Crisis Point: Extinction - Hentai Metroidvania (2019 public demo available now!)

Anon42

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Dec 3, 2015
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Just glad you're doing okay, fingers crossed that the new dosage does the trick but it sounds like you've got other options in case, and things are starting to get better at least. The teasers for new animations and the new Alraune scene are looking nice, can't wait to see them implemented whenever the next build is ready.

Would you mind a question? I've been trying to find a blaster chip (apparently it's the Seeker Shot from Patreon posts) and I haven't been able to locate it despite running around like an idiot with debug effects turned on for easy exploration (did find a hidden SP upgrade or two I'd missed though). I saw from one of the posts that it's supposed to be hidden and hard to find, would you mind giving a hint to where I should be looking for it?
Sure, I don't like revealing secrets outright but I don't mind giving a hint.
It's hidden in the upper half of the Summit; you'll need to pay very close attention to the background and do something specific in a specific location to reveal it.
 

Anon42

Well-Known Member
Dec 3, 2015
123
107
(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, you can try a free demo of the game on our itch.io by clicking here! If you enjoy the game, please consider supporting us on Patreon! We couldn't make this game without our supporters!)

Hey everyone. This week was an okay one, it's been a bit of a mental/emotional rollercoaster but productivity was decent.

To start off, I need to talk about streams. As some of you may know, I held one stream for a few hours earlier this week. Whenever it's been a really long time since I've held a stream, I always get a lot of anxiety leading up to one. This time was no different, but normally when I finally do build up the nerve to stream, the nerves go away after the first hour, and I end up having a great time. The unfortunate thing is.. that just didn't happen this time. I was nervous for the entire stream, and it stuck with me for a while after, as well. I don't know why; maybe it's because I'm already not feeling 100%, or maybe it's because I used to use streams a lot when I needed to crunch to get updates done in time, but regardless of the reason why, it felt awful.

I'm really sorry for anyone who was looking forward to streams; I was too, knowing how well they had gone in the past, I was hoping they'd be able to help me be more productive, but for the time being, I'm going to have to put a pause on streams. I might try another one after Puffernutter is back and things are back to normal, but if that doesn't work out, then I don't think I'm going to be able to stream regularly until I figure out something for my mental health.



With the stream talk out of the way, me and Orexius spent this entire week on H-scenes. I've finished implementing almost every xray scene Orex animated, along with some various H-scene updates - although we're holding off on the slime animation, since he'll be updating that scene soon to add more details and more frames and the xray will have to change along with it. We also decided that we're going to give blowjob xrays a shot; we had decided to go for penetration xrays only before, but some oral scenes feel like they should have them, so we're going to give it a try and see if we can make it look good. If we do include them, I'll include separate toggles for all the different kinds of xrays so you can turn off any you might not like.

I also worked on implementing the new Edovex H-scene animations, which I can't remember if I've talked about before? I think I've mentioned it, but there are several more Edovex scenes being added this update. In general, even though this update is taking a long time, there's a lot to look forward to as far as H-scenes go.

That's pretty much all we spent time on this week, but as a final treat, here's another preview of the Poison Alraune BE H-scene, but this time, animated!
Poison_Alraune_BE_H-Scene_Loop_One_200_Export.gif

Orex finished the first loop as you can see above, and has nearly finished the second loop now; after that is the climax which shouldn't take long.

I took stock of the update's overall progress this week, and the good news is that there's more done than I thought there was, though we do still need a bit before it can be finished. I probably won't try to add any new areas to explore in this update, and just focus on the other things so I can get it out sooner. It'll be a very H-scene heavy update, along with a lot of polish for existing stuff, like the ledge vaulting, xrays, improved special effects, some improved enemy animations, etc. Once this update is released, I'll put all my focus towards the level editor, then use that to try and get a bunch more rooms implemented in the next update.

Alright, that's all I've got for today. Thank you for reading and supporting us, and sorry again about the stream situation; I hope it will improve soon and I can go back to streaming like we used to, but until then, I'll continue keeping you as up to date as possible with these weekly updates.
 
