Welcome to the week 42 devlog for Cosmic Construct. Each week we review development goals set up at the end of the prior week. I think it might be time to admit that I am really bad at keeping schedules, or really good at procrastination. As this post is almost 9 days behind the date where it should be. I'll have to get myself, yet again, back on the correct posting date.
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.
With that out of the way...
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Finish the biome.
This was probably the hardest to create biome so far, at least to make everything look thematically appropriate. Drawing a bunch of objects too match isn't too bad, but it is the complexity of them. The weirdwood trees for example had to have entirely redrawn trunks which too much longer than I expected. I had a design in mind, and that initial attempt I scrapped.
The ghastgrass is the most complex grass texture, as it has a smoke animation. In fact, I have to render it's image frames differently compared to every other object in the game, so its smoke animations don't line up. I actually don't think I have that entirely solved, but it looks good enough for now. The ghastgrass was more difficult to animate than any of the crops, as it has 5 variations with 4 frames each and a smoke effect. It's one of the only "real animations", I've had to make for natural blocks. I think it turned out fine.
Here are all of the assets I've made over the last couple weeks, and I have to say I'm not very impressed. It was a surprising amount of work for so few images.
However, the end result turned out to be just lovely. I really like this biome, and not only because it matches the color scheme of my profile picture. The rendering here is also unique, as I've actually turned the sepia shader off for most of the objects where to increase their natural vibrancy and make this biome look a little more magical.
The ground turned out a muddy grey color, but there isn't much I can do about that. I turned the shader off on that as well and couldn't see anything. I had also done that for the foliage layer, so it looked the same as the mature ghastgrass. I found that even despite having a huge smoke effect coming off of them, I could differentiate the harvestable plant from the passive scenery.
Another unique thing about these biome objects is that the Ghost Pepper, Ghastgrass, and Soulstone all make funny ghost noises when you harvest them. Finding the right audio for this also took a bit of time.
Work on the minigame mechanics
I did not do any work on the minigame mechanics.
Structure Art (if I have time)
No structure icons were done.
More achievement icons (if I have time)
No achievement icons were done.
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For this upcoming week which I am going to cut short, I am only going to work on structure art and icons.
- Structure Art (priority task)
- Achievement Icons
That is all. I'll see you again sooner rather than later.