Cosmic Construct News

[p]This is the week 28th devlog for Cosmic Construct. So much for the  devlog schedule I put forth last week. I ended up devoting time to other things. Like playing games with friends. I'm probably just really lazy to be honest.[/p][p]Each week we go over development goals set up during the prior week and see if they were met.[/p][p]To follow the game's progress you can join me at:[/p]

• [p]My bluesky account which gives more frequent updates.[/p]
• [p]The Cosmic Construct community discord server.[/p]
• [p]Also Wishlist Cosmic Construct on Steam and follow it's steam page.[/p]

[p]---[/p][p]Demo preparations.[/p][p]Nothing really pretty to show other than an engine screenshot. Cosmic Construct is make in the Gamemaker Studio 2 engine. But I feel like I don't use gamemaker how almost any other person does. My rooms have a single object in them on a black background. I'm not using the editor as anything more than an IDE alot of the time.[/p][p]Most of the work for the demo has been revolving around making sure the state machine tree for the pawns is doing everything it is intended to do. Testing all of the corner cases is difficult. Sometime pawns get a task then rapidly switch between idle and planning stages because they are stuck, or walk off to the far corner of the map because they were loaded incorrectly. Pawns will be the main source of bugs for the foreseeable future it seems.[/p][p]
Lock out unassignable professions.[/p][p][/p][p]This is one of those things that looks like a step backwards until you actually use it. Before there were a list of about 50 professions pawns could take up. Which is overwhelming to someone looking at the pawn manager menu for the first time. I wanted to prevent this, and remove all of the jobs that would do nothing when selected. This meant also writing logic to handle checking of available jobs, and removing redundant assignments in case a building is deconstructed.[/p][p][/p][p]Lock out objectives categories that aren't available.[/p][p][/p][p]Before categories would show as locked until there level requirements were meet. This no longer happens. Only the objectives themselves show as locked, in categories that have been unlocked. This very much streamlines the list of objectives making it for less unwieldly.[/p][p][/p][p]Structure art of some kind.[/p][p][/p][p]Haven't done much here. I tried doing the 21-25 totem level sprites, but didn't end up finishing them. I really haven't felt like doing any of the art stuff recently. I'm doing my best to prevent burnout when it comes to that.[/p][p]---[/p][p]Rising Tide[/p][p][/p][p]I spent a significant amount my days at the end of this week voting on the Rising Tide trailer jam / competition hosted by Blue Ocean Games. Over 1000 game trailer submissions were made, and Cosmic Construct was one of them. For the competition, people can watch these trailers and vote on winners in an ELO based ranking system. I have watched and voted on nearly all of these trailers. I've spent about 16 hours doing this.[/p][p]---[/p][p]This WILL be a very short week. I have to get devlog posting back on schedule. I will be posting on the 9th or 10th. 3 days, 3 tasks.[/p][p]- Demo preparations, testing and bug fixes. (priority)[/p][p]- Pawn voice lines, and fixing of pawn complaints. (difficult)[/p][p]- Structure art, and totem ranks 21-25.[/p][p]Thank you for joining me for this devlog.[/p]

Welcome to the 27th week of development for Cosmic Construct. This week has been what I would like to call a "productive week with little productivity". Basically, I'm not happy with my performance here. I didn't do everything that I wanted to get done, and I'm not happy about it. I'll make the excuse that I haven't felt well, but that doesn't matter.

Every development project has its highs and lows. I appreciate anyone who sticks around through both.

If you want to do that you can follow the project through:

• My bluesky account where I try to post daily updates.
  
• The Cosmic Construct community discord server.
  
• And of course you should Wishlist Cosmic Construct on Steam and follow it's steam page.
  

Each week in these devlogs I review development goals set at the end of the prior week's log.

Spoiler, I didn't get it done.
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Finish two separate 2 minute gameplay trailers. (priority task)



As expected, this has taken up a bulk of my development time. Committing to two trailers being done at around the same time was convenient as I have footage I could use between the two of them. However, having to cut them together hasn't been easy. I'm not really a video editor. I've done some of it for youtube, but I don't have enough experience doing it to call it easy. The 18 second sequence screenshotted above took about 3 hours of just recording and arranging to get correct. I also had to program in an alignment teleport script, for the player to that I could sync the animations and player position to the changing crops. Despite all of this effort I still managed to screw up one of them. >(o.o)<



I did two separate 2 hour playthroughs of the game to get trailer footage, only to find many bugs and minor annoyances that needed to be corrected. I'll go over that later in this devlog. Regardless, I think the little town I constructed is rather nice, even through after the two hour mark I cheated in a bunch of structures because silkworm farming and its profession isn't programmed in yet.



