Cosmic Construct News

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

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

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

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

Lets go over the planned work first.

Build Mode Structure Icons for New Buildings

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



9 New Jobs and Job Icons for Pawns

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

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

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

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



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

Any additional art that can get done.

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

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

/v/3

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

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



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

Demo Day 61

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

Options Bug

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

Setting Up A Discord

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

Objective System Rework

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

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

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

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

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

- Implement suggested quality of life features

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

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

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

This devlog marks the end of the 16th development week for Cosmic Construct. Can't believe it has been 4 months since I've started this project. Time really does fly doing this kind of work. I can't give a good estimate as to when the game will be done for a variety of reasons. But I know I will be able to reevaluate where the project is after another 4 months. Where a majority of the art assets will be complete.

If you haven't already wishlisted the game on steam. You should do that, especially if you are interested in these weekly devlog posts. If you want to get more regular updates to development, you can also follow me on bluesky. I only post updates related to the game there. Also, don't be afraid to comment on the posts on bluesky. I respond to everyone I can, and will answer any questions about the game.

In these weekly devlog posts, I go over development goals set over the previous week. This was a short week that I was using as an excuse to take a break from development by doing light work. I will be back to our regularly scheduled development for the upcoming week.

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[] Prepare a Press Kit (priority task)

I prepared a press kit from the assets I had on hand from the creation of the capsule images for the steam store page, as well as screenshots from these weekly devlogs which I do save. I meant to add some extra screenshots and reels from testing Totem Ranks 6-10, but I mostly forgot to do that. I can just update the press kit with content as I create it.

The press kit is available from a google drive folder and includes all of the art assets used for the steam page including sub assets which come from the comic. Select screenshots, an hour and a half of gameplay video, the game soundtrack, and the demo trailer are also included in the press kit folder.

I even took the extra effort to edit the metadata of the game music files so everything is displayed nicely in a media player.



[] Prepare a slightly better Steam trailer.

This took quite a lot longer than I anticipated. Given that I have some beginner level experience editing videos, I figured I could whip together a trailer real quick. It instead took the better part of a day to get timings to a point where I everything felt right, as I was trying to sync it up with the music. I think the result was worth the effort. Sadly, I don't have the game content to show off in the demo trailer.

The "Grow Into A Metropolis" part is a little lackluster. Given that I am showing off an area of level 5 of 50. A level 50 settlement is going to be entirely different in appearance. Especially with the number of decor objects I plan to add.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[] Communicate with publications and get articles up where I can.

Because of the nature of the work, I can't really detail exactly who I attempted to contact, and what kind of progress was made there. I can say I did manage to get ahold of some games journalists to cover the demo sometime over the next couple months. Which should hopefully get the game into the eyes of more playtesters, and people who like games like this.

This is going to get a little yappy, and not about publications so much. Let me talk about Cosmic Construct's development pillars real quick.

Cosmic Construct is a colony management sim that comes from a mentality of not really feeling satisfied with the "progression systems" of other survival crafting like games. I feel the RPG elements integrations of games like Ark Survival Evolved or Minecraft Mods like PMMO where "doing x repeatedly makes x a little faster", becomes grindy rather quickly. This is the same in Rimworld where the progression of the colony comes, mostly from building a base; but also from the stats of the individual workers. A settler with 15 construction will outclass multiple settlers with 3 construction.

I wanted to develop a game where progression of a Colony Sim game, is tied to the advancement of the colony itself. Where the settlement is a character of sorts, to a lesser extent personified as the Totem. The player serves the primary role, but doesn't really have stats other than "the cloak". I did consider several times during development to add "runescape style" skills. I do want to make a game like that eventually. Though I also feel that if I am going to take a risk with the obviously experimental and "avantgarde" Cosmic Construct, that I might as well go all the way.

Bringing us back to publication and appearance, it doesn't take much to get someone interested in this game. Due to the black neon art style, in a sea of other games it stands out. It gives people something to talk about, but unfortunately I am dealing with a two edged sword. If someone notices it for its appearance, they see the game as an art piece. Ignoring the fact that I am making a crafting colony sim that will likely have a hundred plus hours of progression mechanics. Getting the gameplay itself reviewed is difficult, as those who notice the game and are willing to write about it see the game at it's face value. Which was why a new steam trailer was needed.

