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.
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".
No extra work was done this week.
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.