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Anon42

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Dec 3, 2015
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(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, you can try a free demo of the game on our itch.io by clicking here! If you enjoy the game, please consider supporting us on Patreon! We couldn't make this game without our supporters!)

https://soundcloud.com/anon-42-498945869%2Fcrisis-point-extinction-human-hq-2
Hey everyone! Sorry for this update being so late; I had a stomach bug over the weekend, and on Monday when I was planning on making the post, I had a pair of appointments at the clinic that went longer than expected and chewed up my whole day.

That first appointment was with my medicine doctor, and I've now switched prescriptions to another ADHD medication to give it a shot; I haven't picked up the new pills yet, but I'll be doing that tomorrow, so fingers crossed! My other appointment was to finally get set up with health insurance. Unfortunately, the healthcare marketplace is having trouble verifying my identity (and have been doing so for years, which is why I never got it done before), so we weren't able to finish putting in a healthcare application; I'm going back on Wednesday with as much identifying paperwork as possible so we can hopefully get things sorted and get me on track to have insurance in 2022, so I can finally start taking care of all the medical things I need done, like getting my heart checked out.

I also had another meeting with my behavioral health doc, who is basically acting as a temporary therapist until I get a full time one. It's been months since she had an opening so it was good to check in and get some more goals in place. That meeting is the only reason I managed to get moving on the insurance, for example; it might sound childish, but anything that requires a phone call has been a huge roadblock for me since pretty much forever, so being able to make the calls required for that has been a big step forward. Phone anxiety and ADHD go hand in hand, as it turns out, which explains a lot for me haha.



Anyway, enough personal stuff. Aside from all that, last week was a pretty productive one. As you can see at the top of the post, I worked with our composer for some new music; specifically, a dedicated track for the human HQ, where Rodriguez and the gang hang out. In addition to playing in the main room of HQ, this will also play in the ingame H-scene gallery, and I plan on having a toggle to allow it to keep playing during CGs as well.

You might notice the track is called "HQ 2"; as you progress through the game, the HQ theme is going to change based on what's going on in the story, who you've brought back to camp, etc. I'm really excited for this! I love areas with dynamic music, like Tarrey Town in BotW, and I'm excited to have a place in CPE where we can do something similar. As you might expect based on the name, the song I posted is the 2nd variant of the Human HQ theme; currently we have 3 variations, with a 4th one nearly complete as well. They've already been implemented into the game too, so you can look forward to hearing them in v0.45!

Speaking of v0.45, I'm going to be gunning as hard as I can to get it released before the end of this year. Some stuff will have to wait til next update to make it happen, like the golem enemy and new areas to explore, but this update is our most substantial one yet in the H-scene department (since I finally finished implementing basically every H-scene Orex has finished), as well as containing new features like the new Iron Boots slam attack and the parkour vaulting. I haven't really talked about this much, but there's a bit of an unspoken pressure with v0.45; it's not as big of an update as I would've liked after.. over half a year with no releases.. but there's no way I'd be able to release any update that lives up to that long of a wait, since most of it was spent being depressed and not actually working. At this point, I think it's best for me and the team for us to get this update out ASAP so we can have a bit of a reset, and start on v0.46 without those pressures.

And that's about it for this update. Thanks for being patient with the late update; I try to write these on Fridays so they're ready for Saturday, and that's exactly when the stomach bug hit :' ) I'm feeling much better now though and ready to get stuff done this week, so if you'll excuse me, it's back to work! See you again next week!
 
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Anon42

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Dec 3, 2015
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(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our major playable update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, you can try a free demo of the game on our itch.io by clicking here! If you enjoy the game, please consider supporting us on Patreon! We couldn't make this game without our supporters!)

Told you I'd make it before the end of the year, didn't I? Crisis Point: Extinction v0.45 is now released and ready for all our $10+ patrons to play!



