Pixcade Cosmos

This is a LD38 project which didn’t get done in time to be a real playable game but I’ll still be finishing. Will edit this OP and make new posts in this topic when new builds go up.

Build 6

Press 1 - 6 to toggle between debug placement
Try to make water without placing it manually!
Click and drag to scroll around.
Press F11 to toggle fullscreen.

https://www.pixcade.com/cosmos/web/?6

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Nice! I managed to create single tiles of water. I’m guessing there are larger patterns or other ways to create larger areas of water?

Yep, but not actively in that build. Redoing the UI, and going to make some more changes to the way the world is handled then will upload another build.

UI will be similar to the original refmock. Some blocks can be placed by paying their cost in Gravity once unlocked, others can only be placed by the amount of stock you have. Some times will unlock via patterns, others will unlock via transforming them through following recipes of placing tiles on top of each other for certain amounts or in certain orders.

Originally I had the UI as mostly Game Objects and labels but because of this I switched to normal GUIs which will probably be better in the long run… Laggy camera

Ah, yes, sorry, haven’t looked at that one yet. Me and @sicher discussed it briefly yesterday. I’ll make sure to take a look!

User stats so far. I enabled a while after posting first link so it’s not all data. I’ll post updates to this too over time. This is using Defold’s built in ability to optional give analytics on your dashboard for anyone who didn’t know this was possible to enable.

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Build 6
Spending spare time while not working on other projects. Basic recipes for creating new elements, still messing with pattern matching and encoding more complex recipes in an efficient way. Going to add some more block types next while I continue to work on the bigger features.

https://www.pixcade.com/cosmos/web/?6

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Preview of more things to come. Mud, and dry/irrigated farm land. Plus blocks with doodads on them which can interact with the blocks they are on.

Soon I’ll be adding ability to auto-save your game, playfab integration for cloud save syncs, and time simulation for when you’re away and come back. So over time your farmland goes dry (unless directly next to a water block) and must be re-watered, and your plants grow up into something harvest-able, but if you’re gone away too long they become withered (dry soil) or rotten (wet soil). Then could make a compost block where you can put compostables to produce fertilizer and gas as an energy source. :smiley:

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Testing brighter / more vivid tile colors. Mostly for the benefit of phone screens. This forum software seems to make color adjustments automatically so may still not look right, but you could still compare to above pics for difference. Might make toned down and super bright alt version toggleable in config.

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New mock for UI but still thinking about it more. Have some things working but testing other ideas too. The bottom area you would swipe or drag left and right to scroll between blocks you have so that doesn’t change much from original mock. Or you could swipe /drag up on the menu area to expand into a scroll list where you can see everything you have and maybe even filter by string match for name. The block / pickaxe buttons toggle between blocks and tools. Placing blocks is a quick tap / click.

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WIP doodle ideas for monster cards. The idea is that in the overworld themed dungeon portals can randomly spawn, and the player can enter into a timed trial to defeat mobs / and do whatever else they want to do in the randomly generated dungeon. There are multiple themes a dungeon can have. There are mobs which are rarer than others. Mobs have a low chance to drop their monster cards. Once you have a monster card, you can then spawn that mob’s eggs on your own overworld. If a mob is on an island it will stay there otherwise it will be able to roam around and potentially interact with other mob types. And you can kill your own mobs on your overworld to farm their materials, but spawning eggs can be costly, and I’ll probably add a forced wait cooldown time to spawn eggs too.

So each dungeon theme has a set of monster that can spawn, each theme has a set of monster cards to collect, each theme will have its own card border art style and the monsters within it will fit the theme well. There could be super rare mobs which can spawn in any themed dungeon zone too!

Each mob would need its card art appealing look. Two frames for movement, one frame for action, one frame for taking damage.

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More doodlegrams for the monster cards. You can see some yokai! Not all will make the cut but like normal process will make bunch of sketches and then pick the best to refine and put into sets.

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Super nice, Pkeod – great progress!

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Hey there.

I’ve tried the game. What to do? Whats the goal?
I’ve placed a couple of ground / stone and if sourrounded water appears. Using keys 1-6 I can change the “block” to other materials. Nice to paint, but whats the thing about this game?

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Current live build has no goal. Probably next few builds won’t increase the fun or make it much more compelling but hopefully not too long before it’s actually interesting to play and keep coming back to!

The final game’s goals will most likely be about creatively designing your overworld + collecting things in the dungeons as you make progression in a few areas. I’m thinking about removing the block recipe and transmutations even because past the initial discovery they don’t seem that interesting and will probably be more annoying than fun for people wanting to design their overworld in certain ways. But the skeleton of the game as it is now could be iterated in a few directions into a few different games.

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Discovered this game which has some similar fundamental concepts to original concept, but I’m diverging away from that. Still neat, and a 2d version of a game similar to it would be possible to make.

1 Like