Welcome to the 8th development week for Cosmic Construct. As usual if you aren't already following the development on bluesky, you should do that. This week was heavy on art. Art for the game, despite its simple appearance, takes a long time to create. Because each piece needs to be drawn 4 times for the game's squigglevision style. 

Now, it is time to review the development goal for the previous week and see how the planning turned out.

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

This one was probably the most enjoyable thing I did this week when it comes to art. It's just fun to make upgraded versions of existing structures. Making animations like this are going to be so satisfying once all 50 settlement advancement levels are finished. I really wanted to get around to making more of these totem upgrade frames this week, but I got sucked into playing Path of Exile 2.

These totem frames aren't the only art I did for totems. I did the bases / platforms for all totems up to Rank 50, which was quite a bit more involved than you might think. I will save me a ton of work later. I have a path forward to work on the next set of frames.

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

This was quite the task. I expanded the number of procedural tree types from 2 to 8. Meaning there is now 4 times as much tree art now as there was last week. Something that I think doesn't matter much to the player, but does to me. I hated seeing the same two trees (and their x flipped versions). Now, I can hate noticing the same to trees next to each other slightly less often. I also changed the colors trees can generate with. They colors are slightly different and there are 3 of them. In all, there are 24 different way trees can appear. I think I am happy with it, for now.

[] Expanding the list of structures.

If you weren't aware, I have a complex tech tree for Cosmic Construct which is only about 20-25% of the way finished. I still need to work on expanding it to create game content up to the 50th settlement rank, which contains buildings up to tier 8. These buildings will perform complex tasks I don't quite want to reveal yet. They will require some new unique materials such as mana / spirit, rare minerals, special objects, and other prerequisites. I got a very small part of this done over the week, but nothing I am ready to show. An example I can give is a University, which generates research. What is this research used for? You'll find out when the game releases.

[] Structure art for the Binder, Forge, Loom, and Mint

Not only is the art done, they are partially implemented with their crafting recipes and build costs ready for settlement ranks 11-20.

The Binder binds paper stacks into signatures, which are used to make blank books. These blank books will be used at the Scriptorium to create written books for the Library.

The Forge makes metal parts of different shapes. Currently it just processes precious metals into blanks for the Mint.

The Loom is the most important crafting structure here. Which produces cloth, to upgrade the player and pawn cloaks. This is used to increase stats and inventory capacity.

The Mint takes coin blanks and stamps them into coins to be used at the Market and Treasury. They will be used to convert items from one kind into another at a cost.

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

Pawns are highly complex state machines. Each time I implement a new feature, their capabilities expand rapidly. With the introduction of pawn aspirations the pawns now have the capability to return to jobs in an intelligent way. For example, if a pawn is set to the Carpentry job they will check the settlement storage for logs to process at the Lumber Mill. If they find some, they will process the Logs into Lumber and Planks. However, if they do not find Logs in the storage, they will automatically go get Logs to process. This will change their job to "Chopping Logs". In the background, they still remember their assignment of processing the logs into other materials.

With these changes in place, the pawns can nest a queue of tasks at any scale. Allowing a researcher, to go all of they way down to making paper if there is nothing to write research on. Should I implement this chain of reasoning that is.

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

Nope, did not get to this. :P

[] North and South direction bow firing animation. (maybe)

I got this finished just before making this post. Both the player and pawns now fire bows in directions that make more logical sense. The side on animation was good enough for testing, but got a little weird directly above and below the hunter. Now those animations are mostly fixed. Might require some tuning later, but it works enough for testing.

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[] Iron

For some inexplicable reason, I neglected to add iron to my tech tree. I started to run into structures like the Forge which would required iron to build (for the anvil). So this created extra work of needing to add a new ore to the game. I decided to hide it in normal rocks. Mostly because I didn't want to add more rock variants. There are now regular sources of iron as hematite, which can be smelted into iron ingots.

[] Gameplay Recording

Because of the demo being released on the 3rd of January, I am polishing some of the bigger pain points of the game as it currently stands. The plan is to Implement quality of life features that will make it easier for players to test the game.

This means having a review video to help testers out, to guide them on what they need to do, should they get stuck somewhere.

I went ahead and recorded 80 minutes of settlement rank 1-5 gameplay, which will go live at 7pm ET today.

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As for this upcoming list of work. Most of it will be refining what is already in the game, to make sure the game is ready for testing before I add additional content.

+ Additional Tudi Messages, Reviewing Quest Objectives, Crafting and Demo locks for objects, and bug catching.

+ Streamline storage management for the player, adding features for auto filling the inventory with an item, and bulk processing.

+ Art for additional tiers of storage and housing.

+ Art for future item icons, which require tech tree planning.

+ Structure art for higher tier structures (Sericulture, Tailor, Market, and Scriptorium, etc...). (maybe)

+ Art for additional settlement advancement ranks. (maybe)

+ Art for primary HUD elements, which track player advancement. (maybe)

That is all for this week. Thank you.