You can watch the trailer above for the main highlights, though a lot of the main things are NSFW, which can't be shown in the youtube trailer for obvious reasons. You can also check the redgifs link for the NSFW version of the trailer, as well! Here's a list of all the major things added or changed:

v0.45 MAJOR CHANGES AND FEATURES

-Added 5 more unique Edovex H-scenes (bringing the total from 1 to 6)
-Added optional xray animations to every applicable H-scene (except slimes; will come later)
-Implemented new Ledge Vault ability for the Kilogrip, to improve gameplay flow
-Implemented new Slam ability for the Weighted Boots, to improve underwater mobility and give a fun new movement and combat option in general
-Implemented Azulisk (Crystal Dragon) CG
-Finished implementing dialogue choice system, and wrote optional hints for all points of the playthrough, which the player can access by speaking to Rodriguez back at camp
-Fixed more bugs and glitches

More was planned for this update, but as you all know, I've been going through a major mental health crisis this year. I'm finally getting to a healthy place again, slowly but surely, and next year is looking up for not just myself, but everyone in the Crisis Point team.

I've said it before, but despite the long wait for v0.45, this update isn't any larger than any previous update has been. I wasn't working for a large portion of the year thanks to my mental health issues leaving me barely able to get out of bed some days, but I felt the need to get v0.45 out and finished, even if the size of it is disappointing to some people. Honestly, after all this time there's no possible way I could make an update big enough to make up for the long wait, so I've just been crunching hard the past week to get what I could out of the door, so the team can start 2022 fresh and without the weight of 8 months of expectations keeping us down. Speaking of starting fresh, let's look forward to v0.46, shall we?



v0.46 GOALS AND PLANS

-Finish implementing new Golem enemies
-Add more new and updated H-scenes
-Continue fleshing out cutscenes with more character animations
-Implement new mobility upgrade
-Finish CG reworks with the Edovex CG
-Work on a custom level editor for the game, to make future level design work better and easier
-If the level editor is finished, add further story cutscenes and a new small "biome"
-Continue adding altered behaviors/attack patterns to enemy recolors, and update some outdated enemy gameplay animations
-Fix more bugs and glitches



Most of the things we plan for v0.46 are things that were originally planned for v0.45, before my mental health turned south. v0.45 was originally a very ambitious update, and I might honestly be being too ambitious with v0.46 too, but I want to bring the game back with a bang if possible. If not, then don't worry, I'll scale it down as needed; my goal for 2022 is steady development and continuing to improve my health, both mental and physical, not light-speed development at any cost. Years of burnout is a major contiributor towards 2021 going so overwhelmingly badly for me, and I'm going to be careful because I refuse to let that happen again - but I'm still going to aim high, because development is more fun that way :p



This is gonna be our lengthiest Top Patrons list yet, considering it includes 8 months worth of folks, but all of you that grabbed our highest tier despite the lack of updates absolutely deserve one hell of a shoutout - so thank you SO MUCH to these wonderful people:

SeraphStarliege
Katsune Teku
Benjamin Arnold
Leon Kiske
Pedro Fraga
HOELS
Lukas Binder
Dezren
Serge Hinzelin
Bombastic Black
Nate
patricio cancino
Thomas Kleis
David Hyde
Thurston Scott
Zero the 1st
Joseph J Hall
bugs weeb five69
Justin Tyler
Zackery Shivers
Fluff
Ingrid Blackflame Discordia


I seriously cannot thank you all enough for your patience and understanding throughout this year, there just.. aren't words for it, honestly. You guys are amazing, and I'm so fucking grateful for all of you, whether you're a patron or not. The constant outpouring of positivity, kind words, and reminders that you all care more about the team than the game, is something I will never forget.

As always, the download link will be posted shortly after this post goes up, in a separate Patron-only post, and I'll also be DMing everyone who was pledged during the development of v0.45.. so, that's a lot of people lmao. I apologize ahead of time, because any of you who were here for the entire year are about to get a LOT of DMs from me; I have to send DMs on a month-by-month basis, I can't just look at the entire period at once, so.. sorry about that!

