It is now the 9th week of development for Cosmic Construct. If you are not already subscribed to the Bluesky for daily progress updates on the game, you should do that. Following on Bluesky costs you nothing but your time, and helps me get the word out about my games.

Over the last week, I have been dealing with the fallout of Demo Day 60 and the testing that surrounded it which opened up a bunch of issues and sore spots. Which of course is the point of an event like this. Due to that work, I was not able to get to all of the things I had planned to do this week. Instead, I got a whole list of things to improve which I can knock out to make Cosmic Construct a more fun to play game.

Lets go over each of those points, and see what was missed.

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

There is alot going on in this line, and it was not as straightforward to work on. I just skipped around posts of this sublist of tasks, and it was mostly integrated elsewhere.

Additional Tudi messages were added, while others which were confusing or appeared in incorrect places were removed. The quest objective review got touched on which I will cover in the unplanned section below. Crafting locks were put into place locking down the later game content for the demo, but have not been implemented for subsequent demo releases. Bug catching, based on what happened doing the demo gameplay reviews, was forced to happen.

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

Storage management is much better now than it was before. The storage menu now has options to transfer 10 items at a time with shift click.

Because of some complaints about being able to destroy items from the inventory, the option to delete items from chests as well as from the inventory was added directly from the menu.

You can see here the control + shift + right mouse destroys 10 items.

Then control + right mouse destroys a single item.

From the inventory menu the same control + right mouse also destroys items.

+ Art for additional tiers of storage and housing.

This did get done. 

There are 2 new tiers of storage: the Shed and Container structures. The Shed expands the storage by 1,280 items, and the Container by 5,120. Each subsequent tier stores 4 times as many items, while costing about 3 times as many resources to create. Increasing the storage efficiency of each tier of structure.

There are also 2 new tiers of housing: the Tipi and Yurt. Each housing tier will increase the overall value of the settlement, as well as amount of leisure and energy need recovered by resting in them. Additionally higher tiers of building will store more pawns within them, better utilizing available space.

+ 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)

None of this was done, as I was dealing with many more issues, as I explain below.

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This is the part where I explain all of the unplanned additions made over the last week, and there were a many. If you want to see me struggle as bugs pop up, you can view the demo day entry thread.  Otherwise let me go over some of the changes.

brimstonewalker was the first one to stream the game for demo day. He ran into many issues I couldn't have really caught myself over testing. As I have knowledge of how things were programmed. Which is why testing in important. The most important thing I needed to fix was an arrow collision bug which crashed the game with certain objects. This was fixed while I was watching it happen live and now Tudi and the Surveillance Golem now no longer crash the game when shot.

Tudi had quite a small radius, half a square to talk to her. I thought this might be enough, but I was very wrong. This was expanded to two grid spaces vertically.

The R keybind was showing in the build menu, which shouldn't have been. Unfortunately, it looks like it should logically be there, but the destroy function is meant to be available outside of the menu. I'll revisit that at a later time in development, when pawns get construction.

For gameplay balance, trees now have a chance to drop 2 logs instead of one. People kept suggesting to make the chests themselves cheaper. For a complex reason related to determining the value of the entire settlement, that's not really possible, as the build cost for all tier 1 buildings must be "10 value points". Best I can do is drop additional logs.

Those chest did not have enough storage capacity, so all storage across the game was increased. I originally said 75%, but it was actually 60%.

Pawns can now partially deposit their inventory (plus a little extra). This sometimes results in more items in storage than allowed, but that would happen over the course of normal gameplay anyhow. So it doesn't really matter that much.

There was a big change to how questing was handled because it contained too much railroading. Currently I have band-aid solution in place that checks if objects already exist. I will be rewriting the entire settlement progression function.

There is now a flashing rainbow indicator showing what square is being currently selected by the player.

Other than these, here is a lightning round of other changes I made.

• Rain volume was adjusted multiple times.
• Options menu was going to a new track each time it was opened, it no longer does.
• There were two options menus, one for the main menu, and one in game. These have been combined on the back end.
• Changed cyan text label borders to white.
• Fixed the name input field on character creation pages.
• Sprint needs to just be removed, but I have it enabled by default for now.

Finally, most of all, there was a significant bug with pawn aspirations which rendered the game mostly unplayable. Which has forced me to create a new pawn manager. The new pawn manager is far and away better than the previous iteration. This should solve aspiration assignment issues.

Moreso, pawns currently always upcycle resources to a higher tier. There are many reasons why a player might now want a pawn to do this. I will be making sure this no longer happens by default. Instead, there will be a checkbox to enable that behavior should the player desire it.

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Here are the development goals for the upcoming development week.

+ Finish the new pawn manager. This included upcycling, aspirations, and hover tooltips for traits.

+ Add a HUD for player statistics.

+ Add a record history of all game actions to prepare for the new objective system.

+ Recreate the a new objective management system for settlement advancement ranks.

+ If I get all of this done this week, I'll work on settlement ranks 6-10.

This was a long one, but thank you for coming. See you next week, or tomorrow if you are on bluesky.