Cosmic Construct News

I am... SoaringMoon... your dev... for this... 21st week... of... Cosmic Construct.. Devlogs.

My what a week has been. I've done a lot of development work, but not all on Cosmic Construct. We will get there. Each week we set development goals for the upcoming week. Then review if those goals have been met.

If you are reading this and are not in the Cosmic Construct community, you should get involved by:

• Following the bluesky account for more frequent updates.
  
• Joining the Cosmic Construct community discord server.
  
• Wishlisting Cosmic Construct on Steam.
  
• Follow the page for more of these weekly devlog posts.
  

At the end of each week's devlog posts, I set aside goals to complete during the upcoming week. Then review if they were completed.

---

The structure art for Brewery, Town Hall, Warehouse, and Vertical Farm that I didn't do.

I did not do these. Which is very sad. It's now a development bottleneck and a priority task.

At least 2 of the new plants, again.



Proud to introduce the new Garlic and Onion crops. I was so enamored by learning how garlic grows, that I actually planted some outside of my house. We'll see how those hold up. The Garlic will be used to create some "italian" themed dishes when I get the cooking fully set up. Adding new dishes is basically as easy as drawing their icons and adding them to the database. Onion will have the dual use of whole onion and scallions from the same plant.

The remaining item new icons I didn't get done.



21 new item icons have been added. I'll go over each of these items and what they do, loosely in their order above.

• Abrasive - Used to grind and polish hard materials.
  
• Brocade Fabric and Cloak - Rank 5 cloak material increasing player and pawn carry capacity to 250, base attack damage to 5, and movement speed by 25%.
  
• Cardstock and Deck of Cards - Pretty much only used to create a deck of cards. These will be used with the game table and casino to play minigames.
  
• Copper, Silver, Gold Wire - Used for many things, most importantly being brocade fabric. Might use it for devices of some kind. Not sure yet.
  
• Cosmic Aether - Used to create Starsteel, power certain devices, and other end game uses.
  
• Grain Spirit - A type of pure grain alcohol used as a solvent, and for leisure.
  
• Granite / Slab - A premium construction material for mid game structures.
  
• Lens - A precision ground optical glass to create objects used by certain buildings.
  
• Marble / Slab - A premium construction material for mid game structures.
  
• Research - A currency consumed by research structures to unlock abilities and technology.
  
• Starsteel - A mid-late game material.
  
• Velvet Fabric and Cloak - Rank 4 cloak material increasing player and pawn carry capacity to 160, base attack damage to 4, and movement speed by 20%.
  

Marketing related activities, which I will explain in the next devlog.

This is a little esoteric and difficult to explain without explaining search engine optimization. Basically, I am in the process of translating the steam game page into every language I can, and getting multiple articles written.



Explaining and promoting the game for people searching in general for indie games. It's generated a small amount of traffic to the game page, but it's mainly there for AI to read and gain information from so that I can get the google schema embed.



---

For unplanned work.

Ludum Dare 57

Most of my time this week was taken up by Ludum Dare 57. A game jam that challenges developers to make an entire game from scratch in 3 days. I have never taken part in Ludum Dare before, and have always wanted to. So I decided to enter on a whim.

For most gamejams, a theme is set to prevent "cheating". So that everyone is on the same playing field. Ludum Dare is no exception, and the theme for this jam was "Depths". Themes can typically be interpreted in any way the developer chooses. I decided to make a game as "deep as possible". This is what my game Just Keep Digging looks like after it was finished..







The number of total assets needed to make this game was... extensive. I overscoped it a bit, but did however meet the deadline with a few hours to spare.



---

For the next week I have a lot of art lined up.

- The structure art for Brewery, Town Hall, Warehouse, and Vertical Farm (priority task)

- A new biome. (Yes, another one. :P)

- 2 new plants (I'm trying to do at least 2 a week.)

- Integrate the new items into the database.

- (If all of this is finished, I will move onto more plants.)

Let's see if I actually do the structure art this time. See you all next week. (or sooner on bluesky)

Hello and welcome to the week 20 devlog post for Cosmic Construct. If you are new to reading this weekly posts about the game, please:

- Follow the bluesky account for more frequent updates.

- Perhaps join the community discord server.

- Then of course, wishlist Cosmic Construct on Steam. (Also follow the page for more weekly devlog posts.)

At the end of each week's devlog posts, I set aside goals to complete during the upcoming week. Then review if they were completed.

---

The structure art for Brewery, Town Hall, Warehouse, and Vertical Farm.

I didn't start work on a single one of these buildings. Then again, I did indicate that I might not work on this.