I hope you guys enjoy v0.45 - and here's to putting 2021 behind us, and making 2022 a brighter year for everyone!
-A42



v0.45 MINOR CHANGES AND BUG FIXES

-Redid a chunk of our H-scene and animation system, to try and fix the H-scene crashes last update introduced
-Renamed Central Summit teleporter to Eastern Summit, to better fit character dialogue referring to that area
-Added a new sound effect for Flare Strike melee swings
-Fixed an issue where the BE vines animation would cause Alicia's animations to slow down, and prevent version actions, until the player changed rooms
-Boom Shot damage reduced from 6 to 5
-Fixed an issue where the position of Wire Shot-pulled blocks would not save, and would reset to their original locations when you leave and reenter the area
-Fixed an issue where cumshooter enemies would reset some of Alicia's animations, which could lead to a softlock in very specific situations
-Rebalanced the volume levels of music tracks to fix the game's uneven volume levels
-Attempted a fix for certain sound effects looping indefinitely under certain conditions
-Attempted a fix for Boss 3 getting stuck rarely during their divekick animation
-Fixed an issue that allowed the player to enter through the upper door of the Torguis camp before watching their introduction cutscene
-Shortened an awkwardly long pause during a cutscene before Boss 3
-Fixed an issue where a softlock would occur if skipping the post-boss-3 cutscene, where the boss and the room barriers didn't disappear
-Implemented a pink screen vignette for when the player's libido meter is high
-Fixed minor animation bug where Alicia would use her "running jump" animation if both left and right were held, despite not actually moving
-Fixed issue where Edovex hovering noise would continue indefinitely if the player leaves a room while being chased by Edovex
 
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WolframL

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I enjoyed checking out all the new animations and noticing the little added details throughout, and playing around with the Slam attack. And this time I made notes on what's where; amazing how much earlier you can get some upgrades than I did on my .44 run once you remember to backtrack. :p Oh, and this time I didn't have the third boss get stuck on geometry despite their best attempts to jump into corners so as far as I can tell, that fix worked like a charm.

Best of luck for the new year and fingers crossed the level editor you've talked about works out for ease of adding content in the future.
 

Anon42

Well-Known Member
Dec 3, 2015
123
107
Hey everyone. Been a while since I posted here; my apologies for not keeping you all in the loop, but 2022 has been off to a very rough start for me. I've still been posting at least every other week on our Patreon, so if you want to read up on everything, I suggest looking there - you don't need an account or anything, all of the updates are public. Just be aware that it's all personal stuff, not really game updates. After crunching so hard to get v0.45 finished, I was heading back towards a dark place, and it took a while to pull myself out again - I won't be making that mistake again, and thankfully things are on the upswing now. I just started seeing a therapist, and will be making some life and work changes to accommodate my ADHD and mental health, but updates should be back to mostly normal now.



(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, you can try a free demo of the game on our itch.io by clicking here! If you enjoy the game, please consider supporting us on Patreon! We couldn't make this game without our supporters!)

Hey everyone. Not a ton has happened since the last weekly update, but a lot of things have been set in motion, so I have a good bit to talk about. My therapist gave me a LOT of ideas to try and improve my ability to work, and it's going to take a while to put all of them together, but here are some of the major bullet points:

-Separate life and work better. This starts by creating more defined work days/hours - which, for now, I'm aiming for Sunday-Wednesday from 1-5 pm. When not in work hours, ALL work-related things should be kept away - emails, messages, everything. Those of you in our discord might have noticed me being online there a lot less, because I've been logging in to my personal discord instead of staying on my work discord all the time. I also have a bad tendency to constantly refresh Patreon here, as well as the other forums I update on, to check for any new posts - I often did this 20+ times a day in the past. I've been gradually weening myself away from that already because I know it's an unhealthy habit, but now I've made a hard cutoff and I'm no longer looking at things unless it's during work hours. This will mean that my responses won't be as quick, and I apologize for that, but I think it's a necessary part of getting my mental health in order.

