Today me, thewreck and Fredrik “@Frall_”  Henriksson (who will be helping out developing the game) had a planning meeting for the development of the main campaign and I can tell you things are looking good! Next week we’ll bring along Jacob “@jjervey“ Jervey and Frall to a cottage in the middle of Sweden for a week of intensive development, so stay tuned for updates!

Love to be back in the saddle and I can’t wait to start processing all the feedback and molding it into what will probably be mine and Oxeyes biggest endeavour so far.

/Kinten

We’re taking the whole develop together with the community thing very seriously, that’s why we’ve been keeping ourselves busy with reading the forums, the get satisfaction page, twitter, mails, the IRC channel, the Reddit page and the Facebook page. Even though we might not comment on everything we manage to read about 99%. As the community grows (which it hopefully will) it will become increasingly harder for us to keep up. To remedy this we’ve decided to have getsatisfaction.com/cobalt as our main channel of communication. If you’re having issues with the game or want to share an idea, post it there!

Now to some fun stuff!

We’ve been receiving some pretty neat suggestions and ideas, some of which have already been implemented in the game.

I’ve resolved to every now and then write a post reviewing some of the more popular/interesting ideas. Below you’ll find the first list.

• Power/Energy currency should be called Volts: This started as a misunderstanding – but we like it! Volts it is!
• Nerfing of shield and blaster: Yes, this should be tested. Thewreck?
• Playing offline before failing to connect: There is room for serious improvement here, and we have a plan.
• Autoaim being optional? What do you think? Personally I think it sounds like a great idea.
• Rail gun too powerfull? It seems like the current poll on the forum suggests it’s ok as it is. We’ve discussed changing it a bit though for the next update. We’ll just have to wait and see if you can tell the difference. J
• More melee weapons! Yes! I’m a big fan of this. Needs more suggestions!
• Video/screenshot forum? I’ve talked to the good citricsquid about this. We’ll see what happens!
• Pause button! Has been added to the next update, sir.
• I’ve seen quite a lot of posts on character customization. There are plans on adding several levels of upgrades to the main character. This will allow for some different styles of characters depending on your preferred playing style (sneaky ninja, obnoxious bomber, etc). When it comes to visual customization we’re hoping to someday be able to support creating your own characters in a character editor.

I’ve seen a couple of pretty grandiose  suggestions as well, but they sort of deserve their own separate posts. I’d love to see more posts on your take on the games lore. I know we havn’t given that much away yet, but it would still be fun to see your ideas and thoughts! There are some hints to be found here and there

Now for some common issues:

• “The game is too difficult!” Yes. Yes it is. And no! The problem is that the learning curve is way too steep at the moment. This will be remedied with time and the addition of a campaign and of new levels.
• “I’ve got weird text showing up, some sort of development console with different options.” *GASP*! You’ve found the secret console! Try deleting debug.cfg in the cobalt folder. And don’t tell anyone how you managed to find it in the first place, or we will have to find you. You wouldn’t want that.

Last but not least I would like to add that I’ve seen some pretty amazing looking custom maps on the forum. You cheeky bastards managed to find the editor quite quickly

I will try to be as active as I can on the map/mods forums but I won’t be showing off your maps on the blog quite yet since that would only cause awesome confusion since the editor is not supported yet. Officially.

Also, Mr Alex Herrman reports that “cobalt runs perfectly under wine, it does need a more powerful system to run at a higher framerate.” Thank you for sharing that, good sir!

Kinten out.

The absolutely most frequently asked question right now is “When will Cobalt be available???”

The answer is that we are working on getting the auto-updater / launcher ready for the game, and update the Mojang back-end to contain information about which games you own (in addition to Minecraft). Our current, reasonable estimate is that this will be done “before the holidays”

The second most asked question is “How much will Cobalt cost?”

We will probably decide this the same day as the pre-order is available, so we don’t know yet. However, the aim is that when the game is “feature-complete” it will cost about €20, so the pre-order will cost much less than that.

// jeb_

Here is the link to the ep:
Cobalt EP