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.
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.
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.
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.