-Create an isolating environment for work. This means, essentially, changing our office setup so that I can't see the rest of the room, the rest of the room can't see me, and finding some form of audio isolation as well. I love listening to music while I work, but traditional headsets AND earbuds both make my jaw ache, so I've been using speakers for years. I'm going to be doing some research on off-ear earbuds and trying them instead; hopefully I can find some sort of solution, because audio and visual distractions have a huge impact on ADHD productivity. Even if it seems minor, it adds up and slows down my work a lot by preventing me from getting into the flow state that ADHD brains excel at.

-As an extension of the dedicated work days, I'll also be having dedicated appointment days, which will be Thursday/Friday. Appointments still give me quite a bit of anxiety, especially if it's something new, but before now I was scheduling them for whenever was possible. I'm sure I'll still need to schedule SOME appointments at other times, if it's something really important, but for the most part I will no longer be scheduling any appointments outside of Thursday/Friday; my weekly therapy appointments are on Thursday, for example. Having it like this will prevent situations where I've got an appointment every other day of the week, and I just end up overwhelmed and exhausted from being anxious constantly. Plus, by not scheduling them on work days anymore, they shouldn't interfere with my ability to work as much. ADHD has a weird thing I like to call "waiting mode", where if I know I have an appointment, even if it's not for 7 hours, I feel like I can't really do anything until after it's done. That includes work, goofing off to play games, and everything in between. It's incredibly obnoxious, and I usually try to avoid it by having my appointments be at the very start of my day, but sometimes it's not possible and it can throw off plans very easily.


So in general, the therapy has been great so far. I've only had 2 appointments, so it hasn't been long enough to be 100% sure, but so far I'm very happy with my choice of therapist. He seems like the right person to help me out and I'm ridiculously grateful that I didn't have to run through a dozen people before finding someone that clicks.
Aside from therapy, I also had my neuropsych evaluation a few days ago. I won't hear back results for about ~2 months based on what they said, but it'll be nice to have a more thorough examination of my brain.

That's all the personal stuff I have to update you guys on. Once I'm done with this post, I'm heading straight into my first work week with this new schedule, so with any luck I'll have more than usual to post about next weekend! Before I go, though, I do want to give you guys two visual updates - the Poison Alraune BE preview that I mentioned last update, as well as a shot of the tweaked idle animation we're working on for Alicia.

For Alicia's idle, here's a comparison screenshot:
Idle-comparison.png

As you can see, there are a handful of updates here. The main one is that we've altered Alicia's breasts quite a bit - we've made them slightly larger and fuller, which fits her character sheet more accurately, as well as making her clothes react to her boobs better. Her jacket now curves around her boobs instead of just hanging down and kinda ignoring them, and her shirt is stretched across them instead of hugging their shape. We also added some additional shine spots, so that the one single shine on her breast isn't the only one on her entire sprite, and also improved the detail on her shorts and shirt. These are all tweaks we've been wanting to make for a while, so it's nice to get them all done at once.


And of course, last but not least, the Poison Alraune BE preview!
Poison-Alraune-BE.gif

This is only the first loop; the full scene is easily the longest H-scene animation in the game, so I hope all of you futa fans are looking forward to it!

Alright, that's it for this week's update. Thank you for reading, we'll see you again in the next update!
 
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Anon42

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Dec 3, 2015
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(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, you can try a free demo of the game on our itch.io by clicking here! If you enjoy the game, please consider supporting us on Patreon! We couldn't make this game without our supporters!)

Hey everyone. Jesus, where to even start this post? I'll start off with the good news that I've been able to get back into CPE work pretty successfully! I haven't quite stuck to my proposed work schedule, but not because work was difficult, rather things have just been SO busy that I wasn't able to work every day I intended. Because of the limited work days, I haven't gotten a ton of stuff done yet, but I've gotten a good chunk of work on something that I think you guys will be excited about - increasing the screen size in CPE.

Embarrassingly, the screen resolution in Crisis Point (640x480) was chosen because.. it's the default resolution in my engine, and I just never changed it. So, if any of you were ever wondering why our screen resolution and aspect ratio is a little odd, that's why lmao. I've considered changing it for a long time, but so much of the game has been built around that size that I wasn't sure how good of an idea it was. I decided to tinker with it this week for fun, though, and even though there will still be some oddities (like some rooms are the exact size 640x480, so making the screen bigger than that means those rooms will have blank space at the edges), it already feels SO much better to have more screen space that I'm okay with the slight imperfections.

