Welcome to the 27th week of development for Cosmic Construct. This week has been what I would like to call a "productive week with little productivity". Basically, I'm not happy with my performance here. I didn't do everything that I wanted to get done, and I'm not happy about it. I'll make the excuse that I haven't felt well, but that doesn't matter.
Every development project has its highs and lows. I appreciate anyone who sticks around through both.
If you want to do that you can follow the project through:
- My bluesky account where I try to post daily updates.
- The Cosmic Construct community discord server.
- And of course you should Wishlist Cosmic Construct on Steam and follow it's steam page.
Each week in these devlogs I review development goals set at the end of the prior week's log.
Spoiler, I didn't get it done. <(o.o<)
Finish two separate 2 minute gameplay trailers. (priority task)
As expected, this has taken up a bulk of my development time. Committing to two trailers being done at around the same time was convenient as I have footage I could use between the two of them. However, having to cut them together hasn't been easy. I'm not really a video editor. I've done some of it for youtube, but I don't have enough experience doing it to call it easy. The 18 second sequence screenshotted above took about 3 hours of just recording and arranging to get correct. I also had to program in an alignment teleport script, for the player to that I could sync the animations and player position to the changing crops. Despite all of this effort I still managed to screw up one of them. >(o.o)<
I did two separate 2 hour playthroughs of the game to get trailer footage, only to find many bugs and minor annoyances that needed to be corrected. I'll go over that later in this devlog. Regardless, I think the little town I constructed is rather nice, even through after the two hour mark I cheated in a bunch of structures because silkworm farming and its profession isn't programmed in yet.
I have to say, now that the crafting tables tell you what is being crafted, and that the crafting autocompletes after each craft step; its so much more satisfying to craft manually. All of the pawns do the work I expected them to do when assigning, and I didn't have to babysit them to ensure they were actually doing work. Talking to them, makes the game feel much more lively. Although I do miss Logs coming up in the logging menu. I really need to have social events from pawns interact with the player in game verbally, with a pop up overhead text.
Add new structure icons and complete gameplay balance.
I got the new structure icons in, which is the first time backgrounds show up for the tier 6 and 7 buildings. When the game is finished, there will be just as many red, cyan, and rainbow background structures as there are gold. That's how many buildings are left.
Art for new structures.
I got about a third of one structure done, and I'm not even happy with that. I might delete it and start over. I was trying to draw the Abattoir, which is a slaughterhouse. I was trying to do this in such a way as to have grubs swarming around it like the Orchard and Arboretum do for trees. I just couldn't mentally visualize that for some reason while working on it. I know what I need to do now, I just haven't gone back to it.
Either way, zero progress on this. Big sad.
New pawn interactions and voice dialogue for existing complaint types.
This was more broken than I thought, and dialogues aren't working for complaints. Because of the way it's implemented, it's difficult to test. I have to make a testing suite for the pawn interactions to sus out where the problems actually are.
Unplanned work.
Bug Fixes
During gameplay recording for the trailer I found so many bugs that needed to be squished.
Most of them have centered around the way food was implemented. I found I couldn't eat meat. What I could eat could be consumed multiple times, wasn't restoring the correct amount of energy, could be eaten and wasted, and many other problems. Basically, just the animation was and energy restoration was working. Everything else, like, preventing you from eating while you are already eating was completely ignored for some reason. That has all been fixed.
Player eating frequency is easy to adjust as I can simply change the energy consumption. Because more physically demanding activities have a higher animation rate, I found it convenient to consume energy relative to the player's animation and movement speed. The more you run around and collect, the more energy you consume; as expected. Before it was just sort of going down over time, that felt "abnormal". Unfortunately, pawns don't yet consume food... and they definitely need to. I was preparing crops to feed them, only to realize I was making food only for myself. That is a bad feeling.
I've been doing gameplay balance changes and implementations for the cost of mid game structures. I have input them into the database incorrectly, and many were requested items that didn't exist. Those have been fixed. I still have to add costs for the mid-late and late game structures. This isn't hard to do, but the balance is difficult to test as I don't have a "naturally constructed save file" to see how long it would take a player with 50 optimized pawns to construct one of those buildings.
Many other bugs were fixed with structure placement. Some structures weren't aligned to grid. The Mint building specifically was set to the wrong structure id in two separate places in the structure database which was a pain to figure out. I somehow managed to set the Mint's name field to "! INTERACT ERROR !", and it caused a lot of confusion. I have confirmed that the entire crafting line from mining to minting coinage now works as intended. I just need to get the market working.
One of the big issues I found that isn't a bug, as that the game now feels a little aimless when it comes to goals. It isn't clear exactly what the player is getting "experience" in their bar for, or what to do after they have gained a point. The intent was to have the player open the objectives menu to find stuff to do, but it is frankly unwieldly and intimidating. So I might also find a way to remove the locked objectives from showing up. I need to add an objective / achievement popup display. Which means I need to make about 500 icons for that. I am not in the mood to do that right now.
Demo Preparation
Last week I said that the demo will be available on June 3rd. That is not the case. I might be delaying it until mid to late June given all of the new problems that have come up. I don't want to present something that has so many issues. I want players to be able to play up to level 8 (when the Shed is unlocked) at least, where production really starts ramping up.
Given the amount of stuff I still need to do, like locking off professions in the pawn manager, I expect 2-3 more devlog weeks before I have the demo ready.
Anyhow, that is all of what was done this week. Hopefully this upcoming week is better. I'm going to shorten this one by one or two days as the devlogs are getting off schedule. This week 3 devlog should be coming out on the 21st not on the 28th, so I'm misaligned by a full week. It is easily fixed by just releasing them every 7 days, as months have 2-3 more days than 28. So it will fix itself naturally if I do that.
So this week will be a "short one" to get me back to a correct schedule. June 2nd, June 9th, June 16th, June 23rd, and June 30th; will bring the 4th June devlog back to being actually "at" the end of June.
With that said this next devlog will be posted in 5 days, so don't expect much.
- Demo preparations.
- Lock out unassignable professions.
- Lock out objectives categories that aren't available.
- Structure art of some kind.
Thank you for following the development of my game. I'll have more updates soon.