Today ends the 7th development week for Cosmic Construct. As usual, if you haven't been following the game's development on Bluesky, you should do that. I post daily updates there. The weekly devlogs here on itch cover the development over the last week in more detail.

At the end of each weekly post, I list out the development goals of the upcoming week. I review each of those goals from the previous week to see if they were met. Ideally, they all should be as I am using that list to dictate the course of work I do across that week. Here is last week's list of goals.

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[] More missions for the player to complete, progress, and unlock pawns need to be created. (This is the priority task.)

Most of this development week was spent creating gameplay objectives to onboard the player. Meant to teach a variety of concepts, like gathering materials, constructing structures, managing storage, assigning pawn jobs, farming, and much more. Each of the player settlement levels follows a different theme, which will continue throughout the main gameplay. As each settlement rank is advanced,  the claim area and available structures will expand. 

I ran through all of the objectives, timing the playthrough in the upper right corner. The first 5 settlement levels took 1h 21m 04s to complete. As the developer of the game, I have knowledge of the upcoming objectives. So I expect a player to take about 2 hours to complete this onboarding section of the game. After which they will be in control of 8-10 pawns.  I filled almost the entire constructed storage inventory during this playthrough of the start of game content. I'll have to make the next tier of storage sometime soon.

[] Bugs related to animations, especially for hunting, need to get fixed.

This isn't something I can convey in a single image or video. So I'll just link to the relevant post on bluesky. The animations for hunting were quite jittery. Because the range between the hunter and target change by such a small amount, I had to lock the hunter in place while the target moves out of range. This prevents the animation from skipping a few pixels forward after every shot. This doesn't fix many of the other issues the animation has when the target it moving very slowly (the snail), or very quickly (with the mimic). I also need to add additional directions for the bow firing animation, but it isn't a development priority at this time.

[] Many SFX need to be added to various UI items and interactions.

Many sound effects were added. Crafting structures, inventory, placement, buildmode, and other various UI mouse button activated actions now have sounds. Some crafting structures have some sound that builds as a device is used, while others play individual action sounds like the Stonecutter. Inventory, storage, placement, and buildmode menu's effects now give more feedback.

I've also re-coded the way in SFX are handled. They are now done with a single switch statement. I can play any sounds with a single line of code calling a function that goes to this switch statement. I can add any sound effects as needed, and select them randomly for variation.

[] Add Tudi's surveillance drone.

Tudi now has a golem that travels around the map from place to place, just to explain how she knows what is going on in the settlement.

This is a new mob that does nothing but roam around the camp. It's effectively unkillable, and Tudi has some to say if the player tries to attack it.

[] Add a few non-functional static environment objects to be placeable by the player.

The biggest change was to how the placement of structures are handled, putting structures into dedicated categories. The newest category is decor. This is a menu of decorative parts for the settlement that "seemlessly" tile into each other, and have a fair bit randomness thrown into the parts themselves to prevent them from repeating.

You can see that so all of the parts are randomly assembled, even though individually they are one grid size. It was quite difficult to get them to connect seamlessly. Even now, some of the parts are cut off. Especially on the centered 3-way fences. It's not too much to fix, but it have a lot of other art to get done.

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There are a few things I managed to add across the week that I didn't plan on getting so soon.

[] Mimic

There is a new mob, the mimic. It is not completely functional yet. Currently, it roams around the map turning into any object, and attempts to hide among clusters of objects that looks like itself. The player can identify a mimic using build mode, and shoot at it to scare it away. Eventually, this mob will still items from player's chests. This function is difficult to implement persistently, in a way that will not destroy the player's items. I will tackle that issue, another day.

A mimic can turn into any object. Even an entire tree. I thought it would be interesting to turn the build menu into a sort of spotting mode, for these mimics. Pawns set to the hunter job, will hunt mimics on their own. Which will be a necessary skill for them when they start stealing items.

[] Level Restricted Buildings

All of the structures used to be available at settlement level 1, for testing purposes. That has changed to prepare for the demo release. Over the course of advancement through the settlement ranks, the player will unlock new structures progressively. So that they aren't overwhelmed by the extensive list of structures the game will eventually have. I've also prepared the build menu to be split into tabs, should there be so many that sorting them becomes necessary. 

[] Decor Icons and Build Menu Background Icons

Decor Icons, now that they have their own build menu tab.

These are just the same as the object as it's placed, but it took a little arranging to get them to look passable. Unfortunately, the paths are black, so they are kind of hard to see. I don't think I'm going to change it though, without redrawing them at a different scale. I'd rather avoid doing that.

The background image for build menu icons used be a figure eight, link looking thing. While posting my development on 4chan's /agdg/ thread on /vg/ someone pointed out it was very hard to see the icons. Especially the fences, while selecting build objects. They were right, so I changed it.

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Now, the next week of development will be an art loaded week which will be adding many new structures to prepare for pawn garrisoning.

+ New Totem images for settlement levels 6-10 need to be finished.

+ New Dark Tree variants because the game only contains 2 trees.

+ Expanding the list of structures.

+ Structure art for the Binder, Forge, Loom, and Mint

+ Set up pawn aspiration system, to return pawns to their primary assigned job.

+ Structure art for the Sericulture, Tailor, Market, and Scriptorium. (maybe)

+ North and South direction bow firing animation. (maybe)

With any luck, there will be twice as much crafting content by the end of this week. So that I can start integrating cloak crafting and upgrading. The Scriptorium will be the biggest test for the new garrisoning system for pawns. If I manage to get the market done. Then I can start doing game objectives up to settlement advancement level 20. (Which would be like 8 hours of gameplay, I assume.)

Thank you for following my work.