Welcome to week 5 of Cosmic Construct development. If you haven't already been following my development on Bluesky, you should do that. I update there at least once daily. This post will be recapping what has happened over the last week, with images.

Last week I gave a list of what should be added to the game this week, lets see how I did.

Animations for Chopping, Cutting, Paying Respects, and Gathering.

The animations for all resource gathering and usage of non-garrisonable structures are done. All pawns chop trees, scythe wheat, pay respects to the totem, and gather resources by kneeling down to pick them. I finished this not long after the last devlog post was made.

Optimization of game code for new object drawing calls.

The refactoring for object drawing calls took almost all week, in the background it still isn't done. Doing this is necessary as the game has three new draw layers. The amount of refactoring done had me redoing almost all of how animation was handled. Now, I can call animations with a string, which makes retrieving everything much easier. (It also now runs over 1000 FPS).

A map underlayer to make the game more visually interesting. The ground is not meant to be entirely black.

There were 3 new under layers added to create a more interesting visual space. After asking alot of people for their opinion on how everything looked, this image is the result.

The bottom most layer is a starfield created of tiling rainbow colored parallax masks; fancy. Above that is what I call the "shatterlands terrain layer". Which implies alot of things, but currently it is a field of procedurally randomized geometric rocks. Above that is the small bits of grass everywhere, which is surprisingly just one image that has been randomized pretty well. I plan to add so variants to that. Regardless, I think it all looks very nice. If you liked it how it was before, don't worry, I'll get to that later.

Giving pawns a visual indicator of their profession.

Didn't work on this at all. In fact, I've shelved it for later, as I can do it at any time. Plus, I don't want to go back and redo all of the professions if I have a new animation set. I'd rather do it at the end of the development as a polishing step.

Addition of a creature from which the pawns and player can harvest resources.

I've added a grub, not depicted here. This grub will be what the player harvests meat, bone, and hide from. Despite looking like a maggot. The logic in this magical world being that if animals live together in harmony; what do they eat? Well, I can't really add rabbits, or dear because they are sapient species. So I went with something that clearly has no intelligence, and give them red meat and bones. In this world, grubs have bones and hide. I'll make sure Tudi tells the player that.

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That was the stuff I planned to do, what about the unplanned work?

First of all, the main menu and splashes are done. Going from an epilepsy warning page, to the main menu screen. The main menu has a fade in animation for the logo, and populates the screen with the player character and mob of pawns from the main save file. So if the player has 100 pawns, all of those pawns will appear on the main menu screen. I have no pawns in the save below, so I am alone. :(

The next big think that needed done was the options menu. Which for now is some basic options about how the map layers are rendered, and the volume of various audio channels. The graphics layer for terrain density changes how often the shatterland and foliage tiles appear. There is another for how bright the cosmos parallax background is. Then most importantly, tree opacity. So that you can see the player and pawns behind them without having to toggle the build menu. If you likes how the game looked before the layers were added. You can simply turn the layers down to zero.

Over the next week I have the following things to work on.

• Adding the snail mob. Then having the player and pawns target and hunt them. To fully implement the resources they drop.
• Add additional storage structures, as there is currently just the Storage Chest.
• Add the next few levels of missions, and level lock structures so there is a clear path of advancement for the player.
• Get pawns to perform processing jobs, and change the pawn job selection menu.
• Implement pawn claiming of houses.
• Make the Tudi teaching messages that occur when the player runs into a mechanic they haven't for the first time.
• Draw the new totem rank images. (maybe)
• Add additional higher tier structures to the build menu. (maybe)

I'll post here again next friday with another update. ^--^;