Sorry for the "notice me senpai" rant.

[] Review, reorder, and streamline the objectives list to teach concepts earlier. Then finish Ranks 8-10.

This barely got touched as I got to it at the end of the short week. I did manage to get about 10 objectives done across all of the Ranks. The game has 550 total progression objectives, similar to those Sims mobile games. where subsequent ranks grow a town. However, the individual objectives are more open ended and be completed in any order the player chooses. I considered opening up all 550 objectives at the same time with a Minecraft FTB style quest tree.

If that is something you think you might want to see, let me know what you think about that. I've been playing a lot of Feed The Beast minecraft modpacks lately. I think that opening the objective tree like that might give the player "too much" to do. However, might allow the player to make meaningful progress more early. Limiting the buildings the player can build by Rank (number of objectives completed), could still work. If I make this change, it will be much later in development.

I could knock out like 40 more of the total objectives by writing the totem level up descriptions. So they aren't "objectives" so much as they are confirmations. That is like a long book chapter worth of text all at one time. However, that work is on the table as something I can do in the coming weeks.

[] Additional structure art. (Maybe. We'll see)

Didn't get to this.

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Map Seeding

When I released the trailer, another dev on discord commented that 10,000 maps is a pretty weird number of maps used for a procedural generation algorithm. Which is correct. The maps Cosmic Construct generated were "not entirely procedural". All of the map files for the game are human readable, located in appdata/local.

Prior to last night, every map would save a huge array of randomized numbers which acted as the seed values for each individual tile. This dev pointed out that I could generate the a deterministic seed table instead of saving the seeds individually. Cosmic Construct's maps files no longer save seeds for each tile. However, a planned future feature that would allow for transmog of placed objects has to be cut. It doesn't have any if at all gameplay impact. It was "creep" anyway. I'd rather the map save files be 35% smaller.



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That was all I managed to get done this last week, which wasn't much. We are back to normal, so lets go over what will get done in the upcoming days.

+ Build Mode Structure Icons for New Buildings

+ 9 New Jobs and Job Icons for Pawns

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

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

+ Any additional art that can get done.

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

Welcome to the devlog of 15th week of development for Cosmic Construct. If you are following the game's progress but haven't wishlisted it on steam, I'd be interested to know how you came across it. Otherwise, you can follow more frequent updates that I post on my bluesky account.

This week has been uneventful for me, and admittedly I was a bit lazy. I got more done that I thought, especially with the structure art. I spent most of the last few days playing Tribe Nine. You're not here to hear excuses though. Lets get on to the progress that was made.

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Finish and test Totem Levels 8-10

There are 20 objectives in Totem Levels 8-10, and it got 5 of them done. I need to make sure some new structures are working before I can test out those levels and implement them fully. It almost looks like I will have to do a second pass over the entire objective list to reorganize everything.

Draw totem rank images 11-15.

Yep, this was the first thing I did at the start of the week. Actually, after doing the 11-15 images, I felt so good about it; that I also did 16-20. There are a total of 50 ranks that need totem images. They will get more extravagant and complex at each of 10 stages, with 5 images each. You can see the same element be added every 5 levels. A cloak, flower pots, obelisks, and a crown with "royal cloth". What could this mean? Who is the statue of?



Draw the Horseshoe Pit, Grinder, Orchard, Press, Market, and Scriptorium structures.

This took up a bulk of the week. It was a lot more work than I initially predicted. Over 150 frames needed to be drawn, which was very time consuming. As well as planning for the market, which itself took almost an entire workday to figure out. The result in my opinion was worth it.



From top to bottom, left to right.

The Grinder, which has a gear and material dumping animation. I honestly just winged what I thought a grinder looked like in my head. I think it turned out okay. Put little safety signs on the side for worldbuilding purposes. The Grinder will skip crafting steps, turning larger products into their base ground counterparts at half the speed. So instead of using the Metate to turn stone to gravel to sand for glass. The Grinder turns stone into sand, in 1.5 seconds instead of 6.

