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[Devlog] January 2025 - Week 3

This is now the 11th week of development for Cosmic Construct, and it comes with a many substantial changes to the game's future and its scope. Unfortunately, this creates more work for me, but don't worry about that. I'm familiar with having large scope projects.

Most importantly, Cosmic Construct now has a steam page! (You might even be reading this on the steam news page.) In addition to being posted on itch as these logs typically are, they will be echoed on the steam for the benefit of people there. If you want more frequent updates to Cosmic Construct's development, you can follow on bluesky. (Although, I have admittedly lapsed on daily updates as of late. I'll do my best to get that back on track.)

Each week I cover the development goals set the prior week and see if they have been meet.

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New save management system for the main menu. (Multiple Save Slots and New Game)

There is now a half complete saving and loading system on the game splash / main menu. Players can load from up to 8 individual save files. Each save file has its own maps and pawn database files. The main menu will still only load the characters from save slot 0.



Settlement value, population, currency, and rank display.

In the save slot there is a gold number representing settlement value. This value is calculated the simulation once every 5 seconds. It includes the value of all objects in the origin map (the one with the totem), all objects in storage, and all production buildings outside of the origin map. This value serves an endgame function of determining total economic strength of the settlement, which will be needed for triggering events for non-pawn NPC interactions. (Something that will be more obvious as the tech tree for the game grows.)

In the below screenshot, the same gold number is overtop of the totem level progression bar. Marked as "wealth".



Rewriting the item database.

The item database was in a very poor state. As I was mostly calling items by their item id, which was largely unsorted and unwieldy. The play save file would only list items from the length of the item database and break each time a new item was added to the game. This is naive, and I knew this when I wrote it. Working with it is now painless.



Now the save file is fully futureproofed. I can add as many items to the database as I which whenever something new comes up. This also applies to item and structure records. However, I still need to do the same thing for the interact objects database, but its going to use the same json struct format. It'll take like 30 minutes to implement, so it'd not really a concern.

Objectives for settlement ranks 6-10. Structures and items to support ranks 6-10.

I didn't quite get these done. Largely, the structures are already in place. I don't know why I said this last week. However, the items really weren't. I added 22 new items to the tech tree, which each needed icons. I'm not going to tell you what those items are, but most should be pretty obvious.



As for objectives planning, I decided to take a more wholistic approach to the design of objectives. I'll be working on advancement levels 6-50 all at once, and as I get each totem level finalized I'll put them into the game. Because of the way the tech tree is arranged, I will naturally complete the lower totem levels first.

A secret feature. (If I have time. What could it be?)

These are the big ones, and ended up taking up a majority of my development time. It also broke almost every map handling system, which needed to be restructured.

The first is multimaps. The game now has multiple maps. Before the entire game consisted of a single 101 by 101 tile grid, with the totem at the center x 50, y 50 position. I've nested these maps in a similar 101 by 101 tile grid. So the game now has 10,201 map cells, each with 10,201 grid cells. Making the game 10,201 times larger by area. Totaling 104,060,401 tiles.

Alright cool, so the game is big now. It would be boring if it was all forest.

Well, I also added support to the terrain generator for additional biomes. Which was the most difficult thing I have had to do for this game up to this point. Was it worth it? Yes, absolutely. The map you have seen time and time again with all of the trees is the "Shatterlands" biome. It's been that way in the game's code for a while, and I have intended to add additional biomes much later in development.

This is the new "Hinderlands" biome. A red and dry themed biome with a lot more wheat, a lot less berries, birch-like trees, and red grass.



It also rains a non-descript red liquid.



Rewriting the place mode function. (maybe, it's hella spaghetti right now)

I didn't work on this at all due to complications with the integration of multimaps. As the code working in its current state, it actually places just fine in the multimaps. I didn't expect that to be the case, but I also didn't want to mess with it too much in case I broke that also. Once I fix the multimap bugs, I'll work on this.

