Silence Before the Storm

Silence, but certainly not Calm. At least not here, where I've been super busy, nor in the community where we have been seeing a flurry of fun and challenging runs from many players (and GJ has returned!).

As always I'm very eager to get the next release out for you, though there has been a bit of a... setback. No issues on the design and development front, at least not directly--but over the past month and a half IRL issues have dropped some huge roadblocks in the way that require a lot of time and brain power to navigate.

As anyone familiar with indie dev projects will know, work long enough and stuff like this is inevitable, since being solo/small teams our progress is much more significantly affected by individual external factors. I'm generally good at mitigating this sort of thing, having always been independent in my work (even before gamedev), but there comes a time when something is significant or sudden enough that it's time to roll with the punches at the expense of progress (if temporarily).

To get more specific, not long after my last update here, we were notified that the old apartment we've been renting for more than a decade (basically for most of Cogmind dev) is suddenly being sold this year. We can't afford it (and wouldn't want to buy it anyway), so we have to move out, but also our rent has been frozen for a decade, so as one would expect, prices of other options, everywhere, have gone waaaay up in the meantime xD. This has led to a lot of issues (more than just what's on the surface there, but no need to get into it). As such, I've had to put a lot of effort into figuring out the best options for where to go from here, then executing on those plans.

The good news is, so far everything IRL is progressing smoothly enough! There is light at the end of this tunnel, it just keeps getting longer for now :P

Also the timing could be worse! Several things are lining up just right to help us get through this, so I'm grateful for that, though in terms of Cogmind development it does mean it's been both slower and quieter than I'd like.

Part of the silence was going to happen anyway, since I'm working on spoiler content at the moment so it's harder to do as much writing or sharing to begin with. The "wannabe gooftech" post and related discussions were supposed to be a sufficient bridge across the spoiler period, avoiding too much silence, though that was my intent before things started getting even crazier here.

Of course I'm still on Discord every day, keeping up with the community, fielding little bugs, or engaging in other discussions. Also you might notice I've been streaming more than usual these weeks, which is not a coincidence--that has been a direct result of needing to take some breaks xD. I've been playing and sharing Lost Flame and the Brogue-like TARN, though this week had to skip even my normal streaming day because I was simply out and about all day working through issues...

Anyway, just a general update for folks as to my/Cogmind's status, since you normally would've heard from me by now. I've previously mentioned as much in our private Discord channel, but decided it was about time to put up a wider notice for anyone not hanging out there, or for those who may have missed it.

I think the next release is going to be fun times, but still don't have a time frame for it. While I'm decent at gauging approximately how long dev work might take to complete (even factoring in my usual side quests with extra content), it's much harder to predict what any of these IRL curve balls might do, hehe. If everything goes smoothly, we will be moving in maybe about three months, with still much more to handle between now and then, so it will continue to be a distraction for a while, but I believe the height of this craziness will at least settle down here after another week or so and I can get back to properly focusing on development until the next wave hits in maybe a couple months.

Many thanks for everyone's support, and it's been great to see all the play progress and camaraderie on Discord. Really keeps me going <3

As usual not the greatest measure, but it's a measure so I'll share that since Beta 16.1 a whopping 7k lines of code have been added towards the next release. That's a 2.7% increase on the core code base so far. That's the best I can do right now for a tease. You know, spoilers :)