Next is the Orchard, which passively produces berries and other fruits. Getting it to look how I want, and match up with the Arboretum amounted to just cutting the Arboretum building in half and redrawing it. The Arboretum has trees behind it which, are already drawn. However, there aren't that many variations of the domesticated berry bushes. So I just duplicated the rendering of bushes a bunch of times.

The Scriptorium I wanted to look like Tailor, as will all of the "business buildings". This is so that the player can build a row of structures and construct city streets with decor parts when I work on those much later in development. Making the sizes of the buildings uniform in style, size, and color is important. The Scriptorium turns blank books into written books, and passively produces Research. To construct a Library will need to write enough books to populate the library when they construct it.

Next is the press, which produces twice as much liquid from materials. Instead of getting 1 Linseed Oil like you do at a Metate, you will get 2. It can press berries into juice.

Then there is the Horseshoe Pit, where pawns can play throwing games. Which will improve the Leisure mood. It doesn't really have any other purpose than teaching how to take care of the Leisure mood. Other buildings will provide Leisure when visited. Some decor objects will also restore a pawn's leisure.



Finally we have the Market. This took up a significant amount of my art time. As you can probably tell. I make a procedural generator for market stalls. Each shows variations of items and displays. The cloth roof can have patterns as you can see. I find it interesting that the blue with yellow chevron appeared right next to each other. It's like a 1 in 245 chance of happening.

Anyhow, these Markets will be the access point to the Market UI, which will allow currency to be exchanged for items of its tier. This is what the copper, silver, and gold coins will be used for. A single market will allow this UI to be accessed, but each additional market produces passive income.

Add garrisoning for the new structures.

The Market , Orchard, and Scriptorium all need to be occupied by a pawn to function. The pawns can occupy the new structures, but they currently don't produce resources, and don't have the correct job assignments; such as Author. The Market also needs to have a UI made specifically for it.

Test implementation of player and pawn needs (If I have time.)

Draw additional structures. (If I have time.)

Neither of these were done, as I "didn't have time".

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No extra work was done this week.

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This week is going to be a little different to prior weeks. Because of the shorter month, I'm going to have a shorter week. Due to late devlog posts. I figured I would use this shorter week to do something I've been neglecting to do over the last few months.

Marketing.

This week will be a marketing week. During this week I will be promoting Cosmic Construct in the places I can, and prepare materials for publications. Here is what needs to get done for this week.

+ Prepare a Press Kit (priority task)

+ Prepare a slightly better Steam trailer.

+ Communicate with publications and get articles up where I can.

+ Review, reorder, and streamline the objectives list to teach concepts earlier. Then finish Ranks 8-10.

+ Additional structure art. (Maybe. We'll see)

Thank you for reading this post and following Cosmic Construct's progress.

Just finished up the 14th development week for Cosmic Construct. If you are reading this article, but haven't already wishlisted the game on steam... Who are you? What do you want? What GOLD!? YOU WON'T FIND WHERE IT'S BUR--- Also, I post more frequent updates to bluesky which more regularly cover what's going on. I try to post there daily, but alas, I don't always have something meaningful to visually show.

Each week in these devlogs I cover the development goals and tasks set during the prior week and reflect on if they were met. Spoiler: This week wasn't great.

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Totem ranks 6-10 (priority task)

This was the main thing I wanted to do over the last week. Unfortunately, I only got up to finishing Rank 8, so 9 and 10 remain untouched. The planning requires some features to be implemented for pawn and player needs to teach the player about them earlier in the game. So, I have to integrate some of those features or skip them before testing of the other components to begin.

This was a big oversight on my part.

Also, this week I dealt with an internet outage. Because my game engine Gamemaker Studio 2 LTS is "always online" software, it requires logging into a launcher to use. Meaning I had to do most of my planning in Obsidian, which really halted my progress for a few days.



AI for Structure Garrisoning

Pawn garrisoning of structures requires altering the state machine. As the pawns have more of their features added, they will rapidly grow in complexity. The below diagram doesn't include sound effects, animation state changes, or bubble icons. I still need to add wait functions, redirections for in use objects, and some other things for quality of life.



For structure garrisoning, many of the pawns AI actions will occur inside of a building. You might think that checks are being made if a building exists to generate resources passively. In actuality, the pawns are generating the resources and pulling them from storage. The pawn generates the resource for garrisonable structures, not the building itself. The pawn is just rendered invisible, just like on non-origin maps.

