April 2025 - Week 1

I am... SoaringMoon... your dev... for this... 21st week... of... Cosmic Construct.. Devlogs.

My what a week has been. I've done a lot of development work, but not all on Cosmic Construct. We will get there. Each week we set development goals for the upcoming week. Then review if those goals have been met.

If you are reading this and are not in the Cosmic Construct community, you should get involved by:

• Following the bluesky account for more frequent updates. 
• Joining the Cosmic Construct community discord server. 
• Wishlisting Cosmic Construct on Steam. 
• Follow the page for more of these weekly devlog posts.

At the end of each week's devlog posts, I set aside goals to complete during the upcoming week. Then review if they were completed.

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[] The structure art for Brewery, Town Hall, Warehouse, and Vertical Farm that I didn't do.

I did not do these. Which is very sad. It's now a development bottleneck and a priority task.

[] At least 2 of the new plants, again.

Proud to introduce the new Garlic and Onion crops. I was so enamored by learning how garlic grows, that I actually planted some outside of my house. We'll see how those hold up. The Garlic will be used to create some "italian" themed dishes when I get the cooking fully set up. Adding new dishes is basically as easy as drawing their icons and adding them to the database. Onion will have the dual use of whole onion and scallions from the same plant.

[] The remaining item new icons I didn't get done.

21 new item icons have been added. I'll go over each of these items and what they do, loosely in their order above.

• Abrasive - Used to grind and polish hard materials.
• Brocade Fabric and Cloak - Rank 5 cloak material increasing player and pawn carry capacity to 250, base attack damage to 5, and movement speed by 25%.
• Cardstock and Deck of Cards - Pretty much only used to create a deck of cards. These will be used with the game table and casino to play minigames.
• Copper, Silver, Gold Wire - Used for many things, most importantly being brocade fabric. Might use it for devices of some kind. Not sure yet.
• Cosmic Aether - Used to create Starsteel, power certain devices, and other end game uses.
• Grain Spirit - A type of pure grain alcohol used as a solvent, and for leisure.
• Granite / Slab - A premium construction material for mid game structures.
• Lens - A precision ground optical glass to create objects used by certain buildings.
• Marble / Slab - A premium construction material for mid game structures.
• Research - A currency consumed by research structures to unlock abilities and technology.
• Starsteel - A mid-late game material.
• Velvet Fabric and Cloak - Rank 4 cloak material increasing player and pawn carry capacity to 160, base attack damage to 4, and movement speed by 20%.

[] Marketing related activities, which I will explain in the next devlog.

This is a little esoteric and difficult to explain without explaining search engine optimization. Basically, I am in the process of translating the steam game page into every language I can, and getting multiple articles written.

Explaining and promoting the game for people searching in general for indie games. It's generated a small amount of traffic to the game page, but it's mainly there for AI to read and gain information from so that I can get the google schema embed.

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For unplanned work.

[] Ludum Dare 57

Most of my time this week was taken up by Ludum Dare 57. A game jam that challenges developers to make an entire game from scratch in 3 days. I have never taken part in Ludum Dare before, and have always wanted to. So I decided to enter on a whim.

The number of total assets needed to make this game was... extensive. I overscoped it a bit, but did however meet the deadline with a few hours to spare.

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For the next week I have a lot of art lined up.

- The structure art for Brewery, Town Hall, Warehouse, and Vertical Farm (priority task)

- A new biome. (Yes, another one. :P)

- 2 new plants (I'm trying to do at least 2 a week.)

- Integrate the new items into the database.

- (If all of this is finished, I will move onto more plants.)

Let's see if I actually do the structure art this time. See you all next week. (or sooner on bluesky)