To be specific, my plan is to alter the screen size to 960x540 - exactly half of the standard 1920x1080 resolution that most hardware uses. This means the game will upscale more consistently on most systems, as well as giving you more space to see while you're exploring the game world. Keep in mind we are NOT changing the game's art assets, so don't worry thinking that this will take an absurd amount of effort - we'll need to update some things, like our UI and some backgrounds, to match the new resolution, but 95% of the game's art will stay as is. It's a lot of effort on my end to update things and make sure there are no issues, so I'm not sure if this will be done in time for the next playable release, but here's a before and after screenshot in the meantime so you can see just what sort of a change we're talking about:

Before
screensize-before.png

After
screensize-after.png


Please forgive the debug numbers and the background being cut off; the art hasn't been changed to match the new resolution yet, these screens are just to show you how much more space there will be. Hopefully the screenshot gives you a good idea of it, but it really feels amazing to run around the game with so much more visibility. Platforming and combat are both easier than ever, and even though I've still got a LOT of work to do to make it playable with the new resolution, I can already tell it'll be worth the effort.


So, aside from the work things, there are a LOT of life updates to talk about. Like, a lot, these past two weeks have been absolutely insane. I'd be here writing for a few hours if I went into depth on everything, so I'll just drop some bulletpoints here;

-Obviously, I've been able to start working consistently again, which has been great. Work isn't feeling so hard anymore, and I expect to be able to deliver more consistent weekly updates now.

-In general, my mental health is in the best place it's been for a LONG time, which is great because..

-Our landlord informed us that they will not be renewing our lease once it runs out in June, not because we did anything wrong, but because they want to sell the house we've been living in. Thus, we have about 3 months to pack up and move to a new house. Development of the game may stay just a little slower than I'd like for a bit, because we're going to have a lot of work cut out for us to move the entire household - we were planning on staying here for years, so we have a lot more stuff than usual.

-As an extension of the previous point, me and Puffernutter have been talking seriously about buying a home, instead of finding another place to rent. There are basically no good rental options in Anchorage - they're all not only worse than our current place, but they have HIGHER rent as well. So, it's very likely we'll be putting a downpayment on a home within the next 3 months.

-On another note, Puffernutter and I are now officially engaged, after living together since before Crisis Point was even started! Neither of us likes being the center of attention, so the wedding is going to be a VERY low-profile affair, but we've been talking about the idea of marriage for years and we both knew we were in for the long haul. We were already considering doing it soon, and once we got the news that we were going to have to move, and likely end up buying a house, we decided it would be a good idea to have it done before that happens. We don't have a date picked out just yet, but it's a pretty limited timeframe since we want it done before we move.

-I signed up for lessons, and am finally going to start learning how to play bass guitar, which is something I've always wanted to do but never knew how to start! My therapist recommended I find more hobbies, especially creative things, that are disconnected from my work - and finally taking the plunge to learn an instrument seems like the perfect option.

-Our household, which currently consists of 4 people (myself, Puffernutter, Orexius, and a friend of ours), all signed up for a gym membership and a month of small-group personal training. We had our first two sessions earlier this week, and despite it being a harder workout than I've ever done at home, I felt fantastic afterwards, so I have high hopes for us sticking with it! We did well when exercising as a group before, since we're all accountable to each other for staying on track, and so far it seems to be working great. Not only are we doing regular exercise now, but we're also drastically cutting down on how much food we order out, so we're eating a lot better too.

-Even though I just said our household has 4 people in it, we're about to get a 5th, because my mother will be moving in with us once we settle in to a new place. She WAS going to move in with us this week, but we got the news that we were being kicked out of this house shortly after the decision was made, so we decided to delay having her move in so she doesn't have to basically move twice. I don't want to be specific out of respect for her privacy, but she needs to get out of her current living situation for her own mental health, and every one of us agreed immediately that we'd be happy to have her living with us.

