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.
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.
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.
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.