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[Kyzrati]

New post covering the in-game manual and input schemes.

[Kyzrati]

Every True Roguelike's gotta have one (or more!): The message log.

[Kyzrati]

Making the map area more informative in Cogmind/roguelikes with "map dynamics":

[puke]

holy cr@p, this is great stuff.

[Kyzrati]

Thanks. While there's still a bit more interface work to do, it's about to time to move on to content. Finally getting to that now. Just posted about entering the "content" phase of production: Making a Game.

[puke]

I'm a little bit shocked at the level of feedback I'm seeing on this project.  Or not seeing, as the case may be. 

You are a well known and well regarded developer, as far as these things go.  The initial project was award winning.  This is THE most groundbreaking and best polished UI I've ever seen in a roguelike game.  But where is the public response?

I'd be fascinated to hear about the number of unique impressions your dev blog gets, where else you publicize, how much social media exposure you have, and the like.

I'm thinking of writing and publishing some things (mostly because I hate having free time and disposable income, so I thought I'd fruitlessly squander it on something).  Learning more about your experiences would be an immense value.

[Dutchling]

Oh bloody fuck, I want to make sweet sweet love to that UI o.o

[puke]

where is the public response?

Oh bloody fuck, I want to make sweet sweet love to that UI o.o

Oh, there it is.

[Kyzrati]

It's out there

There are two main reasons you don't see a lot of feedback. The primary one is that I'm not yet actively engaging players, or advertising in a way that gets their attention. Players want to see gameplay and content, but the game is only just now reaching that stage of development.

Another would be that the already reduced crowd of "early followers" is split up in different places on the net. Some like to leave ideas on the blog itself, others follow and comment via Twitter, and a few watch the Facebook page. Reddit interest has been fairly high (/r/gamedev)--still though, overall the exposure is mostly limited to dev communities. While I'm sure plenty more on Bay 12 will be interested once the game is playable, in its current state the game doesn't leave much room for discussion since the design isn't very open-ended--there's a fairly clear and precise goal.

Cogmind will gain more traction and a wider audience once it's found its way to places like IndieDB and (possibly) Greenlight, but going to those places without a good video or two would be throwing away the potential benefit of that initial exposure boost.

Right now publicity is about where I expect it to be given the state of the game. You just happen to be one of the "early followers" ;p

[Delta Foxtrot]

Oh I've been following this thread for a long while. It's just that I don't actually have the time to play this at the moment. The same with URR, though there I've posted a few times a long while ago. I'm interested but not actively engaged in.
I mean, I guess I could post "fuck yeah" after every devblog post, but that would just feel fake to me.

I guess I'm the sort of guy who goes to a concert and then sits silently in a corner.

But yeah. FUCK YEAH. I really like what you're doing with the interface, but also the mechanics. The use of sound, stealth elements, the works. Looks interesting, keep it up.

[EuchreJack]

Once you get to the point where you want more players/exposure, you should do another contest for players like you did at the beginning.

And I'm not just saying that because I want to sweep several more award categories. 

[Aoi]

Once you get to the point where you want more players/exposure, you should do another contest for players like you did at the beginning.

And I'm not just saying that because I want to sweep several more award categories. 

Oh really... 

[puke]

I mean, I guess I could post "fuck yeah" after every devblog post, but that would just feel fake to me.

Perhaps.  But I'm a technology professional.  I am exposed to the good and bad of all angles of the SDLC.  I follow game design as a hobby, and read shit like DF Dev Blogs and Gamasutra as it it relevant to both professional and entertainment interests.

And frankly, Kyzrati's stuff blows me the eff away.

It's the kind of amazing that I look at and wonder why no one is doing it already. I mean, I'm sure it's hard work.  I've got a pretty fair idea how hard it is.  But it's stuff that anyone with a basic grounding in CS can realize how you might do it, once they see it done.  The true genius isn't as much in the execution, as it is in the vision.  No one has sat down and done this yet.  They've done parts of it -- I'm sure Looking Glass used home built development tools similar to parts of the audio visualization components when they first made Thief -- but no one has quite put it all together in this way. 

When the Wright Brothers made their first airplane, the mechanical engineering of it wasn't revolutionary in any way.  All those components and parts existed and were simple to obtain.  They just put the shit together in a configuration that no one had quite managed yet, and it fucking flew.

This is like that.

[tompliss]

As Kyzrati said it himself "the design isn't very open-ended".
He seems to have a very precise idea of what he wants to do (having developed the first prototype and other games in the same genre surely helps), so when he posts, there are no problems, there are solutions.
He doesn't ask the readers/future players whether they prefer one UI component or another, he analyzes the pros and cons of each, and decide. Each time I asked him something about his game-design (since the dev-blog started), he never was elusive, he always had reasons as to why he did thing the way he did.

Best Engineer Award goes to Kyzrati.

[10ebbor10]

When the Wright Brothers made their first airplane, the mechanical engineering of it wasn't revolutionary in any way.  All those components and parts existed and were simple to obtain.  They just put the shit together in a configuration that no one had quite managed yet, and it fucking flew.

Meh, the Wright Brothers probably weren't the first, and certainly weren't the only ones.

Other than that irrelevant bit of information there's little to say at this moment.