Cosmic Construct News

This is an old devlog, ported over from itch.

It is now the 9th week of development for Cosmic Construct. If you are not already subscribed to the Bluesky for daily progress updates on the game, you should do that. Following on Bluesky costs you nothing but your time, and helps me get the word out about my games.

Over the last week, I have been dealing with the fallout of Demo Day 60 and the testing that surrounded it which opened up a bunch of issues and sore spots. Which of course is the point of an event like this. Due to that work, I was not able to get to all of the things I had planned to do this week. Instead, I got a whole list of things to improve which I can knock out to make Cosmic Construct a more fun to play game.

Lets go over each of those points, and see what was missed.

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Additional Tudi Messages, Reviewing Quest Objectives, Crafting and Demo locks for objects, and bug catching.

There is alot going on in this line, and it was not as straightforward to work on. I just skipped around posts of this sublist of tasks, and it was mostly integrated elsewhere.

Additional Tudi messages were added, while others which were confusing or appeared in incorrect places were removed. The quest objective review got touched on which I will cover in the unplanned section below. Crafting locks were put into place locking down the later game content for the demo, but have not been implemented for subsequent demo releases. Bug catching, based on what happened doing the demo gameplay reviews, was forced to happen.

Streamline storage management for the player, adding features for auto filling the inventory with an item, and bulk processing.

Storage management is much better now than it was before. The storage menu now has options to transfer 10 items at a time with shift click.



Because of some complaints about being able to destroy items from the inventory, the option to delete items from chests as well as from the inventory was added directly from the menu.



You can see here the control + shift + right mouse destroys 10 items.

Then control + right mouse destroys a single item.



From the inventory menu the same control + right mouse also destroys items.

Art for additional tiers of storage and housing.

This did get done.

There are 2 new tiers of storage: the Shed and Container structures. The Shed expands the storage by 1,280 items, and the Container by 5,120. Each subsequent tier stores 4 times as many items, while costing about 3 times as many resources to create. Increasing the storage efficiency of each tier of structure.

There are also 2 new tiers of housing: the Tipi and Yurt. Each housing tier will increase the overall value of the settlement, as well as amount of leisure and energy need recovered by resting in them. Additionally higher tiers of building will store more pawns within them, better utilizing available space.



Art for future item icons, which require tech tree planning.

Structure art for higher tier structures (Sericulture, Tailor, Market, and Scriptorium, etc...). (maybe)

Art for additional settlement advancement ranks. (maybe)

Art for primary HUD elements, which track player advancement. (maybe)

None of this was done, as I was dealing with many more issues, as I explain below.

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This is the part where I explain all of the unplanned additions made over the last week, and there were a many. If you want to see me struggle as bugs pop up, you can view the demo day entry thread. Otherwise let me go over some of the changes.

brimstonewalker was the first one to stream the game for demo day. He ran into many issues I couldn't have really caught myself over testing. As I have knowledge of how things were programmed. Which is why testing in important. The most important thing I needed to fix was an arrow collision bug which crashed the game with certain objects. This was fixed while I was watching it happen live and now Tudi and the Surveillance Golem now no longer crash the game when shot.

Tudi had quite a small radius, half a square to talk to her. I thought this might be enough, but I was very wrong. This was expanded to two grid spaces vertically.

The R keybind was showing in the build menu, which shouldn't have been. Unfortunately, it looks like it should logically be there, but the destroy function is meant to be available outside of the menu. I'll revisit that at a later time in development, when pawns get construction.

For gameplay balance, trees now have a chance to drop 2 logs instead of one. People kept suggesting to make the chests themselves cheaper. For a complex reason related to determining the value of the entire settlement, that's not really possible, as the build cost for all tier 1 buildings must be "10 value points". Best I can do is drop additional logs.

Those chest did not have enough storage capacity, so all storage across the game was increased. I originally said 75%, but it was actually 60%.

Pawns can now partially deposit their inventory (plus a little extra). This sometimes results in more items in storage than allowed, but that would happen over the course of normal gameplay anyhow. So it doesn't really matter that much.