-I don't think I've mentioned anything about this before, but I finally got to see a podiatrist, and it turns out my foot pain while standing/walking isn't just me being crazy. I have flat feet and mild metadductus (google that one if you want specifics), so I'll be getting some custom-made orthotics to help alleviate my foot pain, which should make exercise all the easier. It certainly explains why I've had trouble with walking and standing in the past, so I'm relieved to finally get some answers there.



So I said two weeks, but really the majority of all that happened in just the past week. It's been a crazy busy time, with appointments out the ass and lots of big life changes being thrown at us. Normally this kind of thing would've overwhelmed me and made me shut down for a while, but I'm honestly doing pretty well despite all of it. Therapy has done wonders for my mental health, and things like exercise and getting out of the house more have had me more energetic and motivated than I've been in years.

I'm sure there's still some things that I've forgotten to talk about here, what with the sheer amount of events happening, but I've written enough for one day. Thank you guys so much for reading - and again, thank you SO much for being so patient with me while I get myself in order. It's taken a good while, but the result is an Anon42 that's gradually becoming better at dealing with the stresses of life in a healthy and constructive way, moreso than I've ever been, and I'm eternally grateful to you guys for sticking by me and allowing this to happen. Even beyond the development of games and having steady income, you guys have helped improve my life more than you'll ever know, and it means the world to me. We'll see you again in the next update!
 
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Anon42

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Dec 3, 2015
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(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our bi-weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, you can try a free demo of the game on our itch.io by clicking here! If you enjoy the game, please consider supporting us on Patreon! We couldn't make this game without our supporters!)


Hi again, everyone! Hope you're all doing well, today's update has been a long time coming.

First off, everyone in the house has thankfully recovered from covid now. There's still a few small lingering side effects, but we're all feeling much better, and we've been able to work on getting the house in order again. We've still got some unpacking left to do, but all of the really important stuff is in working order now.


The most important news I have today: I'm so incredibly happy to finally be able to say that as of today, the team - and myself especially - has officially begun full time work on Crisis Point once again! I'm writing this update at the end of my first real day back at work, and I feel fantastic. I'm not going to say that I've "cured" my troubles - these are things that I've been struggling with since even before Crisis Point, and they'll probably be with me for life - but I'm finally in a place where my motivation and drive to work is back in full force, and I'm equipped with so much more knowledge and understanding of myself. A combination of therapy, medication, heaps of lifestyle changes, having a private office, and creating a healthier work/life balance has done wonders for me, and I feel better than I think I ever have. I'm genuinely excited to be working again, which is a feeling I haven't had in a long time, and I can't wait to share some of the things we have in store with you all!


One thing that's been on my mind recently is the frequency of updates I post here on Patreon. As you likely know, when work was normal I would post weekly development updates for CPE, to talk about what the team was working on. During the past few months, while work on the game was at a standstill, I switched over to posting every other week instead; I'm thinking about keeping that schedule, and updating every other week rather than once a week. Try as I might to trim things down, I always end up writing a lot for these updates (you can thank my ADHD for that), and they can even sometimes take a few hours to put together, especially when I also need to take screenshots/make gifs to show things off. I really value keeping you all in the loop on what we're working on, and I don't want the quality of our development updates to go down, but I'd also like to spend less of my work hours on these posts since they don't directly contribute to the game's development. I want to stress that this is something I haven't decided on for sure yet - I might give it a trial period, see how it feels, and I very much want to know how all of you would feel about it! If you prefer the more frequent updates, please don't hesitate to let me know. Patreon as a platform is all about the relationship between creators like me and our supporters, and your feedback on this is something I will take very seriously, which is why I wanted to bring it up now that development has resumed.

One last thing before I finish this post up, regarding development streams - I still want to get them going again as soon as we can, but we've been having some bad internet problems ever since we moved, so we can't start them up again just yet. We're working on trying to get it fixed, so fingers crossed it won't take long!


