This is an old devlog, ported over from itch.
The 6th development week for Cosmic Construct has concluded. As always I will remind you that if you aren't already subscribed to my development on Bluesky, I post more regular, at least daily, updates there. The weekly posts here serve as a more complete record of the work that won't fit in a post over there.
As with last week. I will cover the planned and unplanned developments that have been made, and cover plans for the upcoming week.
Adding the snail mob. Then having the player and pawns target and hunt them. To fully implement the resources they drop.
The animations for the snail mob I found a little harder to make than I expected, but I got this done at the start of the week. I didn't have a drop for the snails, so I added a Snail Shell to the items database which needed its own icon. I plan to use the Snail Shell in crafting recipes that require Quicklime. I shouldn't need to implement that for a while yet.
I think they came out well, but what is the point in having mobs if you don't have the ability to interact with them? Well, I did say I was going to implement hunting. Now, both the player and pawns can hunt mobs.
Add additional storage structures, as there is currently just the Storage Chest.
I did plan to add additional storage structure...s plural, but I only managed to do the art for one of them. The Storage Crate. Which holds 4 times more than the Storage Chest, but can't be accessed by entities. Each subsequent upgrade to storage will be more cost effective than the last. Providing more storage per item cost. I actually like the storage crate art a lot.
Add the next few levels of missions, and level lock structures so there is a clear path of advancement for the player.
From the previous few images, you can see the new mission objectives for setting up the new pawns with work and housing. I only managed to get the next level of missions done, as I bumped up against this near the end of the week. I also don't know yet what concepts I want to teach the player early. As I need to get them both crafting items, and managing the needs of pawns.
I also didn't manage to get structure level locking done. This isn't terribly difficult to implement, and isn't game critical at any point. It just reduces the number of build items the player can see. So we aren't overloading them with 8 tiers of buildings, and spoiling them on the types of resources they can find. I can do that later.
Get pawns to perform processing jobs, and change the pawn job selection menu.
A bunch of new pawn jobs have been added, without a good way for the player to select them. Still need to work on that. However, they are now able to perform their jobs. They will retrieve items from storage, craft related items using the correct equipment structures located around the map, then deposit the crafted items into storage while retrieving a full inventory of new material. If they don't have access to the material in storage, they will then shift their priority to getting the materials for their job.
They can chop and process wood into lumber, harvest and process wheat into flour into bread, mine ore to process into ingots. As well as spinning thread, making paper, cutting stone, and tanning leather. As you can imagine well, this is all very complicated.
Implement pawn claiming of houses.
In addition to the pawn processing jobs, I have to get the "Housing the Homeless" questline from previous updates finalized. I am glad to say that they pawns will now claim the nicest free house available in the area, and use it for their leisure activities. Something I can easily verify in the new fully featured debug mode.
Make the Tudi teaching messages that occur when the player runs into a mechanic they haven't for the first time.
Tudi now has a number of teaching messages that will now appear for the player when a wide variety of things happen for the first time. Things that are kind of confusing will be explained rather succinctly in the journal, the first time they come up. The game will remember this. I have the capability to re-remind the player at later times with varying frequency.
In this example, messages came up the first time the player was overencumbered, and when the first pawn tried to look for a house that did not exist. I can trigger just about any event in the game to push a message to the journal.
Draw the new totem rank images and add additional higher tier structures to the build menu.
This simply didn't happen, I was unable to get to it this week.
Now for the things I didn't plan for.
Bubbles
The most time consuming part to get implemented was pawn notification bubbles. I needed them for both debugging and bringing additional life and thoughts to the characters, seeing as this week was pawn focused. The pawns will show a bubble above their heads for any action or interaction they perform. When pawn social interactions are implemented, this feature will extend into that showing the player what the pawns are discussing.
Here, we can see our pawn is about to cut maybe some grass with their scythe.
The next week is going to be a little lighter on new features as I am preparing content to be ready for the Demo Day upcoming in about 3 weeks, after which there will be a playable demo.
Here are the following things I need to work on this week to prepare for that.
+ More missions for the player to complete, progress, and unlock pawns need to be created. (This is the priority task.)
+ Bugs related to animations, especially for hunting, need to get fixed.
+ Many SFX need to be added to various UI items and interactions.
+ Add Tudi's surveillance drone.
+ Add a few non-functional static environment objects to be placeable by the player.
(IE decor... so that we have the menu ready for later development content.)
That is all for this week, again please follow on bluesky if you haven't already. As I plan for Bluesky to be the primary source of direct consistent updates.