There was a big change to how questing was handled because it contained too much railroading. Currently I have band-aid solution in place that checks if objects already exist. I will be rewriting the entire settlement progression function.

There is now a flashing rainbow indicator showing what square is being currently selected by the player.



Other than these, here is a lightning round of other changes I made.

• Rain volume was adjusted multiple times.
  
• Options menu was going to a new track each time it was opened, it no longer does.
  
• There were two options menus, one for the main menu, and one in game. These have been combined on the back end.
  
• Changed cyan text label borders to white.
  
• Fixed the name input field on character creation pages.
  
• Sprint needs to just be removed, but I have it enabled by default for now.
  
• Finally, most of all, there was a significant bug with pawn aspirations which rendered the game mostly unplayable. Which has forced me to create a new pawn manager. The new pawn manager is far and away better than the previous iteration. This should solve aspiration assignment issues.
  

Moreso, pawns currently always upcycle resources to a higher tier. There are many reasons why a player might now want a pawn to do this. I will be making sure this no longer happens by default. Instead, there will be a checkbox to enable that behavior should the player desire it.

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Here are the development goals for the upcoming development week.

+ Finish the new pawn manager. This included upcycling, aspirations, and hover tooltips for traits.

+ Add a HUD for player statistics.

+ Add a record history of all game actions to prepare for the new objective system.

+ Recreate the a new objective management system for settlement advancement ranks.

+ If I get all of this done this week, I'll work on settlement ranks 6-10.

This was a long one, but thank you for coming. See you next week, or tomorrow if you are on bluesky.

This is an old devlog, ported over from itch.

Welcome to the 8th development week for Cosmic Construct. As usual if you aren't already following the development on bluesky, you should do that. This week was heavy on art. Art for the game, despite its simple appearance, takes a long time to create. Because each piece needs to be drawn 4 times for the game's squigglevision style.

Now, it is time to review the development goal for the previous week and see how the planning turned out.

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New Totem images for settlement levels 6-10 need to be finished.

This one was probably the most enjoyable thing I did this week when it comes to art. It's just fun to make upgraded versions of existing structures. Making animations like this are going to be so satisfying once all 50 settlement advancement levels are finished. I really wanted to get around to making more of these totem upgrade frames this week, but I got sucked into playing Path of Exile 2.



These totem frames aren't the only art I did for totems. I did the bases / platforms for all totems up to Rank 50, which was quite a bit more involved than you might think. I will save me a ton of work later. I have a path forward to work on the next set of frames.

New Dark Tree variants because the game only contains 2 trees.

This was quite the task. I expanded the number of procedural tree types from 2 to 8. Meaning there is now 4 times as much tree art now as there was last week. Something that I think doesn't matter much to the player, but does to me. I hated seeing the same two trees (and their x flipped versions). Now, I can hate noticing the same to trees next to each other slightly less often. I also changed the colors trees can generate with. They colors are slightly different and there are 3 of them. In all, there are 24 different way trees can appear. I think I am happy with it, for now.



Expanding the list of structures.

If you weren't aware, I have a complex tech tree for Cosmic Construct which is only about 20-25% of the way finished. I still need to work on expanding it to create game content up to the 50th settlement rank, which contains buildings up to tier 8. These buildings will perform complex tasks I don't quite want to reveal yet. They will require some new unique materials such as mana / spirit, rare minerals, special objects, and other prerequisites. I got a very small part of this done over the week, but nothing I am ready to show. An example I can give is a University, which generates research. What is this research used for? You'll find out when the game releases.



Structure art for the Binder, Forge, Loom, and Mint

Not only is the art done, they are partially implemented with their crafting recipes and build costs ready for settlement ranks 11-20.

The Binder binds paper stacks into signatures, which are used to make blank books. These blank books will be used at the Scriptorium to create written books for the Library.

The Forge makes metal parts of different shapes. Currently it just processes precious metals into blanks for the Mint.

The Loom is the most important crafting structure here. Which produces cloth, to upgrade the player and pawn cloaks. This is used to increase stats and inventory capacity.

The Mint takes coin blanks and stamps them into coins to be used at the Market and Treasury. They will be used to convert items from one kind into another at a cost.