A new fully complete biome.



Behold! This is the brand new Lunlands biome. Objects are a little spare as I don't quite know what I what all I want to put in it yet.

The Lunlands have a crescent and start shaped terrain pattern. As well as, Magewood Trees that pulse and breathe with magical energy emitting blue light. Hanging from these trees is Magemoss. Both of these will produce magical materials, decor objects, and compounds.

The grass of the ground is Bluegrass which produces Blue Plant Fiber, similar in use to the Hinderland's Red Plant Fiber. I did intend to add an additional weather type to this biome, but I figured I could do that much later when I polish all of the areas.

These new biomes are making me excited to work on the terraformer later. It will make the origin map look so pretty once that is all working, and can get biome blending and mixing in.

The most time consuming part of the new biome was the Magemoss strings hanging from the trees. Those alone took almost 6 hours to finish, due to coloring on of the tiny leaf bits. The trucks of 8 tree variants were red done. A second version of the trunks with the glow effects. Then the strings of Magemoss. There are 4 frames for each of the 8 trees (32 frames). Each on average with 3 strings of more then 30 little leaflets. Comes out to several thousand of them that needed to be colored black.

Item icons for quite a few new items.



Got a bunch of new item icons done. These are, if you can find them, Magewood, Blue Plant Fiber, Beer, Carrot, Corn, Edamame, Barley Grain, Black Beans, Arugula, Cabbage, Onion, Potato, Rice Grain, Hops, Tomato, Squash, and Garlic.

Most of these as you can see are for the new crops.

There are many still missing, which I will be working on this week I think. Magemoss, Marble, Granite, Marble Slab, Granite Slab, and many others.

At least 2 of the new plants. (These take quite a long time, it might not get finished.)





There are now Carrot and Tomato crops. These on their own take so much art and testing to look right, but I think they turned out well. I especially like the Tomato's because the stakes they grow around was satisfying to see after drawing it and looking like this.



In Krita I draw it white, and actually color it in code. I do it like this so I can make variants of colors later, if I have the urge to do so. (I should probably bake them for performance but whatever.) Obviously, I can't make out anything in the editor. I edit each layer individually with transparency and hope for the best. Can you see where the yellow flowers are in that image? I can't.

---

No unplanned work this week.

---

This upcoming week I probably have some of the video editing to do for a trailer. Which will make it to one of the two upcoming events I'm taking part in. (Before the eventually make it to steam.) In the meantime, I have other work I am going to try to get finished.

- The structure art for Brewery, Town Hall, Warehouse, and Vertical Farm that I didn't do.

- At least 2 of the new plants, again.

- The remaining item new icons I didn't get done.

- Marketing related activities, which I will explain in the next devlog.

- (If I have time, more plants. I have 12 left to do in total.)

Thank you for being here. This is the week 19 devlog post for Cosmic Construct.

- Follow the bluesky account for more frequent updates.
- We now have a community discord server.
- Most importantly, wishlist Cosmic Construct on Steam.

Cosmic Construct is in its In-Development phase. Development phases are as follows.

In-Dev >> Pre-Alpha >> Alpha >> Beta >> Release >> ???

(We will see whatever the post release pipeline is.)

Each week during these devlog posts, we cover development goals set up at the end of the previous devlog. A never ending cyclical chain. (At least until the game is finished. Whatever that means.)

---

Implement suggested quality of life features.

During the previous Demo Day, there was quite a bit of feedback related to the "handholdiness" of the objective system that was implemented between Demo Day 60 and 61.

There were a couple of easy fixes. For example, every clickable element in the game UI has a colored border of some kind. This is not entirely consistent across menus. The main menu had cyan borders for text that is meant to indicate a label. This along with some others have been changed to white. I did this originally for the pawn creation menu, but neglected the main character page for some reason.



Another complaint I received multiple times was the length of Tudi's voice lines. Despite being skippable, not a single player has ever attempted to skip them. Perhaps allowing the player to interact with Tudi during the dialogue voiceline playing wasn't intuitive enough. Regardless, I have changed her voiceline to a single sentence. She now shuts up after about 2-3 seconds.

The most complex fix for this week was getting crafting stations to feel better to use. Before crafting stations would attempt to craft an item regardless if a player could craft one or not. Now the station will decline immediately, preventing the player from having to wait 3 seconds for a craft check to fail.

Not only this, but crafting stations will now automatically craft any item that can be crafted with the contents of the player's inventory. Given them the same rules as pawns with upcycling active. This now means instead of deliberately interacting with the [E] button each time. The player will now have to cancel crafting by walking away from the station.

