Welcome to the 18th week devlog for Cosmic Construct. If you enjoy this devlog, feel free to join the community in the following ways.
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Each week, I cover development goals set at the end of each prior devlog. Then review if those goals were met.
Unfortunately, this devlog is going to be rather short, as the objectives system redesign took the entire week to complete.
Redesign the objectives system (this is the priority task)
Here is what the old (currently live) objective system looks like.
The player is given a 10 objectives to complete for each level. They must advance through each 10 objectives in any order they choose, and complete them all to unlock the ability to pay respects and upgrade the totem rank. There were some problems with this system and player onboarding which preventing the game from being played in the way that it was intended; creatively.
Players have been following the objectives in the order that they appear on the screen. This is the same order they are listed in the above objectives menu screenshot. In a linear list of 10 objectives, that attempt to get the player to learn how to play what is a rather complex game. As the player unlocks new expanded mechanics, the games complexity increases astronomically.
I thought that guiding the player though this increasing complexity would improve the gameplay experience and encourage the player to explore what is off of that linear progression path intuitively. That is not really the case. Every player's camp ends up looking the same at level 5, with not much creative expression or individuality.
To solve this problem, the "handholding" nature of the game needs to be almost entirely removed, replaced with a small, direct explanatory tutorial of each menu as the player encounters them. To do this, basically all 50 levels of progression need to be set up and available to the player simultaneously.
Introducing the new objective system.
The new objective system makes all progression objectives originally planned available to the player from the very beginning. There is a section at the top dedicated to the tutorial and onboarding process. This will teach what the various game menus do and how to access them. As well as guide the player through basic structure placement, planting, and pawn management.
This list of objectives is very long.
Even still, not all of the objectives are in. Many of the objectives have unique checks that need to be made for structures and objects that do not yet exit. Much testing needed to happen to make sure that these new check weren't lagging the game, didn't crash the game if broken.
I also had to make a locking system which hides objectives that the player current does not have access to. Each objectives has its own associated level requirement. As the player completes available objectives, new are unlocked after they pay respects at the totem. The number of objectives is always at least 10 times the player level. In practice, the player starts with a significant number of unlocked objectives.
Implement suggested quality of life features
Finish structure art for the Cartographer, Greenhouse, Storehouse, and Surveyor (if I have time)
Add the remaining pawn jobs to the pawn manager. (if I have time)
None of these even got touched, which is a real shame.
For unplanned work...
Save File Restructuring
The new achievement and objective system needed to be integrated with and replace the saving. Objectives prior to this update were tracked the level variable and nothing else. Really. All of the objectives would at the start of each play session compare with the play record and current number of build structures to determine in current level objectives were complete. All of the objectives were stored in a separate database. Level "progress" wasn't really a thing. It would just check if all 10 level up requirements were met.
Obviously, this is very restrictive.
Now, all of the objectives are individually tracked and recorded permanently for their completion status. This has the added bonus of giving the game a means to track steam achievements.
This is what will be worked in the upcoming week. You will notice that this list is just the unfinished work from last weeks with job icons added. This will be an art and bug fixing week, which should be a nice change of pace.
- Implement suggested quality of life features
- Finish structure art for the Cartographer, Greenhouse, Storehouse, and Surveyor
- Add the remaining pawn jobs to the pawn manager.
- Draw the new pawn job icons.
Thank you for joining me for this week's devlog.