend to. And even if those run out (though I doubt they will), there's always yet more plans for Beta 10 which could be moved up :P

I can say that there'll definitely be a Beta 9X5 coming out at some point, when we get to test the new online database system and make sure it's all running properly to smooth out any issues prior to the public release. (Of course it'll also include all the other additions up until that point, including the two new superweapons and probably siege mechanics assuming I'm done with them by then.)