The Structure Garrisoning Itself

To do this, all of the spawn AI an animation state changes had to be turned off while a garrisoned building was in use, which I did with a "garrisoned" state. That way I can have the pawns still separately show chat bubbles while they are working. This also conveniently allows a pawn to be moused over while a building is being used, so that they know the pawn that is operating it.

Currently, all garrisonable structures except for the Sericulture automate processes and generate resources.



Tech tree and recipe additions for new building tiers.

Rare resource drops are starting to be added to gather nodes. The first being the gemstones that were added to the item pool a few weeks ago. They now have a small chance to drop each time an ore is mined. I'll be adding additional resources like these to plants, trees, and mobs as well. Which should be a nice surprise.



This also allows me to add a neat feature later with another building that will add something for the player to do in the "end game".

I have also done planning for content at least up to Totem Level 30, and part of 31-50. This has given me a list of buildings that still need art.



Here is the list of structures that I still need to finish art for.

• Tier 3 - Horseshoe Pit
  
• Tier 4 - Grinder, Orchard, Press
  
• Tier 5 - Bank, Cartographer, Expeditioner, Greenhouse, Market, Scriptorium, Storehouse, Surveyor, Town Hall, +1 Other
  
• Tier 6 - Abattoir, Bazaar, Bungalow, City Hall, Courthouse, Library, Museum, Observatory, Treasury, Warehouse, Vertical Farm, +1 Other
  
• Tier 7 - Auditor, Depot, Institute, Residence, and +8 Others
  
• Tier 8 - Distro, Mansion, University, + 9 Others
  

Not all buildings have been listed here. As to prevent spoiling the entire game for you. Not that you would know what all of these buildings will do in game. However, you should have some idea.

Playtesting of new game content. (which will take many hours)

I didn't manage to do this myself. However, I did have a couple of people in various communities offer to help playtest new parts of the game. This will help me greatly, and provide feedback outside of my rose-tinted dev glasses.



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As for unplanned stuff.

Structure Database and Build Mode Fixes

Unfortunately, the structure database, with all of the new to include buildings was going to become unwieldy. I transitioned the database to a struct, so that I can more easily address it during a later planned refactor / optimization of the game. Rebuilding everything right now would be a mistake. Most of the game relies on indexes being called directly by ints. Which is a terrible way to do this, but it works for now.

I'm mostly just worried about how the game will handle database calls once 100 fully automated interactable state machines are being simulated, with 100 secondary state machines interacting with them. All of this being simulated in the background while a player is on another map interacting with 100 more secondary state machines and 50 mobs; while in combat. If that runs at 60 frames per second, then I think that's the highest load the game will be engineered to experience. (Except for the auditing system, but we will come to that when we get there.)

I also got around to fixing the Build Mode list. Which has been patched together since it was made. It was so bad, that changing the order of the list of build mode objects would corrupt map files. That no longer happens with the struct in place. I think existing save files are fine, but I wouldn't trust them for long. The current save files aren't set in stone. Some progress might be lost in the upcoming weeks, depending on what variables I add.

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Here is what I have planned for the upcoming development week. If everything goes as planned.

+ Finish and test Totem Levels 8-10

+ Draw totem rank images 11-15.

+ Draw the Horseshoe Pit, Grinder, Orchard, Press, Market, and Scriptorium structures.

+ Add garrisoning for the new structures.

+ Test implementation of player and pawn needs (If I have time.)

+ Draw additional structures. (If I have time.)

Thank you for joining me this week. See you all on bluesky, or here next week.

Now ends the 13th development week for Cosmic Construct. As usual, a callout to the bluesky account where I post more regular updates on development. If you are reading this and haven't wishlisted the game on steam, you should.

In these weekly devlog posts, I cover the development goals set at the end of the previous week. Then reflect on what work was actually done.

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Prepare for the demo release. (priority task)

This week was a big step forward for getting the game out for a larger audience. It might even be the reason you are reading this post now. The steam demo has so far been a great success, and is in more than 500 user's libraries after being available for only 36 hours.