Set up pawn aspiration system, to return pawns to their primary assigned job.

Pawns are highly complex state machines. Each time I implement a new feature, their capabilities expand rapidly. With the introduction of pawn aspirations the pawns now have the capability to return to jobs in an intelligent way. For example, if a pawn is set to the Carpentry job they will check the settlement storage for logs to process at the Lumber Mill. If they find some, they will process the Logs into Lumber and Planks. However, if they do not find Logs in the storage, they will automatically go get Logs to process. This will change their job to "Chopping Logs". In the background, they still remember their assignment of processing the logs into other materials.

With these changes in place, the pawns can nest a queue of tasks at any scale. Allowing a researcher, to go all of they way down to making paper if there is nothing to write research on. Should I implement this chain of reasoning that is.



Structure art for the Sericulture, Tailor, Market, and Scriptorium. (maybe)

Nope, did not get to this. :P

North and South direction bow firing animation. (maybe)

I got this finished just before making this post. Both the player and pawns now fire bows in directions that make more logical sense. The side on animation was good enough for testing, but got a little weird directly above and below the hunter. Now those animations are mostly fixed. Might require some tuning later, but it works enough for testing.



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Iron

For some inexplicable reason, I neglected to add iron to my tech tree. I started to run into structures like the Forge which would required iron to build (for the anvil). So this created extra work of needing to add a new ore to the game. I decided to hide it in normal rocks. Mostly because I didn't want to add more rock variants. There are now regular sources of iron as hematite, which can be smelted into iron ingots.



Gameplay Recording

Because of the demo being released on the 3rd of January, I am polishing some of the bigger pain points of the game as it currently stands. The plan is to Implement quality of life features that will make it easier for players to test the game.

This means having a review video to help testers out, to guide them on what they need to do, should they get stuck somewhere.

I went ahead and recorded 80 minutes of settlement rank 1-5 gameplay, which will go live at 7pm ET today. (It was replaced with a new video on the youtube channel.)

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

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As for this upcoming list of work. Most of it will be refining what is already in the game, to make sure the game is ready for testing before I add additional content.

+ Additional Tudi Messages, Reviewing Quest Objectives, Crafting and Demo locks for objects, and bug catching.

+ Streamline storage management for the player, adding features for auto filling the inventory with an item, and bulk processing.

+ Art for additional tiers of storage and housing.

+ Art for future item icons, which require tech tree planning.

+ Structure art for higher tier structures (Sericulture, Tailor, Market, and Scriptorium, etc...). (maybe)

+ Art for additional settlement advancement ranks. (maybe)

+ Art for primary HUD elements, which track player advancement. (maybe)

That is all for this week. Thank you.

This is an old devlog, ported over from itch.

Today ends the 7th development week for Cosmic Construct. As usual, if you haven't been following the game's development on Bluesky, you should do that. I post daily updates there. The weekly devlogs here on cover the development over the last week in more detail.

At the end of each weekly post, I list out the development goals of the upcoming week. I review each of those goals from the previous week to see if they were met. Ideally, they all should be as I am using that list to dictate the course of work I do across that week. Here is last week's list of goals.

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More missions for the player to complete, progress, and unlock pawns need to be created. (This is the priority task.)

Most of this development week was spent creating gameplay objectives to onboard the player. Meant to teach a variety of concepts, like gathering materials, constructing structures, managing storage, assigning pawn jobs, farming, and much more. Each of the player settlement levels follows a different theme, which will continue throughout the main gameplay. As each settlement rank is advanced, the claim area and available structures will expand.



I ran through all of the objectives, timing the playthrough in the upper right corner. The first 5 settlement levels took 1h 21m 04s to complete. As the developer of the game, I have knowledge of the upcoming objectives. So I expect a player to take about 2 hours to complete this onboarding section of the game. After which they will be in control of 8-10 pawns. I filled almost the entire constructed storage inventory during this playthrough of the start of game content. I'll have to make the next tier of storage sometime soon.

Bugs related to animations, especially for hunting, need to get fixed.

