Welcome to this week's devlog covering the 10th week of development for Cosmic Construct. As always, if you are not already following me on bluesky or now twitter/x for development updates you should do that. I will keep trying to post on both daily. Admittedly, I've skipped a couple of days due to my poor sleep schedule. Regardless, anything new as it is developed there. Each week I post these large scope devlogs as a sort of "state of the game" post.

Each week I cover the work I list at the end of the previous week's post. Here are the tasks mentioned from last week.

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

The new pawn manager was able to assign pawns while paused, but wasn't cycling aspirations in a way the player could see them. The pawn manager now shows the current aspiration, wipes aspirations when jobs are changed, and lists the pawns current job on the sidebar.

There is a new upcycling checkbox, which changes the list of recipes a pawns has access to, to prevent them from upcycling resources more than one crafting tier. Should a player want the old behavior, they can request it by checking the upcycle box.

Also added are tooltips for the trait's descriptions, and the currently selected job on the sidebar listing all of the settlement's pawns.

+ Add a HUD for player statistics.

This turned out to be quite the project. I ended up doing different HUD art for each species. It still doesn't display all of the information I would like it too. However, I needed two bars to display for energy and health. I doubt the health bar will see much use until much later in the development cycle. But it's there should I need it. I can always repurpose it to something else.

Here are some examples of each species having a different energy bar.

Different from last week is also the inclusion of a "level" and "experience bar at the bottom. This was included as part of the new objective system. I'll explain how that work shortly, but first I needed to...

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

I added a record history to the player save file to sav what the player has already done. It's a massive array of ints that I can math to determine what players have crafted or constructed. Before I was sending signals to the player object to determine when actions were performed. That was a very bad way to do things, and was not tracking player behavior over time. Instead, only when the objective was available. Creating the "but I already did that" problem. That is no longer the case. Players can complete objectives of almost any level or tier at any time, and it will be automatically marked as complete when comes up.

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

As was mentioned, a "level and experience bar" was added to the bottom of the main game HUD. This is part of the new objectives system that allows for more "opened" gameplay than a player following a list of tasks in order. The previous objectives system was quite railroady. While the current objectives system is still quite linear, it exists to teach the player the intended progression path. Perhaps a game mode without the objective system, with more "sandbox" gameplay will be warranted later. For now this is the "story mode" equivalent of Cosmic Construct. 

The new objectives system have 10 simultaneous objectives that a player can complete for each settlement advancement level, which will henceforth be "totem level". As the totem level increases 10 new objectives are added to replace the objectives from the previous level. 

In the above image, you can see that it is just checking the player's historical records of processing materials and building structures. It counts them, and if it is higher than the threshold, then it passes the check. There are much more complex checks, like as for the number of homeowners, each objective works in a similar way. For no numerical checks, I have a progress step function that adds to a counter if states have been passed. Such as the current line of Tudi's dialogue.

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

I did not get to this on week 10.

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Most of the above work took up a significant portion of development time, which I knew it would. The objectives system as it was before was core to the software, and almost every object or script was sending signals out to the mission objective function. All of that had to be removed, and repurposed to send updates to the player history arrays.

However. I did get some really important stuff done that should be mentioned here.

It can't really be explained through an image, so let me just link to the relevant bluesky video. Players can now move objects around after they have been placed. This includes blueprints, decor, farming objects, and structures. It will move even incomplete structures. As long as a structure is not in use it can be moved to any other valid location.

For me, this is a huge relief, as it has been on my todo list for quite some time. (Which is about 1k words long.)

Now that items can be moved around, I no longer feel guilty about growing the size of buildings, such as the totem itself. As players can just move items out of the way of other structures without needing to rebuild them. They can store parts and structures anywhere on the map. 

Another important update is just around the corner.

I have gone ahead and paid the steam partner fee, and am getting a steam page set up for Cosmic Construct. There will be a demo build of the game available there long before the game actually releases, so there will be plenty of time for the game to accrue wishlists. (As a result of this, the demo will probably be removed from this itch page.)

This is of course the first time I am going to ask you to wishlist the game on steam when the page goes live. Get ready for that also to be included at the top of these weekly devlogs.

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At last we cover what will be worked on over the course of the next week. I have a lot I want to do, and some of it is very important for the steam demo.

+ New save management system for the main menu. (Multiple Save Slots and New Game)

+ Settlement value, population, currency, and rank display.

+ Rewriting the item database.

+ Objectives for settlement ranks 6-10.

+ Structures and items to support ranks 6-10.

+ A secret feature. (If I have time. What could it be?)

+ Rewriting the place mode function. (maybe, it's hella spaghetti right now)

Thank you for coming to my TED talk. Enjoy the upcoming week.