13 February 2013, first commit.

The beginning of one year of endless development between one exam and the other, juggling with private and academic life. Back in the day, I was using the pseudonym "3rr3" instead of "zangobot", a pun referring to my inability of correctly pronouncing the letter "R". 

I will not deep dive into the reasons why I retired the game,  but it was not an easy choice back in the days. I was stressed out most of the time for private reasons, and the game was suffering as well, even if I put all my love and dedication to all its bits. The last available version is dated December 2014, with some commits pushed to the repository around the New Year's Eve. I tried to do something again for the game in 2016, but I soon abandoned all the efforts: I was emotionally devastated and I could not work on the game anymore.

Fast forward to few weeks ago. I woke up with the feeling that I had to close this door.  Being finally free from all the bad feelings that were storming inside me 11 years ago, and being supported by the best people ever, I downloaded all the source code from the previous repository, and started working again on the game. 

I did not want to perfect it, I just wanted to resurrect it and made it playable for Desktops. No complicated overhaul of the engine, just the fun of the game.

At first, I completely and instantly removed the in-app purchases and the advertisements that I had to put. In retrospective, it was a giant waste of everybody's time, and I remember the hate for those features. The code was neat, and I felt surprised by the quality of the clarity of some of the portions of the game. The game was developed in XNA, so I had to replace it with MonoGame (https://monogame.net/).

I started  shouting for the joy when the landing screen of the game just popped out with mostly no crashes.

That gave me a tremendous adrenaline rush that lead to 4 hours of non-stop bug fixing in the night, but most of the things were fixed. The game was launching and handling mouse input of some of the scenes. I started realising I was bringing an end to an endless cycle of grief, and bug after bug, I felt like removing boulders from my shoulders.

There are still plenty of bugs, of course. But my intent is saving this game from the slumber, and giving it the life it deserves.

Today, 7 June 2025, CogFactory! is alive and kicking, with Hero throwing endless bombs to guards, exploding his way to save his friend Crystal once again.

-- LD