To get ready for the demo, more rounds of testing and bug fixes for new crafting recipes needed to happen. I played through the demo twice to see if there were any issues with both a slow, and optimized run of the gameplay. Also, I adjusted the way the rain looks. It's a small change, but it's a bit brighter.



I added some additional keybind prompts for menus. As during Demo Day, and from a guy I talked to on linkedin, I found out that players don't know how to close menus. (Despite the escape button being assigned to back out of any open menu.)



I added some tabs to the startup screen, as well as a disclaimer showing that the game is in a pre-alpha state. This also tells the player where the save file location is.



Also added was an image showing demo information, as well as an AI ethics disclosure statement.



Add art for additional cloak ranks.

Complete the art and UI for the Tailor structure.

This was a bulk of the work done this week. I actually forgot I had done that this week until I read this. The demo work has made this feel like it was so long ago. I did 3 cloak ranks patterns for every player / pawn animation in the game. It took more than an entire work day to get working, but the result is better than I expected.

To get make this operable, I had to design a UI for the Tailoring menu. I repurposed the pawn manager code, and used it to assign 3 colors to the cloaks. The game has been developed from the beginning to allow each color layer of any agent sprite to be changed. So the black you see in pawns is actually a white texture I have been coloring black programmatically.



To trigger this UI, there is a structure called a Tailor, which will be operated by a pawn. If the pawn is within it (garrisoned), the shop will be open, and the player will be able to customize themselves and the settlement's pawns with the above menu.

Currently, this is the most art intense building sprite, which is more detailed than the rest, due to its size and 3D depth. This style of will be used for every other "city building", in the game. The buildings should form "blocks" when placed adjacent to one another, with a space between them, to create the appearance of city streets. There will be additional decor objects to link building objects together to create alleyways and the like.



Add the cloak rank logic and equipment UI for the pawn manager.

Add the "Gift Cloak" interaction, which requires the equipment system to be completed.

Complete garrisoning logic for pawns. (maybe)

I did not get to adding the cloak rank logic to the game, or set up the pawn equipment UI in the pawn manager. This involves changing a whole bunch of inventory management code to create a new maximum inventory limit based on cloak rank. I have to write some code to get this all controlled by a single cloak rank variable.

The gift cloak interaction needs to have more time taken to it specifically. I want to create a gift giving animation specifically for this purpose, which bumps it up from a "just program it" thing to and actual game development art step. So I didn't do this either. I likely won't until it's required for progression.

Garrisoning logic is coming along, as I have enough buildings to test garrisoning. However, almost every spawn state and job needs to be changed to include the new logic. Which means altering and testing every part of the pawn AI again. That needs it's own development time set aside.

Needless to say, I put too much into this week with the demo getting released. I'll do this stuff later.

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As for what happened that was unplanned...

Art and Player Scale Changes

This was a side alteration to the game scale and changes how the game feels. In this screenshot, I changed the player back to its old scale. You can see there is actually quite a bit of size difference.



This was done because I started to realize all of the buildings were being drawn at an inappropriate scale to the agents. It was correct to the tile size, but the tile size was too small relative to the player. My options were.

• To redraw all of the dwelling assets, which would take considerable time.
  
• Alter the scale of the game grid, which would mess with the uniform stroke width the game uses, and cause blur.
  
• Make the player and pawns the height of the dwelling doors.
  

I took the easiest of the 3 approaches, and honestly, without showing you the difference explicitly. I really didn't notice how much of a change was made.

Because of this scaling issue, I also redrew two of the most problem assets that were not matched up to the side of the rest of the structures. The Tipi was almost half the side, it is now, with a doorway barely the size of the character's arm. Then the outhouse, which at scale was about 4 meters high. These have been redrawn, and now match the relative size of the rest of the game's structures. (At least well enough for be to be happy with.

tl;dr - With some suspension of disbelief, it now looks like the characters a can actually use the structures that surround them.



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I know this was a long one, but we got through it together. For the next week here is what I have going on.

+ Totem ranks 6-10 (priority task)

+ AI for Structure Garrisoning

+ The Structure Garrisoning Itself

+ Tech tree and recipe additions for new building tiers.

+ Playtesting of new game content. (which will take many hours)

That is all I have for this week. Thank you for reading.