This devlog marks the end of the 16th development week for Cosmic Construct. Can't believe it has been 4 months since I've started this project. Time really does fly doing this kind of work. I can't give a good estimate as to when the game will be done for a variety of reasons. But I know I will be able to reevaluate where the project is after another 4 months. Where a majority of the art assets will be complete.

If you haven't already wishlisted the game on steam. You should do that, especially if you are interested in these weekly devlog posts. If you want to get more regular updates to development, you can also follow me on bluesky. I only post updates related to the game there. Also, don't be afraid to comment on the posts on bluesky. I respond to everyone I can, and will answer any questions about the game.

In these weekly devlog posts, I go over development goals set over the previous week. This was a short week that I was using as an excuse to take a break from development by doing light work. I will be back to our regularly scheduled development for the upcoming week.

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[] Prepare a Press Kit (priority task)

I prepared a press kit from the assets I had on hand from the creation of the capsule images for the steam store page, as well as screenshots from these weekly devlogs which I do save. I meant to add some extra screenshots and reels from testing Totem Ranks 6-10, but I mostly forgot to do that. I can just update the press kit with content as I create it.

The press kit is available from a google drive folder and includes all of the art assets used for the steam page including sub assets which come from the comic. Select screenshots, an hour and a half of gameplay video, the game soundtrack, and the demo trailer are also included in the press kit folder.

I even took the extra effort to edit the metadata of the game music files so everything is displayed nicely in a media player.

[] Prepare a slightly better Steam trailer.

This took quite a lot longer than I anticipated. Given that I have some beginner level experience editing videos, I figured I could whip together a trailer real quick. It instead took the better part of a day to get timings to a point where I everything felt right, as I was trying to sync it up with the music. I think the result was worth the effort. Sadly, I don't have the game content to show off in the demo trailer.

The "Grow Into A Metropolis" part is a little lackluster. Given that I am showing off an area of level 5 of 50. A level 50 settlement is going to be entirely different in appearance. Especially with the number of decor objects I plan to add.

[] Communicate with publications and get articles up where I can.

Because of the nature of the work, I can't really detail exactly who I attempted to contact, and what kind of progress was made there. I can say I did manage to get ahold of some games journalists to cover the demo sometime over the next couple months. Which should hopefully get the game into the eyes of more playtesters, and people who like games like this.

This is going to get a little yappy, and not about publications so much. Let me talk about Cosmic Construct's development pillars real quick.

Cosmic Construct is a colony management sim that comes from a mentality of not really feeling satisfied with the "progression systems" of other survival crafting like games. I feel the RPG elements integrations of games like Ark Survival Evolved or Minecraft Mods like PMMO where "doing x repeatedly makes x a little faster", becomes grindy rather quickly. This is the same in Rimworld where the progression of the colony comes, mostly from building a base; but also from the stats of the individual workers. A settler with 15 construction will outclass multiple settlers with 3 construction.

I wanted to develop a game where progression of a Colony Sim game, is tied to the advancement of the colony itself. Where the settlement is a character of sorts, to a lesser extent personified as the Totem. The player serves the primary role, but doesn't really have stats other than "the cloak". I did consider several times during development to add "runescape style" skills. I do want to make a game like that eventually. Though I also feel that if I am going to take a risk with the obviously experimental and "avantgarde" Cosmic Construct, that I might as well go all the way.

Bringing us back to publication and appearance, it doesn't take much to get someone interested in this game. Due to the black neon art style, in a sea of other games it stands out. It gives people something to talk about, but unfortunately I am dealing with a two edged sword. If someone notices it for its appearance, they see the game as an art piece. Ignoring the fact that I am making a crafting colony sim that will likely have a hundred plus hours of progression mechanics. Getting the gameplay itself reviewed is difficult, as those who notice the game and are willing to write about it see the game at it's face value. Which was why a new steam trailer was needed.

Sorry for the "notice me senpai" rant.

[] Review, reorder, and streamline the objectives list to teach concepts earlier. Then finish Ranks 8-10.

This barely got touched as I got to it at the end of the short week. I did manage to get about 10 objectives done across all of the Ranks. The game has 550 total progression objectives, similar to those Sims mobile games. where subsequent ranks grow a town. However, the individual objectives are more open ended and be completed in any order the player chooses. I considered opening up all 550 objectives at the same time with a Minecraft FTB style quest tree.

If that is something you think you might want to see, let me know what you think about that. I've been playing a lot of Feed The Beast minecraft modpacks lately. I think that opening the objective tree like that might give the player "too much" to do. However, might allow the player to make meaningful progress more early. Limiting the buildings the player can build by Rank (number of objectives completed), could still work. If I make this change, it will be much later in development.

I could knock out like 40 more of the total objectives by writing the totem level up descriptions. So they aren't "objectives" so much as they are confirmations. That is like a long book chapter worth of text all at one time. However, that work is on the table as something I can do in the coming weeks.

[] Additional structure art. (Maybe. We'll see)

Didn't get to this.

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Map Seeding

When I released the trailer, another dev on discord commented that 10,000 maps is a pretty weird number of maps used for a procedural generation algorithm. Which is correct. The maps Cosmic Construct generated were "not entirely procedural". All of the map files for the game are human readable, located in appdata/local.

Prior to last night, every map would save a huge array of randomized numbers which acted as the seed values for each individual tile. This dev pointed out that I could generate the a deterministic seed table instead of saving the seeds individually. Cosmic Construct's maps files no longer save seeds for each tile. However, a planned future feature that would allow for transmog of placed objects has to be cut. It doesn't have any if at all gameplay impact. It was "creep" anyway. I'd rather the map save files be 35% smaller.

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That was all I managed to get done this last week, which wasn't much. We are back to normal, so lets go over what will get done in the upcoming days.

+ Build Mode Structure Icons for New Buildings

+ 9 New Jobs and Job Icons for Pawns

+ Art for the Bank, Cartographer, Expeditioner, Greenhouse, Storehouse, and Surveyor structures.

+ Try to get 6-10 done and tested. (I keep saying this, but it's now a bottleneck to development.)

+ Any additional art that can get done.

Thank you for joining me for this week's devlog.