I also added a popup which will show what items will be crafted when interacting with the crafting station. I still want to retain the player discovery of learning recipes, without including a list of them if I can get away with it. (Of course, if the player base is large enough, there will be a wiki anyway.)



Furthermore, I made some changes to how items are pulled out of storage. When trying to pull out 10 items from the chest, and there not being 10 items to pull, it would just fail. Now the behavior is that it will pull as many items as it can out of the chest. So if you select 10 Logs and only have 7, instead of giving 0 it will give 7.

Another minor change. All "Silk" rank items which deal with cloth have been renamed from "Silk" to "Satin".

Finish structure art for the Cartographer, Greenhouse, Storehouse, and Surveyor

All of the structure art for the 6 new buildings is finished.



From top to bottom left to right.

• Bank - This structure will store currency, removing it from the settlement storage, and allow denomination conversion.
  
• Cartographer - Will give the player an in game map.
  
• Expeditioner - Passively generates random items found in the maps of discovered biomes.
  
• Greenhouse - Passively generates random farmable plants.
  
• Storehouse - Increases settlement storage capacity by 20,480.
  
• Surveyor - Counts the number of all objects contributing to settlement wealth.
  
• There are 38 more structures that need art assets finished. 6-8 more of these structure art sessions and all of the required buildings will be finished. (Decor is a whole different beast of course.)
  

Add the remaining pawn jobs to the pawn manager.

Draw the new pawn job icons.

I've added 27 new jobs to the pawn manager. Yeah it's a lot. I'm not even sure if this will be the final number of jobs, as I have about a dozen unplanned buildings I still need to work out.



When playing the game the player will not have access to all of these jobs initially. Jobs that pawns cannot take will not be displayed to the player. The player will have to unlock each job by building its relevant structure in the origin map.

This list of added jobs will give me an opportunity to clue you into Cosmic Construct's "midgame" progression systems.

From top to bottom, left to right; we have:

• Blacksmith - Which crafts items that use the Forge.
  
• Finisher - Which crafts higher rank non-magical basic items.
  
• Chemist - Which operates the Centrifuge consuming Research to create items.
  
• Sericulturist - Who keeps and rears Silkworms to create Silk.
  
• Weaver - Who creates cloth items with the Loom
  
• Tailor - Who creates cloaks with dye and cloth.
  
• Bookbinder - Who creates Signatures, and Blank Books.
  
• Author - These pawns will write books, a very slow process.
  
• Librarian - Stores and lends books to pawns.
  
• Brewmaster - Brews beer and grain spirits.
  
• Server - Which serves customers at the guild hall and other structures.
  
• Butcher - That raises mobs and produces their goods.
  
• Retail - Who mans registers at stores, and shops.
  
• Hospitality - Who maintains Hotels, Resorts, and Casinos.
  
• Teller - That manages and handles currency at a Bank.
  
• Moneyer - Who mints currency for the settlement.
  
• Treasurer - Who taxes and values property of the settlement, generating revenue.
  
• Auditor - Performs audits of all assets to determine their efficiency. (Is actually the trigger for all map production, and is an excuse to allow 100 million map titles to be calculated.)
  
• Cartographer - A cartographer must be assigned for the map to be updated.
  
• Expeditioner - Does the exploration to produce materials for the Expeditioner building.
  
• Surveyor - A surveyor must be assigned for the survey count to update.
  
• Professor - Teaches pawns magic.
  
• Researcher - Produces Research, an item which has various functions.
  
• Astronomer - Used the observatory to produce various items.
  
• Curator - Tracks all achievement counts and specific milestones. Shows what items the player is missing.
  
• Councilman - A councilman must be assigned for territory expansion and taxation.
  
• Judge - Makes a judgement when crimes are committed by pawns.
  
• Man that is a long list. Imagine, I have to program all of this. (Its not as bad as it looks actually, it's just the pawn state machine.)
  

---

As for unplanned content.

City Builder & Colony Sim Fest 2025



Steam's yearly City Builder & Colony Sim Fest is going on. Nice and early into the Cosmic Construct steam page lifetime too. Glad it was at the start of the year. I had no idea.

Originally Cosmic Construct wasn't able to make it into the fest. As it wasn't included in the original game list for some reason. Valve support got back to me... get this... 7 minutes before the submission deadline. I got it submitted 5 minutes before the fest started. Glad Steam was on the ball though, so glad to see.