This isn't something I can convey in a single image or video. So I'll just link to the relevant post on bluesky. The animations for hunting were quite jittery. Because the range between the hunter and target change by such a small amount, I had to lock the hunter in place while the target moves out of range. This prevents the animation from skipping a few pixels forward after every shot. This doesn't fix many of the other issues the animation has when the target it moving very slowly (the snail), or very quickly (with the mimic). I also need to add additional directions for the bow firing animation, but it isn't a development priority at this time.

Many SFX need to be added to various UI items and interactions.

Many sound effects were added. Crafting structures, inventory, placement, buildmode, and other various UI mouse button activated actions now have sounds. Some crafting structures have some sound that builds as a device is used, while others play individual action sounds like the Stonecutter. Inventory, storage, placement, and buildmode menu's effects now give more feedback.

I've also re-coded the way in SFX are handled. They are now done with a single switch statement. I can play any sounds with a single line of code calling a function that goes to this switch statement. I can add any sound effects as needed, and select them randomly for variation.



Add Tudi's surveillance drone.

Tudi now has a golem that travels around the map from place to place, just to explain how she knows what is going on in the settlement.



This is a new mob that does nothing but roam around the camp. It's effectively unkillable, and Tudi has some to say if the player tries to attack it.

Add a few non-functional static environment objects to be placeable by the player.

The biggest change was to how the placement of structures are handled, putting structures into dedicated categories. The newest category is decor. This is a menu of decorative parts for the settlement that "seemlessly" tile into each other, and have a fair bit randomness thrown into the parts themselves to prevent them from repeating.



You can see that so all of the parts are randomly assembled, even though individually they are one grid size. It was quite difficult to get them to connect seamlessly. Even now, some of the parts are cut off. Especially on the centered 3-way fences. It's not too much to fix, but it have a lot of other art to get done.

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There are a few things I managed to add across the week that I didn't plan on getting so soon.

Mimic

There is a new mob, the mimic. It is not completely functional yet. Currently, it roams around the map turning into any object, and attempts to hide among clusters of objects that looks like itself. The player can identify a mimic using build mode, and shoot at it to scare it away. Eventually, this mob will still items from player's chests. This function is difficult to implement persistently, in a way that will not destroy the player's items. I will tackle that issue, another day.



A mimic can turn into any object. Even an entire tree. I thought it would be interesting to turn the build menu into a sort of spotting mode, for these mimics. Pawns set to the hunter job, will hunt mimics on their own. Which will be a necessary skill for them when they start stealing items.

Level Restricted Buildings

All of the structures used to be available at settlement level 1, for testing purposes. That has changed to prepare for the demo release. Over the course of advancement through the settlement ranks, the player will unlock new structures progressively. So that they aren't overwhelmed by the extensive list of structures the game will eventually have. I've also prepared the build menu to be split into tabs, should there be so many that sorting them becomes necessary.

Decor Icons and Build Menu Background Icons

Decor Icons, now that they have their own build menu tab.



These are just the same as the object as it's placed, but it took a little arranging to get them to look passable. Unfortunately, the paths are black, so they are kind of hard to see. I don't think I'm going to change it though, without redrawing them at a different scale. I'd rather avoid doing that.

The background image for build menu icons used be a figure eight, link looking thing. While posting my development on 4chan's /agdg/ thread on /vg/ someone pointed out it was very hard to see the icons. Especially the fences, while selecting build objects. They were right, so I changed it.

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Now, the next week of development will be an art loaded week which will be adding many new structures to prepare for pawn garrisoning.

+ New Totem images for settlement levels 6-10 need to be finished.

+ New Dark Tree variants because the game only contains 2 trees.

+ Expanding the list of structures.

+ Structure art for the Binder, Forge, Loom, and Mint

+ Set up pawn aspiration system, to return pawns to their primary assigned job.

+ Structure art for the Sericulture, Tailor, Market, and Scriptorium. (maybe)

+ North and South direction bow firing animation. (maybe)

With any luck, there will be twice as much crafting content by the end of this week. So that I can start integrating cloak crafting and upgrading. The Scriptorium will be the biggest test for the new garrisoning system for pawns. If I manage to get the market done. Then I can start doing game objectives up to settlement advancement level 20. (Which would be like 8 hours of gameplay, I assume.)