I have to say, now that the crafting tables tell you what is being crafted, and that the crafting autocompletes after each craft step; its so much more satisfying to craft manually. All of the pawns do the work I expected them to do when assigning, and I didn't have to babysit them to ensure they were actually doing work. Talking to them, makes the game feel much more lively. Although I do miss Logs coming up in the logging menu. I really need to have social events from pawns interact with the player in game verbally, with a pop up overhead text.

Add new structure icons and complete gameplay balance.



I got the new structure icons in, which is the first time backgrounds show up for the tier 6 and 7 buildings. When the game is finished, there will be just as many red, cyan, and rainbow background structures as there are gold. That's how many buildings are left.

Art for new structures.

I got about a third of one structure done, and I'm not even happy with that. I might delete it and start over. I was trying to draw the Abattoir, which is a slaughterhouse. I was trying to do this in such a way as to have grubs swarming around it like the Orchard and Arboretum do for trees. I just couldn't mentally visualize that for some reason while working on it. I know what I need to do now, I just haven't gone back to it.

Either way, zero progress on this. Big sad.

New pawn interactions and voice dialogue for existing complaint types.

This was more broken than I thought, and dialogues aren't working for complaints. Because of the way it's implemented, it's difficult to test. I have to make a testing suite for the pawn interactions to sus out where the problems actually are.

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Unplanned work.

Bug Fixes

During gameplay recording for the trailer I found so many bugs that needed to be squished.

Most of them have centered around the way food was implemented. I found I couldn't eat meat. What I could eat could be consumed multiple times, wasn't restoring the correct amount of energy, could be eaten and wasted, and many other problems. Basically, just the animation was and energy restoration was working. Everything else, like, preventing you from eating while you are already eating was completely ignored for some reason. That has all been fixed.

Player eating frequency is easy to adjust as I can simply change the energy consumption. Because more physically demanding activities have a higher animation rate, I found it convenient to consume energy relative to the player's animation and movement speed. The more you run around and collect, the more energy you consume; as expected. Before it was just sort of going down over time, that felt "abnormal". Unfortunately, pawns don't yet consume food... and they definitely need to. I was preparing crops to feed them, only to realize I was making food only for myself. That is a bad feeling.

I've been doing gameplay balance changes and implementations for the cost of mid game structures. I have input them into the database incorrectly, and many were requested items that didn't exist. Those have been fixed. I still have to add costs for the mid-late and late game structures. This isn't hard to do, but the balance is difficult to test as I don't have a "naturally constructed save file" to see how long it would take a player with 50 optimized pawns to construct one of those buildings.

Many other bugs were fixed with structure placement. Some structures weren't aligned to grid. The Mint building specifically was set to the wrong structure id in two separate places in the structure database which was a pain to figure out. I somehow managed to set the Mint's name field to "! INTERACT ERROR !", and it caused a lot of confusion. I have confirmed that the entire crafting line from mining to minting coinage now works as intended. I just need to get the market working.

One of the big issues I found that isn't a bug, as that the game now feels a little aimless when it comes to goals. It isn't clear exactly what the player is getting "experience" in their bar for, or what to do after they have gained a point. The intent was to have the player open the objectives menu to find stuff to do, but it is frankly unwieldly and intimidating. So I might also find a way to remove the locked objectives from showing up. I need to add an objective / achievement popup display. Which means I need to make about 500 icons for that. I am not in the mood to do that right now.

Demo Preparation

Last week I said that the demo will be available on June 3rd. That is not the case. I might be delaying it until mid to late June given all of the new problems that have come up. I don't want to present something that has so many issues. I want players to be able to play up to level 8 (when the Shed is unlocked) at least, where production really starts ramping up.

Given the amount of stuff I still need to do, like locking off professions in the pawn manager, I expect 2-3 more devlog weeks before I have the demo ready.

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Anyhow, that is all of what was done this week. Hopefully this upcoming week is better. I'm going to shorten this one by one or two days as the devlogs are getting off schedule. This week 3 devlog should be coming out on the 21st not on the 28th, so I'm misaligned by a full week. It is easily fixed by just releasing them every 7 days, as months have 2-3 more days than 28. So it will fix itself naturally if I do that.

So this week will be a "short one" to get me back to a correct schedule. June 2nd, June 9th, June 16th, June 23rd, and June 30th; will bring the 4th June devlog back to being actually "at" the end of June.

With that said this next devlog will be posted in 5 days, so don't expect much.

- Demo preparations.

- Lock out unassignable professions.

- Lock out objectives categories that aren't available.

- Structure art of some kind.

Thank you for following the development of my game. I'll have more updates soon.

This is the week 26 devlog for Cosmic Construct, meaning we are now at the 6 month mark.

As I had mentioned last week, I had some other non-coding work that needed to be done for the game, and that is just about finished.

If you want to follow development progress, you can do so in the following ways.

• My bluesky account where I post frequent updates.
  
• I also have a Cosmic Construct community discord server.
  
