Welcome to the week 30 devlog for Cosmic Construct. Here I am apologizing for missing my schedule again, but what can you do.

I was waiting for the results of the Rising Tide trailer contest before making this new devlog. To make a long story short, my performance wasn't very good. But what can I do than learn how to make a better product for you all.

I usually mix up the below link section, but I'm tired of doing that, so it's going to be boilerplate from now on.

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To follow the game's progress you can join me at:

• My bluesky account which gives more frequent updates.
• The Cosmic Construct community discord server.
• Also Wishlist Cosmic Construct on Steam and follow it's steam page.

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Each week we go over development goals established at the end of the previous devlog.

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[] Demo preparation. (priority task)

There is still alot of work that needs to be done here. Many of the things in this category are tiny changes to polish up how the game feels to play. It's difficult to describe visually, even with a video. Hundreds of tiny changes to code all over the place to squeak out performance. Texture page and preloading, Sounds. That kind of thing. I didn't do much in this category because I was working on other things.

One of the things I've done in the demo prep is reworked save file versioning. So that I have a little more future proofing for changes to game mechanics and systems. I might show the save file version upon loading the game.

[] A secret feature. (What could it be?)

SKILLING! The secret feature is skilling.

When the player harvests any resource, they gain experience in that gathering type, which will increase the speed they perform that action. As well as rare drop rate for stellar resources, gems, and many other upcoming items. The skills covered so far are:

• Forestry: Increasing tree cutting speed, and stellar log drop rate.
• Mining: Increasing stone and iron picking speed, and stellar ore and gem drop rates.
• Farming: Increasing harvesting speed, and stellar crop drop rates.
• Construction: Increases the speed at which items are submitted to blueprints.
• Smithing: Increases smelting and smithing speed.
• Processing: Increases the speed of woodcutting, stonecutting, and other mundane crafting operations.
• Cooking: Increases cooking speed.
• Merchantile: Gives a small discount when buying and trading goods, and increases tax rate as well as the frequency taxes are collected.
• Gaming: Gives a small luck based advantage when playing certain games.

These are the first 10 skills. I have it coded in to allow up to 20 skills. So there is plenty of room to add more to the save file later.

[] Totem ranks 26-30

I've finished totem ranks 26-30. Although, The totem art is getting to the point where I don't actually want to show it off, as to let players discover it when the game releases. This is probably the last full totem art you are going to see. If you want to see the rest of them, you are just going to have to play the game.

As usual, each totem rank n mod 5 = 1 is a bare statue. Then I add a clock, flowers, stonework, and then liveries with a crown. This will be true up to and including totem rank 50. In the full game it will be possible to gain totem ranks beyond 50. I'm not sure what visuals I will add for that, but I will do so.

[] Structure art

Didn't work on this at all. Sorry.

[] Finishing up the pawn complaints

This was the most complex thing I did during the week. The screenshot doesn't show much more than a new line of dialogue, however there was a significant change to how all complaints are handled by pawns. Before pawns would automatically submit complaints to the complaint log. I instead last week, pushed them to the pawns. This was not working as I had intended.

Talking to a pawn would give a complaint but give the "hewa" line for all of those interactions, because I didn't have voice lines for them. Calling a category was using a reworked script which couldn't match voice lines to text. So it was pulling a random voice line for completed conversation categories, and Cosmish translations were not matching the text on screen; which defeats the purpose of making a conlang.

I've rewritten the entire database of dialogue and voices as a json struct. This is very robust, modular, and can be expanded ad infinitum. It will support the thousands of voice lines I have planned to include. Eventually pawns will have conversations between each other, and voice lines will be pulled for those conversations. When this happens, the game will be very lively.

Also, I finally had an excuse to get the pitch modulation for pawns done. So now, pawns in addition to have masculine and feminine voices, can now modify that pitch. I'll add a section to exit this on the character customization screens sometime in the future.

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This next work week will be dedicated to preparing the new demo for public testing.

This new demo will then have weekly builds adding new content.

The playtesting team will then have access to the full game under NDA. If you want to join the playtesting team, you can do so on our discord server linked at the top of this post.

Therefore, there is only one task this week.

- Prepare the demo for public playtesting. (priority task)

The next devlog will basically be a long patch notes. See you then.