Thank you for following my work.

This is an old devlog, ported over from itch.

The 6th development week for Cosmic Construct has concluded. As always I will remind you that if you aren't already subscribed to my development on Bluesky, I post more regular, at least daily, updates there. The weekly posts here serve as a more complete record of the work that won't fit in a post over there.

As with last week. I will cover the planned and unplanned developments that have been made, and cover plans for the upcoming week.

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Adding the snail mob. Then having the player and pawns target and hunt them. To fully implement the resources they drop.

The animations for the snail mob I found a little harder to make than I expected, but I got this done at the start of the week. I didn't have a drop for the snails, so I added a Snail Shell to the items database which needed its own icon. I plan to use the Snail Shell in crafting recipes that require Quicklime. I shouldn't need to implement that for a while yet.



I think they came out well, but what is the point in having mobs if you don't have the ability to interact with them? Well, I did say I was going to implement hunting. Now, both the player and pawns can hunt mobs.



Add additional storage structures, as there is currently just the Storage Chest.

I did plan to add additional storage structure...s plural, but I only managed to do the art for one of them. The Storage Crate. Which holds 4 times more than the Storage Chest, but can't be accessed by entities. Each subsequent upgrade to storage will be more cost effective than the last. Providing more storage per item cost. I actually like the storage crate art a lot.



Add the next few levels of missions, and level lock structures so there is a clear path of advancement for the player.

From the previous few images, you can see the new mission objectives for setting up the new pawns with work and housing. I only managed to get the next level of missions done, as I bumped up against this near the end of the week. I also don't know yet what concepts I want to teach the player early. As I need to get them both crafting items, and managing the needs of pawns.

I also didn't manage to get structure level locking done. This isn't terribly difficult to implement, and isn't game critical at any point. It just reduces the number of build items the player can see. So we aren't overloading them with 8 tiers of buildings, and spoiling them on the types of resources they can find. I can do that later.

Get pawns to perform processing jobs, and change the pawn job selection menu.

A bunch of new pawn jobs have been added, without a good way for the player to select them. Still need to work on that. However, they are now able to perform their jobs. They will retrieve items from storage, craft related items using the correct equipment structures located around the map, then deposit the crafted items into storage while retrieving a full inventory of new material. If they don't have access to the material in storage, they will then shift their priority to getting the materials for their job.



They can chop and process wood into lumber, harvest and process wheat into flour into bread, mine ore to process into ingots. As well as spinning thread, making paper, cutting stone, and tanning leather. As you can imagine well, this is all very complicated.



Implement pawn claiming of houses.

In addition to the pawn processing jobs, I have to get the "Housing the Homeless" questline from previous updates finalized. I am glad to say that they pawns will now claim the nicest free house available in the area, and use it for their leisure activities. Something I can easily verify in the new fully featured debug mode.



Make the Tudi teaching messages that occur when the player runs into a mechanic they haven't for the first time.

Tudi now has a number of teaching messages that will now appear for the player when a wide variety of things happen for the first time. Things that are kind of confusing will be explained rather succinctly in the journal, the first time they come up. The game will remember this. I have the capability to re-remind the player at later times with varying frequency.



In this example, messages came up the first time the player was overencumbered, and when the first pawn tried to look for a house that did not exist. I can trigger just about any event in the game to push a message to the journal.

Draw the new totem rank images and add additional higher tier structures to the build menu.

This simply didn't happen, I was unable to get to it this week.

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Now for the things I didn't plan for.

Bubbles

The most time consuming part to get implemented was pawn notification bubbles. I needed them for both debugging and bringing additional life and thoughts to the characters, seeing as this week was pawn focused. The pawns will show a bubble above their heads for any action or interaction they perform. When pawn social interactions are implemented, this feature will extend into that showing the player what the pawns are discussing.



Here, we can see our pawn is about to cut maybe some grass with their scythe.

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The next week is going to be a little lighter on new features as I am preparing content to be ready for the Demo Day upcoming in about 3 weeks, after which there will be a playable demo.

Here are the following things I need to work on this week to prepare for that.

+ More missions for the player to complete, progress, and unlock pawns need to be created. (This is the priority task.)

