Cosmic Construct News

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. ^--^;

This is an old devlog, ported over from itch.

These devlogs are going to be relatively short I think. A record of what occurred over the course of development. An itemized list of things that have been done or need to be worked on. For a more granular play by play of what is going on, you can follow me on bluesky.

This past week I spent most of my time on the agent AI system for pawns. The player will be able to assign pawns to jobs, or have them roam around and do what they please. Each pawn has 4 needs that keep track of: hunger, bathroom, entertainment, and social. There is a 5th need which tracks overall stress level. If the stress level is too high, they will leave the settlement.





Pawns also track relationships between each other pawn. So there can be up to 10,000 relationship connections. It is possible for a pawn to one pawn to like another, but it not be reciprocated. The plan is to have pawns react to and even verbalize events going on around them. Including dissatisfaction with their job, or with other pawns.





The next week of development will be focusing on animations, and game appearance. Here is the list of planned additions.

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

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

+ Optimization of game code for new object drawing calls.

+ Giving pawns a visual indicator of their profession. (maybe this week?)

+ Addition of a creature from which the pawns and player can harvest resources. (maybe this week?)