After just the first day of the fest Cosmic Construct increased its total wishlist count by 20%. Which is a surprisingly large number for such a small game. To be honest with you, I want to keep the wishlist number secret for now, so that the milestone wishlist posts are more of a surprise. Cosmic Construct does have a wishlist goal, and it is ambitious. You can help of course by wishlisting the game. (Oh, and following the game page, you should do that too. For these devlog updates.)

---

This upcoming week (as well as the next 4-6) have some new stuff going on with it, as I don't entirely know what my marketing commitments are. Before June, I have no less than 2 trailers, a demo build, and a virtual appearance to make. This also means Cosmic Construct gets two know trailers and some changes to its seem page.

What I will try to get done this week. It's gonna have a lot of art.

- The structure art for Brewery, Town Hall, Warehouse, and Vertical Farm. (maybe)

- A new fully complete biome.

- Item icons for quite a few new items.

- At least 2 of the new plants. (These take quite a long time, it might not get finished.)

- (If all of the above is done, I'll work on even more of the new plants.)

Welcome to the 18th week devlog for Cosmic Construct. If you enjoy this devlog, feel free to join the community in the following ways.
- Follow me on bluesky for more frequent updates.
- Join our community discord server.
- And of course, wishlist Cosmic Construct on Steam.

Each week, I cover development goals set at the end of each prior devlog. Then review if those goals were met.

Unfortunately, this devlog is going to be rather short, as the objectives system redesign took the entire week to complete.

---

Redesign the objectives system (this is the priority task)

Here is what the old (currently live) objective system looks like.



The player is given a 10 objectives to complete for each level. They must advance through each 10 objectives in any order they choose, and complete them all to unlock the ability to pay respects and upgrade the totem rank. There were some problems with this system and player onboarding which preventing the game from being played in the way that it was intended; creatively.

Players have been following the objectives in the order that they appear on the screen. This is the same order they are listed in the above objectives menu screenshot. In a linear list of 10 objectives, that attempt to get the player to learn how to play what is a rather complex game. As the player unlocks new expanded mechanics, the games complexity increases astronomically.

I thought that guiding the player though this increasing complexity would improve the gameplay experience and encourage the player to explore what is off of that linear progression path intuitively. That is not really the case. Every player's camp ends up looking the same at level 5, with not much creative expression or individuality.

To solve this problem, the "handholding" nature of the game needs to be almost entirely removed, replaced with a small, direct explanatory tutorial of each menu as the player encounters them. To do this, basically all 50 levels of progression need to be set up and available to the player simultaneously.

Introducing the new objective system.



The new objective system makes all progression objectives originally planned available to the player from the very beginning. There is a section at the top dedicated to the tutorial and onboarding process. This will teach what the various game menus do and how to access them. As well as guide the player through basic structure placement, planting, and pawn management.

This list of objectives is very long.





Even still, not all of the objectives are in. Many of the objectives have unique checks that need to be made for structures and objects that do not yet exit. Much testing needed to happen to make sure that these new check weren't lagging the game, didn't crash the game if broken.

I also had to make a locking system which hides objectives that the player current does not have access to. Each objectives has its own associated level requirement. As the player completes available objectives, new are unlocked after they pay respects at the totem. The number of objectives is always at least 10 times the player level. In practice, the player starts with a significant number of unlocked objectives.



Implement suggested quality of life features

Finish structure art for the Cartographer, Greenhouse, Storehouse, and Surveyor (if I have time)

Add the remaining pawn jobs to the pawn manager. (if I have time)

None of these even got touched, which is a real shame.

---

For unplanned work...

Save File Restructuring

The new achievement and objective system needed to be integrated with and replace the saving. Objectives prior to this update were tracked the level variable and nothing else. Really. All of the objectives would at the start of each play session compare with the play record and current number of build structures to determine in current level objectives were complete. All of the objectives were stored in a separate database. Level "progress" wasn't really a thing. It would just check if all 10 level up requirements were met.

Obviously, this is very restrictive.

Now, all of the objectives are individually tracked and recorded permanently for their completion status. This has the added bonus of giving the game a means to track steam achievements.

---

This is what will be worked in the upcoming week. You will notice that this list is just the unfinished work from last weeks with job icons added. This will be an art and bug fixing week, which should be a nice change of pace.

- Implement suggested quality of life features

- Finish structure art for the Cartographer, Greenhouse, Storehouse, and Surveyor

- Add the remaining pawn jobs to the pawn manager.

- Draw the new pawn job icons.

Thank you for joining me for this week's devlog.

Week 17 of development for Cosmic Construct is now over. It hasn't been a very good week for me. Hopefully next week will be better.