+ Bugs related to animations, especially for hunting, need to get fixed.

+ Many SFX need to be added to various UI items and interactions.

+ Add Tudi's surveillance drone.

+ Add a few non-functional static environment objects to be placeable by the player.

(IE decor... so that we have the menu ready for later development content.)

That is all for this week, again please follow on bluesky if you haven't already. As I plan for Bluesky to be the primary source of direct consistent updates.

This is an old devlog, ported over from itch.

Welcome to week 5 of Cosmic Construct development. If you haven't already been following my development on Bluesky, you should do that. I update there at least once daily. This post will be recapping what has happened over the last week, with images.

Last week I gave a list of what should be added to the game this week, lets see how I did.

Animations for Chopping, Cutting, Paying Respects, and Gathering.

The animations for all resource gathering and usage of non-garrisonable structures are done. All pawns chop trees, scythe wheat, pay respects to the totem, and gather resources by kneeling down to pick them. I finished this not long after the last devlog post was made.

Optimization of game code for new object drawing calls.

The refactoring for object drawing calls took almost all week, in the background it still isn't done. Doing this is necessary as the game has three new draw layers. The amount of refactoring done had me redoing almost all of how animation was handled. Now, I can call animations with a string, which makes retrieving everything much easier. (It also now runs over 1000 FPS).

A map underlayer to make the game more visually interesting. The ground is not meant to be entirely black.

There were 3 new under layers added to create a more interesting visual space. After asking alot of people for their opinion on how everything looked, this image is the result.



The bottom most layer is a starfield created of tiling rainbow colored parallax masks; fancy. Above that is what I call the "shatterlands terrain layer". Which implies alot of things, but currently it is a field of procedurally randomized geometric rocks. Above that is the small bits of grass everywhere, which is surprisingly just one image that has been randomized pretty well. I plan to add so variants to that. Regardless, I think it all looks very nice. If you liked it how it was before, don't worry, I'll get to that later.



Giving pawns a visual indicator of their profession.

Didn't work on this at all. In fact, I've shelved it for later, as I can do it at any time. Plus, I don't want to go back and redo all of the professions if I have a new animation set. I'd rather do it at the end of the development as a polishing step.

Addition of a creature from which the pawns and player can harvest resources.

I've added a grub, not depicted here. This grub will be what the player harvests meat, bone, and hide from. Despite looking like a maggot. The logic in this magical world being that if animals live together in harmony; what do they eat? Well, I can't really add rabbits, or dear because they are sapient species. So I went with something that clearly has no intelligence, and give them red meat and bones. In this world, grubs have bones and hide. I'll make sure Tudi tells the player that.

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That was the stuff I planned to do, what about the unplanned work?

First of all, the main menu and splashes are done. Going from an epilepsy warning page, to the main menu screen. The main menu has a fade in animation for the logo, and populates the screen with the player character and mob of pawns from the main save file. So if the player has 100 pawns, all of those pawns will appear on the main menu screen. I have no pawns in the save below, so I am alone. :(



The next big think that needed done was the options menu. Which for now is some basic options about how the map layers are rendered, and the volume of various audio channels. The graphics layer for terrain density changes how often the shatterland and foliage tiles appear. There is another for how bright the cosmos parallax background is. Then most importantly, tree opacity. So that you can see the player and pawns behind them without having to toggle the build menu. If you likes how the game looked before the layers were added. You can simply turn the layers down to zero.



Over the next week I have the following things to work on.

• Adding the snail mob. Then having the player and pawns target and hunt them. To fully implement the resources they drop.
  
• Add additional storage structures, as there is currently just the Storage Chest.
  
• Add the next few levels of missions, and level lock structures so there is a clear path of advancement for the player.
  
• Get pawns to perform processing jobs, and change the pawn job selection menu.
  
• Implement pawn claiming of houses.
  
• Make the Tudi teaching messages that occur when the player runs into a mechanic they haven't for the first time.
  
• Draw the new totem rank images. (maybe)
  
• Add additional higher tier structures to the build menu. (maybe)
  

I'll post here again next friday with another update. ^--^;