Cosmic Construct News

Hello, and welcome to the Cosmic Construct Devlog, the 23rd week of development has just ended. Every week we cover development goals set at the end of the previous weekly devlog. This week has been largely productive.

If you want to follow development more closely, you can join us at:

• My bluesky account that posts daily progress updates for the game
  
• The Cosmic Construct community discord server.
  
• Wishlist Cosmic Construct on Steam. Every wishlist helps me, and costs nothing.
  
• Follow the steam page to get more updates about the game. (It's also a good metric.)
  

Now for this week's progress

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Finish new structures. Storehouse and Vertical Farm at least. (more if I have time).



All of the new structures are in the game, plus an additional I managed to squeeze in there.

In the above we have the Brewery that I didn't show off last week, because I didn't have the steam animated. It will, again, be used to brew alcoholic beverages and solvents.

The Town Hall, which will have a governing operation, which is complicated to explain, but when I work on the job programming I'll expand on that.

Then we have the Warehouse, which is drawn in a way to attach to itself to expand a single building out horizontally to look like one large building. Once I have the decor for this rank in, then it will like more "rural town".



You can see how the storage structures fit together here. The unplanned structure is the one with the orange stripe; the Depot. It has a corrugated roof which I just realize I haven't shaded. As a bonus, the green grass in this screenshot is actually a mimic.



Finally, we have the vertical farm, which connects to it's neighbors in a similar way, forming large contiguous structures. This screenshot shows a bunch of Garlic and Onion, but when I have all of the plants done it will be procedural. The intent is to show random plants, much like the Market.

2 new crops. There are 8 left.



At the top we have Arugula and the bottom Black Beans. As with the rest of the plants there is a wild and domesticated version. I still need to make all of the dishes these plants turn into. The food diversity of the settlement will be part of the calculation for tourism attraction.

Preparations for trailer editing.

Nothing I can show here as it will spoil the trailer. Some shots will require all of the crops be done. The trailer has a hard deadline of May 2025 Week 2. The trailer will be public in June, along with a new demo build. That build will expand the demo content substantially, bringing the player up to a point just before they can upgrade cloaks.

Reworking of an existing feature, which I will explain next week. (priority task)



Alright so. This is a big one.

I am preparing for "combat features" which require a change to the way that the game implements engagements with targets. Before this change the player had to click on an enemy to target them. They would fully stop, and then fire at a creature walking away. This is easy to program behavior for the pawns. It's fine for "enemies" that don't fight back, but not for what I have planned.

The new combat movement is fully functional. The player fires while moving, and is able to "manually circle strafe" enemies. You can hold down the mouse and aim wherever you want with no checks for range. It's just better in every measurable way.

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There was no unplanned content this week except for the Depot art. I decided not to separate it.

This upcoming week the following is planned.

- 6 more crops. Yep gonna just do the rest of them.

- Energy and food consumption for the player and pawns.

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

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

I really want to get some programming done, I've been doing art for too long. Anyhow, that is all for this week.

Welcome to the 22nd week of development updates for Cosmic Construct.

The last week has been a little rough for me, so I didn't get as much done as I expected to. I also have a few other commitments that I needed to attend to. Regardless there is plenty of new stuff to show off.

As usual, I gotta plug the socials.

• Follow the bluesky account so that you can get daily updates on game progress.
  
• Join the Cosmic Construct community discord server. I'd love to see some more people around there.
  
• Wishlist Cosmic Construct on Steam. This one is important.
  
• Follow the steam page so that you can get notifications for these devlogs in the future.
  

Every week we go over development goals that were set at the end of the previous week.

Here are those goals.

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



I didn't get all 4 of the buildings done. Only the Brewery and Town Hall. The Warehouse is easy to draw, but the Vertical Farm isn't.

The Brewery will be used to produce Beer and Grain Spirits, which will be used for both leisure, and as a solvent. The Town Hall will perform a management function for the settlement. Pawns have a relevant profession for this task.

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



This took up the bulk of development time. There are 8 destroyed truck variants for the new Deadwood Tree. As well as new grass type "Urineweed". Which is a in joke from a development community I am apart of. This item will produce Nitrates which function as both a type of fertilizer for high tier plants, as well as a nitrate source for gunpowder; Saltpeter. I still don't know to what extent gunpowder will be used for gameplay. I'll be working on something special, and related; soon.



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



The two planned crops for this week are Corn and Barley.

Corn is going to be mostly for the creation of Grain Spirits using the Brewery. Of course, you will be able to make and include it in a variety of foods once I go and draw all of the icons for them. Food items are very easy to add to the game, as they are simple recipe exchanges.

Barley Grain will also be used by the Brewery to produce Beer, which will be consumed at the Guild Hall to restore leisure, or by Expeditioners to increase their production. Barley Grain will also make staple meals that restore hunger substantially, but damage leisure.

Integrate the new items into the database.

Not much to show here. I've gone ahead and added all of the new items in. Adding items to the database can take time depending on what type they are. Some have tags that I need to test to confirm are working correctly. Like those that are plantable, or that can be consumed by pawns.

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

I did not finish the above entirely, so I did not do additional work on plants.

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Biome Blending - Omnilands Biome



I added an additional biome to the roster. This is the Omnilands. It doesn't contain anything new, but it does contain most of everything.

I needed a new biome to test the game's biome blending functions which I have been working on in the background since I implemented the second biome. If you look at the terrain tiles, you can see that they are fit together in an interlocking pattern. For example, there are triangle shapes in the space of the shattered ground. Each of the terrain tiles are actually dovetailed shapes. I draw them in a way they can interlock.

The Omnilands is a proof of concept for any biome blending combination. This is 25% of each of the 4 existing biomes. However, I can blend any percentage of any number of biomes. (90% Shatterlands, 10% Grotlands) or (12% Shaterlands, 23% Lunlands, 65% Hinderlands). Any combination can be done at the map generation and update steps. I want to find a way to use this other than for just exploration.



Now that the "4 base colors" are done, I can work on two color schemes with purple, orange, cyan, magenta, and white.

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For the upcoming week, I'll be working on something nifty.

- Finish new structures. Storehouse and Vertical Farm at least. (more if I have time).

- 2 new crops. There are 8 left.

- Preparations for trailer editing.

- Reworking of an existing feature, which I will explain next week. (priority task)

That's about it for this devlog. See you all next week. (or sooner on bluesky and discord)

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.

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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.



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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.



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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.

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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.

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No unplanned work this week.

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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.)

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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.)
  

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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.)

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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.)