• Don't forget to Wishlist Cosmic Construct on Steam and follow the steam page.
  

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Dialogue Art



I decided at the beginning of the week that I would get the social interactions working before the demo was released. That way the game would be a little more lively, and better reflect how I intend the pawns to react in the released game. Pawns are meant to communicate with each other in the same way that they communicate with the player. With audible conversations nearby at low volume.

Social Interactions



Once the art was finished. I was able to work on getting the placeholder coversation text done. When communicating with pawns, they will either complain if they have a complaint, or will talk with a random coversation subject relative to their personality. Personalities will effect the kind of leisure tasks they will take part in. Some will prefer games, reading, physical activities, as well as more or less leisure.

Social needs are covered by these interactions. Pawns with low social will seek out interaction between themselves and others. Pawns can also have traits which prevent them from communicating with others, or the player.

Energy and Food

I previously got the food integrated, and the player could eat; restoring hunger. I found some bugs with the way energy was implemented, and wasn't working for some activities, and was decreasing too quickly for others. This took longer to get working than I expected, but the player now loses energy while working and needs to eat to recover it.

Recording

I've been recording and recording different aspects of gameplay to create two trailers, one for each of two events Cosmic Construct is taking part in, both of which will be up on the Steam page to showcase the game. I have a hard deadline for the completion of those trailers, which is the 23rd of May. 3 days from now.

Gameplay Testing and Prep for the Upcoming Demo

I am going through multiple cycles of gameplay testing preparing for the new demo that will be changing the entire game progression relative to the current demo which uses the old hand-holdy progression system. The game is being changed more to a "move at your own pace, choose your own goals kind of game" with a level restriction apparatus which gates player progress behind completing a number of arbitrary goals.

I'll need feedback on this new demo when it becomes available. Feel free to take part in that at on June 3rd.

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We are now back to a regular schedule of planned development content.

- Finish two separate 2 minute gameplay trailers. (priority task)

- Add new structure icons and complete gameplay balance.

- Art for new structures.

- New pawn interactions and voice dialogue for existing complaint types.

Sorry week's devlog was short on images. I thought I would have more with all of the recording.

Welcome to the week 25 devlog for the development of Cosmic Construct. In these devlogs I go over development goals set at the end of the post from the previous week. However, this week did not have anything set, so it will be more freeform than these usually are. This will go for next weeks as well, before returning to normal.

If you would like to follow development of the game, there are a few ways you can do that.

• My bluesky account where I post frequent updates.
  
• I also have a Cosmic Construct community discord server.
  
• Don't forget to Wishlist Cosmic Construct on Steam.
  
• Follow the steam page if you want more of these weekly devlogs
  

With that out of the way, I normally have a planned work section. Since there is no planned work, we are just going go over what was done in not particular order.

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Pawn Interactions

Code for Pawn Interactions is underway. Pawn Interactions are going to mostly replace the system of pawn report logs, and switch over to an "animal crossing like" conversational system to get feedback from pawns. I don't entirely know what this will look like after it is finished, but there will be chat cut-ins when interacting with a pawn. It should bring more life and character to the game, and provide a means to get a higher resolution art of each of the pawns. Which will make the tailoring more visually interesting.

Pawn AI Improvements



Since all of the new crops were added, they were not recognized by the pawns doing the general gathering job. General Gathering still remains as less useful than intended, due to how the jobs are broken down. I neglected to add a general farming job, which is unfortunate. I'll be reorganizing the job lists so that they make more logical sense in the early game. Instead of having the player select between specific harvestables objects like berries, wheat, or linseed.



The search function was very, very poor computationally. I was using true diagonal distance, to find the nearest grid square. Then even worse, checking all 10,201 squares diagonal distances each time a pawn changed a state. This was fine when I wasn't checking over a list of possible objects to find. The second I needed to check the entire list of harvestable objects, it became O(n^3) complexity and ran the game down to 40 FPS.

I rewrote all of the grid search functions to check manhattan distance in a spiral. This is good because pawns, when harvesting a crop, are likely surrounded by many other similar crops. So it will terminate on an adjacent square almost immediately. Also, nowhere in that check is a square root ever used. This might not be a joke, but it could in some cases be more than 100,000 times more computational efficient than what I was doing before. That is how bad the search algo was.

I did everything I could to stress the game out, and could still do double that and run above 60 FPS. The screenshot above is the worst framerate dip I could find.

Game Balance

About half of the buildings still don't have build costs because none of the game testing has gotten to that point of gameplay. However, this is going to change in the upcoming weeks as I start building the mid game. I figured I would go ahead and do the math necessary for all of those buildings, and see what level of commitment a player needs to craft those items. I'm trying to keep from timegating the player from having access to the resources they need to make progress. Which is why the Market was added as a structure. The idea is that once a colony is established, the player can just buy most of the common resources instead of having the harvest them.