Each week in these devlogs I cover the development goals set during the previous devlog post. As usual, you should wishlist Cosmic Construct on steam if you haven't already. I also post more regular updates on blueksy.

---

This week I had an medical issue come up which required me to go to the emergency room. I've been dealing with the pain and stress related to that, and it kind of derailed my whole week. Thankfully, after having a CT done, I now have an appointment with a gastroenterologist and hepatologist. The pain is being managed.

Despite this going on, there was much going on with Cosmic Construct that gets to go into the unplanned category.

Lets go over the planned work first.

Build Mode Structure Icons for New Buildings

Over the last two months there were a bunch of new structures added to the game which all need build mode icons. I've neglected these, and have been placeholding them with a magenta square. It took longer than I would like to admit to get these finished but the build mode menu now looks as wonderful as the rest of the UI.



9 New Jobs and Job Icons for Pawns

I didn't do any of the artwork for the new jobs. In fact, I realized I might need to make 18 new job icons, and have to do something else before working on the AI to do that.

Art for the Bank, Cartographer, Expeditioner, Greenhouse, Storehouse, and Surveyor structures.

I only got two of the 6 buildings drawn for a lack of trying, the Bank, and the Expeditioner. The Bank will be used by the player to hold and convert currencies without contributing to taking up storage space. The Expeditioner is an explorer which will obtain exotic items from nearby biomes.

This will also be adding 4 new materials to the game. Marble, Marble Slab, Granite, and Granite Slab.



Try to get 6-10 done and tested. (I keep saying this, but it's now a bottleneck to development.)

Any additional art that can get done.

Neither of these got touched as I didn't have extra time. Additionally, the 6-10 ranks are going to be replaced by a new objective system, based on feedback I keep getting about the game.

---

This week I did rather significant amount of unplanned work which ate into the development time I did set aside around the medical stuff.

/v/3

/v/3 is a game development showcase for indie devs put together from some people out of 4chan's /v/ideogame imageboard. It is a low-budget indie alternative to E3, and it's being done for fun /v/3 submissions open sometime next week, but I was invited to create assets for some of the community events early.

As part of the events, participants are asked to create a digital conference booth / kiosk. So I went ahead and got the art out of the way for that, instead of working on buildings.



Eventually, I need to set aside time to make a new trailer for /v/3, as the current steam trailer is too short to submit. Also, /v/3 requires new trailers to be made for the showcase.

Demo Day 61

Cosmic Construct also took part in /agdg/'s Demo Day 61, as I also submitted to DD60. This is a good opportunity to get feedback and testing done for the game. Most of the people who played Cosmic Construct during DD61 also did during the previous demo day. Managed to watch another stream from brimstonewalker, which gave some valuable feedback on QoL points that need to be worked on.

Options Bug

I uploaded a build to DD61 which contained a bug which caused the game not to run when running legacy options files. I has to rewrite how options file saving was handled entirely which took longer than I would have liked. People who played DD60 still had a legacy options file in localappdata. This would have effected the main game save file as well, if I didn't already change the filenames. I still have to fix this for save slot files.

Setting Up A Discord

I'm currently in the process of setting up a discord server exclusively for Cosmic Construct. This is not a terribly difficult thing to do. However, I want to make sure everything is good, and I have a moderation team in place before inviting a bunch of people in.

Objective System Rework

This is the big one. The objectives system currently in the game is bad. Its just not good. The idea of giving the player 10 specific tasks to complete to advance is unfun. It's linear, and causes the player to become an uncreative automaton. It needs to be opened up into a much larger "achievement point" driven system.

The game will still contain the same objectives, and tutorial objectives teaching about in game menus. The difference is that they will now all be accessible to the player from the beginning of the game. Many of the objectives will still be level restricted to prevent spoilers. The structures will also be level restricted, to prevent the player from being overwhelmed by the amount of structures in the build menu. Seeing new structures get added to the build menu is a good display of progression anyway.

The totem rank will now become a more esoteric feeling progression bar. Where the player can choose what they want to focus on to make easy achievement points.

---

Here is the work for the next week. It doesn't look like a lot, but the objectives system redesign is an enormous task. It might actually be the only thing that gets done. We will see.

- Redesign the objectives system (this is the priority task)

- Implement suggested quality of life features

- Finish structure art for the Cartographer, Greenhouse, Storehouse, and Surveyor (if I have time)

- Add the remaining pawn jobs to the pawn manager. (if I have time)

Thank you for being here during this tough week. Hopefully by the end of next week, Cosmic Construct will become its best self.