Cosmic Construct News

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.

Welcome to the 12th development week devlog for Cosmic Construct. If you aren't already following the bluesky account for more regular updates, you should do that. Also, of course you should wishlist the game on steam if you haven't already. Every wishlist helps suggest the game and upcoming demo to more people.

In these devlogs each week, we cover the development goals set over the course of the previous week. The goals for the previous week were quite technical so it will have fewer images that usual. However I still have a lot of changes that I can describe. This will be a text heavy post.

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

The underlayer is one of the more difficult things to get right while drawing. Looking at the game, you might think that the terrain underlayer is a square tile. It's not. While it is a rectangular tessellation, the individual tiles are actually interlocking puzzle pieces. I did this to prevent the creation of obvious seems between titles. I figured if I was going to procedurally generate the terrain, I would do it so that it's difficult to see any repetition.



I have pointed out an overlap in the terrain tiles I just found while getting a screenshot for the devlog. There are 256 terrain tile combinations, all of which are difficult to check. To be honest with you, I would have quite a bit of trouble finding where this overlap is in the set. It's small, so I'm just going to ignore it forever.

Anyhow, as you can see the new Hinderlands underlayer is finished.

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.

Implementing multimaps caused quite few problems.

• Maps were not being deleted when a save slot was deleted.
  
• When a the map update function was called every 5 seconds, it would update the current map the player was viewing. Because the game has to simulate pawn movement on the map where the totem is located [50,50], the pawns were harvesting materials that wouldn't be replenished.
  
• Similar to this, there is a function which pings a random map square every frame to trigger plant growth, and trigger some other functions. This was also only working on only the currently viewed map.
  
• I am simulating the game by making all of the entities on the totem map invisible. They are still there walking around. The player could mouse over the invisible pawns and click on mobs while on other maps.
  
• The saving an loading map functions would sometimes save empty maps due to a poor implementation of map row files.
  
• Sometimes the origin and simulation maps would be unloaded before saving.
  
• The pawns would occasionally interact with the current map while invisible.
  
• To the best of my knowledge, all of these bugs have been fixed.
  

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

I have added 6 new structures to the game. Left to right, top to bottom. (oops forgot to build the first one)

• Mine - This mine will be occupied by a pawn. While occupied, it will produce iron, copper, silver, gold, and other ore passively at a slow rate. This rate should be about as fast as the regular overworld mining, however, it will automatically deposit to storage. All without the pawn having to exit and deposit the material to a storage chest.
  
• Well - Produces water as long as an empty vial is in the player's inventory. I'm not sure if I'll have pawns go and do this task. Water isn't really used for many crafting recipes currently.
  
• Arboretum - Like the mine, this structure will passively produce wood while occupied. Anyone set with the Cutting Wood job, that finds an open Arboretum will occupy it instead of roaming the map.
  
• Quarry - This structure will produce stone, and stone products: such as dressed stone, ashlar, marble, and other resources; passively at a slow rate.
  
• Game Table - This one is probably the most fun planned addition. I want to add a few minigames the player can play with pawns. I figured I can give the player something to do to advance the settlement, aside from gathering resources. The Game Table will open a UI that calls a pawn to play minigames. Currently I have two games planned. A card game which I have yet to concept, and a dice game which I already have the rules for called "Sparkle".
  
• Sericulture - This was the hardest for me to draw and took quite a bit of research. This is a representation of sericulture, the rearing of silkworms for the production of silk. This structure will produce silkworms at a rate equal to the number of silkworms in storage (up to a production cap per structure). The player will need to have a pawn assigned to the Sericulture job to perform it. Silkworms will only exist out side of the origin map, so pawns will not be able to gather them.
  

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

I didn't get around to doing this. However, that was to be expected.

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Attack Animations

Before this week, both the player and pawns attacks were cycled to the current animation from of their movement. Meaning moving outside of the bow attack state would progress the timer which controlled their fire rate. This caused an exploit which would allow the player to target and fire an arrow immediately.

Now the player and pawns have to fully draw their bows before firing arrows.

Place Mode Checks

Some of the buildings I am adding to the game now are "building sized". The current grid squares are intended to represent large tables and devices, and not the fronts of businesses, single family houses, or industrial production spaces. Because of this, I needed to add additional class of structure size, and refactor the structure check code to streamline it. Especially if I am checking neighboring tiles 60 times a second.

Those checks have been completely redone, going from 40ish lines of code checking array values, to just 6. Place mode should be quite efficient on framerate now.

Background Music

I have been quite open about the AI generated background music used for Cosmic Construct. Very simply, I don't have the money to afford paying an artist for dedicated high quality music for my game. If you don't like the AI generated background music, feel free to hand me 500-2,000 USD for every song you want me to replace; I'll gladly accept it. Support your local artists!... but... to be perfectly honest with you all, I actually like this music as it is, and feel it would be a waste of money to pay an artist to essentially just remake what I already have.

Until then, all of the background music in the game is generated with Suno. I have been using Suno since before it was publicly released. I am very familiar with it, and know how to describe the music I want from it (prompting). I have hundreds of credits available for generating music, and have a good ear for what style of music I think fits my game's artstyle.

I don't just generate any song and throw it in. I choose maybe 3-5% of the total generations output by Suno. Even after that, I manually go through the process of adjusting audio levels, bumping the lows until I can get the amount of bass reverb I like. I try to take out the sharp highs, but some songs really don't allow for that kind of thing. I change the sample rate, and clean up pops the sample rate change can sometimes introduce. I fade the audio out, and normalize it with the rest of the game audio programmatically.

With that said, I added 4 new "rare" BGM tracks to the game, that are faster paced than most of the game's music. Just to switch it up. They won't play on the list all of the time, but I feel adding them was a good choice. Then 2 new "regular" BGM tracks, which are on the normal playlist. You can get a sample of those from this video.

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This next week of work is going to be eventful. As I need to prepare for the release of the steam demo, which will be available on the 7th of February at midnight eastern time. So watch out for that. It will come with a weekly devlog post, and will act as the first real public test since multimaps were introduced.

+ Prepare for the demo release. (priority task)

+ Add art for additional cloak ranks.

+ Complete the art and UI for the Tailor structure.

+ 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)

See you next week during the steam demo release.

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.