Here is what I didn't plan on doing, that I ended up implementing

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Multimap Database & Origin Simulation

With the addition of multimaps. I also had to write functions to generate the maps, and tween them from map edges. This sounds like a trivial array assignment and player teleport. Unfortunately, hidden from the player is a function that is colliding with array indices all over the map to update it. This is to trigger the growth of plants and spawning of resources.

The pawns are still being simulated in the origin map when the player is away, so those plants need to be growing in a map the player currently isn't in. This creates a huge issue with the way that update function works.

Unknown to the player, I'm just making all of the entities invisible while one the same map. The pawns are just interacting with a reality that is different to the players. To do that, I have to load and update two maps simultaneously. It's very complicated.

Trees

For the new Hinderlands biome, I needed to make some birch-like light trees for what I envisioned, but none of the trunks of the existing trees were straight. Meaning I had to take the existing 8 trunk assets and make changes to them to create 8 new trunks for the lightwood trees. They actually differ in appearance quite a bit. Although, I also can't really tell a difference when they are clumped together. The trees are also a little sparser in the Hinderlands than in the Shatterlands.

Text Outline

It might be a little difficult to tell from the screenshots, but I added a black border to all of the UI text so that it is easier to read overtop of all of the game's foliage.



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Over the next week, here is what I have planned.

+ Create images for the Hinderland terrains underlayer, so that it actually feels like an obvious new biome.

+ Fix the bugs created from the implementation of multimaps, and make sure the saving and loading of maps operates as intended.

+ Write the update simulation function to separate pawn simulation in the origin map, from the player's current map.

+ Create new placeable structures to prepare for pawn garrisoning, and passive income mechanics.

+ Further expand the tech tree, and add objectives. (If I have time).

Again, if you are reading this and haven't wishlisted Cosmic Construct on Steam, please do that. See you all in next week's devlog.

[Devlog] January 2025 - Week 2

This is an old devlog, ported over from itch. It is the last port, all future content will be current.

Welcome to this week's devlog covering the 10th week of development for Cosmic Construct. As always, if you are not already following me on bluesky or now twitter/x for development updates you should do that. I will keep trying to post on both daily. Admittedly, I've skipped a couple of days due to my poor sleep schedule. Regardless, anything new as it is developed there. Each week I post these large scope devlogs as a sort of "state of the game" post.

Each week I cover the work I list at the end of the previous week's post. Here are the tasks mentioned from last week.

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

The new pawn manager was able to assign pawns while paused, but wasn't cycling aspirations in a way the player could see them. The pawn manager now shows the current aspiration, wipes aspirations when jobs are changed, and lists the pawns current job on the sidebar.

There is a new upcycling checkbox, which changes the list of recipes a pawns has access to, to prevent them from upcycling resources more than one crafting tier. Should a player want the old behavior, they can request it by checking the upcycle box.

Also added are tooltips for the trait's descriptions, and the currently selected job on the sidebar listing all of the settlement's pawns.



Add a HUD for player statistics.

This turned out to be quite the project. I ended up doing different HUD art for each species. It still doesn't display all of the information I would like it too. However, I needed two bars to display for energy and health. I doubt the health bar will see much use until much later in the development cycle. But it's there should I need it. I can always repurpose it to something else.

Here are some examples of each species having a different energy bar.







Different from last week is also the inclusion of a "level" and "experience bar at the bottom. This was included as part of the new objective system. I'll explain how that work shortly, but first I needed to...

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

I added a record history to the player save file to sav what the player has already done. It's a massive array of ints that I can math to determine what players have crafted or constructed. Before I was sending signals to the player object to determine when actions were performed. That was a very bad way to do things, and was not tracking player behavior over time. Instead, only when the objective was available. Creating the "but I already did that" problem. That is no longer the case. Players can complete objectives of almost any level or tier at any time, and it will be automatically marked as complete when comes up.



