This is the week 28th devlog for Cosmic Construct. So much for the devlog schedule I put forth last week. I ended up devoting time to other things. Like playing games with friends. I'm probably just really lazy to be honest.
Each week we go over development goals set up during the prior week and see if they were met.
To follow the game's progress you can join me at:
My bluesky account which gives more frequent updates.
Also Wishlist Cosmic Construct on Steam and follow it's steam page.
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Demo preparations.
Nothing really pretty to show other than an engine screenshot. Cosmic Construct is make in the Gamemaker Studio 2 engine. But I feel like I don't use gamemaker how almost any other person does. My rooms have a single object in them on a black background. I'm not using the editor as anything more than an IDE alot of the time.
Most of the work for the demo has been revolving around making sure the state machine tree for the pawns is doing everything it is intended to do. Testing all of the corner cases is difficult. Sometime pawns get a task then rapidly switch between idle and planning stages because they are stuck, or walk off to the far corner of the map because they were loaded incorrectly. Pawns will be the main source of bugs for the foreseeable future it seems.
Lock out unassignable professions.
This is one of those things that looks like a step backwards until you actually use it. Before there were a list of about 50 professions pawns could take up. Which is overwhelming to someone looking at the pawn manager menu for the first time. I wanted to prevent this, and remove all of the jobs that would do nothing when selected. This meant also writing logic to handle checking of available jobs, and removing redundant assignments in case a building is deconstructed.
Lock out objectives categories that aren't available.
Before categories would show as locked until there level requirements were meet. This no longer happens. Only the objectives themselves show as locked, in categories that have been unlocked. This very much streamlines the list of objectives making it for less unwieldly.
Structure art of some kind.
Haven't done much here. I tried doing the 21-25 totem level sprites, but didn't end up finishing them. I really haven't felt like doing any of the art stuff recently. I'm doing my best to prevent burnout when it comes to that.
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Rising Tide
I spent a significant amount my days at the end of this week voting on the Rising Tide trailer jam / competition hosted by Blue Ocean Games. Over 1000 game trailer submissions were made, and Cosmic Construct was one of them. For the competition, people can watch these trailers and vote on winners in an ELO based ranking system. I have watched and voted on nearly all of these trailers. I've spent about 16 hours doing this.
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This WILL be a very short week. I have to get devlog posting back on schedule. I will be posting on the 9th or 10th. 3 days, 3 tasks.
- Demo preparations, testing and bug fixes. (priority)
- Pawn voice lines, and fixing of pawn complaints. (difficult)
- Structure art, and totem ranks 21-25.
Thank you for joining me for this devlog.