New BGM Tracks

4 New BGM tracks were added to the game. Cosmic Construct has two music playlists, common and rare. All 4 of the new songs are in the common rotation, which makes them just as likely to show up. In total 16 minutes of BGM audio, which brings the grand total to 1 hour and 40 minutes. I still don't think this is enough, but I probably will not add any more BGM audio until after the game is released.

Recording For Trailers



I have committed to two gameplay trailers for a couple of events that are going to happen in June. Once those trailers are finished, I'll be going on a small marketing run presenting the game to some interested people. The final pre-release trailer will be for Steam Next Fest. I don't know which next fest Cosmic Construct will be participating in. However, I have hard numerical requirements and goals that need to be meet before I consider sending the game out streamers.

Game Testing

Much of my time this week has been spent doing game testing and tweaking what I see. Removing annoyances, and shifting direction way from mechanics that cause those annoyances. This is part of the reason I am lessening the Logging mechanic, in favor of a more interactive means of communicating with pawns.

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As like last week, I will be doing work that I do not have planned.

I will be preparing a new steam demo, and do not know yet what is required to have it ready to play.

Alright, I've finished up with the 24th week of development, so its time for the 24th week devlog.

You can always follow development more frequently in other locations.

• My bluesky account posts daily progress for Cosmic Construct.
  
• You can join the Cosmic Construct community discord server.
  
• Wishlist Cosmic Construct on Steam!
  
• Follow the steam page where I post these weekly devlogs.
  

Each week I cover development goals for the game set at the end of the prior week's post. Then review if those goals were hit.
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6 more crops. Yep gonna just do the rest of them.



Behold! All 6 of the crops I planned to do this week got finished. In the top row we have Soy, Cabbage, and Hops. In the bottom, Potato, Rice, and Squash. Soy produces Edamame which I might also have turn into Soy Sauce or something. Cabbage, probably needs a pepper of some kind to go along with it later (I can't believe I didn't do a pepper now.) Hops will be used by the Brewery for beer production. Potatoes and Rice are just staple food items. I think I can turn Squash into an event thing on certain dates or

Energy and food consumption for the player and pawns.



Food of all kinds can now be consumed. Both player an pawns have a maximum of 100 energy. On the above screenshot, it is the cheese shaped bar. When the energy bar is fully depleted, the players movement speed will be halved, and will start to loose health over time. This will be the same for pawns, but will also damage their stress.

Food restores and amount of energy equal to 10 times its tier. This means higher quality food is generally "less efficient" for restoring energy, but can be eaten more quickly. Additionally, the food diversity of the settlement will be used in the calculation that determines the number of tourists who visit attracted by food.

HP DoT for certain environments, as well as "death". (I'll clarify that later.)

I didn't finish this entirely, and its in a way I can't easily show visually. The intent is to have some environment object damage the player by simply being around them. This will occur in a couple of biomes, but most recently the Grotlands. There will be a miasma which damages the player continuously will within. This also means the Grotlands willn't have its own roaming settlers.

The difficulty comes from trying to find the objects that damage the player within the players area. The sounds they create, etc... Normally in gamemaker, finding a nearby object is an easy thing to do. Usually with distance_to_object(obj), which would give the closest instance of the object you want to find. The objects on the map of Cosmic Construct are not objects, but is an arrangement of strips of sprites called from three 2d arrays. Finding an object requires checking each cell in range, calling one of these arrays, finding if its value matches one of the damage objects, and determining its distance. The damaging miasma is every easy on the step event; if currentbiome = "Grotlands" {hp -= 0.005}.

This is just one of many of the things I've done before I am able to fully implement damaging objects properly.

As for "death", I've decided that permanent stakes for death is very poor in a game intended to have a cozy atmosphere. At the same time, I do want to give the player an activity which earn rewards for doing "combat" of some kind. I think teleporting the player back to the totem or house, and putting a "death stone" into their inventory, is a sufficient penalty.

(If I have time, I'll do some of the new building UI elements.)

I did not get around to this.

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Cursors



I was tired of seeing the windows cursor in game, and decided to fully replace it with a custom cursor. Clickable objects change the cursor shape, and some cursors are informational. If you hold control while in the inventory it will inform you that you can trash items, and in a menu that has a confirmation, it will show a checkmark. Things like that.



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This upcoming week is going to be very different to other weeks, as I don't really know what can get done.

This is because I have two separate trailer videos for Cosmic Construct that need recording and features implemented to show off what the game can currently, and will soon be able to do.

I can't create a list of todo items, because I don't know what needs to be made during this process.

Basically, the entire next week devlog will contain unplanned content, which should be interesting.

The week after will return to normal, where I will be working on buildings and starting to implement gameplay features. I would like to have a minigame finished sometime soon.

That is all for this week. o7