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

As was mentioned, a "level and experience bar" was added to the bottom of the main game HUD. This is part of the new objectives system that allows for more "opened" gameplay than a player following a list of tasks in order. The previous objectives system was quite railroady. While the current objectives system is still quite linear, it exists to teach the player the intended progression path. Perhaps a game mode without the objective system, with more "sandbox" gameplay will be warranted later. For now this is the "story mode" equivalent of Cosmic Construct.



The new objectives system have 10 simultaneous objectives that a player can complete for each settlement advancement level, which will henceforth be "totem level". As the totem level increases 10 new objectives are added to replace the objectives from the previous level.

In the above image, you can see that it is just checking the player's historical records of processing materials and building structures. It counts them, and if it is higher than the threshold, then it passes the check. There are much more complex checks, like as for the number of homeowners, each objective works in a similar way. For no numerical checks, I have a progress step function that adds to a counter if states have been passed. Such as the current line of Tudi's dialogue.



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

I did not get to this on week 10.

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Most of the above work took up a significant portion of development time, which I knew it would. The objectives system as it was before was core to the software, and almost every object or script was sending signals out to the mission objective function. All of that had to be removed, and repurposed to send updates to the player history arrays.

However. I did get some really important stuff done that should be mentioned here.

It can't really be explained through an image, so let me just link to the relevant bluesky video. Players can now move objects around after they have been placed. This includes blueprints, decor, farming objects, and structures. It will move even incomplete structures. As long as a structure is not in use it can be moved to any other valid location.

For me, this is a huge relief, as it has been on my todo list for quite some time. (Which is about 1k words long.)



Now that items can be moved around, I no longer feel guilty about growing the size of buildings, such as the totem itself. As players can just move items out of the way of other structures without needing to rebuild them. They can store parts and structures anywhere on the map.

Another important update is just around the corner.

I have gone ahead and paid the steam partner fee, and am getting a steam page set up for Cosmic Construct. There will be a demo build of the game available there long before the game actually releases, so there will be plenty of time for the game to accrue wishlists. (As a result of this, the demo will probably be removed from itch.)

This is of course the first time I am going to ask you to wishlist the game on steam when the page goes live. Get ready for that also to be included at the top of these weekly devlogs.



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At last we cover what will be worked on over the course of the next week. I have a lot I want to do, and some of it is very important for the steam demo.

+ New save management system for the main menu. (Multiple Save Slots and New Game)

+ Settlement value, population, currency, and rank display.

+ Rewriting the item database.

+ Objectives for settlement ranks 6-10.

+ Structures and items to support ranks 6-10.

+ A secret feature. (If I have time. What could it be?)

+ Rewriting the place mode function. (maybe, it's hella spaghetti right now)

Thank you for coming to my TED talk. Enjoy the upcoming week.

[Devlog] January 2025 - Week 1

This is an old devlog, ported over from itch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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



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

Then control + right mouse destroys a single item.



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

Art for additional tiers of storage and housing.

This did get done.

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

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



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

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

Art for additional settlement advancement ranks. (maybe)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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




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

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Here are the development goals for the upcoming development week.

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

+ Add a HUD for player statistics.

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

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

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

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

[Devlog] December 2024 - Week 4

This is an old devlog, ported over from itch.

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

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

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

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



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

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

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



Expanding the list of structures.

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



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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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



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

Nope, did not get to this. :P

North and South direction bow firing animation. (maybe)

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



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Iron

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



Gameplay Recording

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

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

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

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

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

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

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

+ Art for additional tiers of storage and housing.

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

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

+ Art for additional settlement advancement ranks. (maybe)

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

That is all for this week. Thank you.

[Devlog] December 2024 - Week 3

This is an old devlog, ported over from itch.

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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



Add Tudi's surveillance drone.

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



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

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

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



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

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

Mimic

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



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

Level Restricted Buildings

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

Decor Icons and Build Menu Background Icons

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



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

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

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

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

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

+ Expanding the list of structures.

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you for following my work.