I know I've said thank you a million times already, but truly from the bottom of my heart, I cannot thank you all enough. There are so few jobs in the world where someone can take a hiatus like I've been taking, and still be able to afford to live during it, and no amount of words I can say will ever properly express my gratitude towards you all. You gave me the time I needed to work on myself, and that is a blessing I don't take lightly. Things are so different to how they were a year ago, and I mean that in the best way. You guys are the best community I could ever hope to have, and I'm so happy I can finally start delivering you guys the content you deserve again. Thanks for taking the time to read all of this, and we'll see you again soon with our next update!
 

Anon42

Well-Known Member
Dec 3, 2015
123
107
(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our bi-weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, you can try a free demo of the game on our itch.io by clicking here! If you enjoy the game, please consider supporting us on Patreon! We couldn't make this game without our supporters!)

Hey everyone, and welcome to the first "normal" update we've had in a long time! As you all know, our team - specifically myself, Orexius, and Puffernutter - have finally been able to get back to work, after planning a schedule for the household. The scheduling has turned out to be a godsend for all of us, and we've all managed to be pretty productive these past two weeks! I've still had a day or two where it's a struggle, but it's a far cry from how things have been this past year.

I don't want to spend too long talking about personal stuff, since we have a REAL update to get to, but it's caused a huge improvement in my mental state, as well. I was already doing way better after spending so much time working on my mental health, and getting back to work feels like the last piece of the puzzle finally falling into place. Having CPE gives me a creative outlet, and a purpose and fulfillment that is otherwise lacking in my day-to-day, and I'm more confident than ever that now was definitely the right time to get back to it. Instead of work feeling like a drain, it's invigorating again, and I haven't felt that way in a long time! I really can't thank you all enough for sticking with us this whole time. My therapist has even recommended going down to visits every other week instead of every week, because of how much I've improved, and it's all thanks to you guys giving me the time and space to work on myself!

Before I start the post proper, just a heads up - as part of the new schedule, we'll be posting updates on Sunday again, so expect to see us then instead of Saturdays like we were doing for a while. And since everybody seemed okay with me trying updates every other week, we'll be trying that out as well and seeing how it goes, so you can expect to get 2 development updates a month at minimum. Now, without further ado, on to the update!


For starters, let's talk about my work, which was decidedly the least glamorous part. Because of the inconsistent way I was working on the game for a while, there's a lot of things I was working on that I just never finished. My first priority now that we're back to it is going back and finishing all of those things; it's been kinda awkward, figuring out exactly where I was with all of it (melee attacking any enemies caused the game to crash, as one example of how borked things were), but I've been making good progress. The main thing I'm focused on right now is the upgrade to 960x540 resolution, up from the 640x480 the game used previously. I don't remember if I've ever shown off the difference in screen size, so here's a quick comparison shot:

screen size comparison.png

Please forgive the graphical issues and floating debug numbers, it's very much still a work-in-progress! Believe me when I say that this area used to have way more visual bugs than there are now. Playing the game with this new resolution is honestly a revelation, exploration and combat both feel so much better. The biggest negative is that the game's areas were designed around that 640x480 resolution; after some deliberation, I've decided to keep the 640x480 area designs where possible so I don't have to go updating every single level in the entire game, and if an area is too small to fill up the new screen resolution, it'll just be centered on the screen with black bars on either side.

I'm really hoping we'll be able to include this resolution upgrade in the next playable update, and I'm making good progress - I've fixed over half of the issues I have written down so far, but there are still a lot of things that need to be done. Pretty much every area's background was designed for 640x480, so all of them need to be fixed (and the code for them was terribly inefficient, so updating them has taken longer than you might expect), but the most daunting thing is probably updating the UI. I've never been completely happy with CPE's UI/UX, and now that we have so much more space to work with, we plan to revisit and redesign some of it rather than just updating graphics for the new resolution.

Aside from that I've been doing some code refactoring for how the game handles hitboxes - a boring task, but it'll make future development easier - and I'm still tinkering with the game's story. I especially want to edit down some of the early cutscenes to be a bit shorter and get players into gameplay quicker, doubly so now that we have systems for optional dialogue, so I can move some of the less necessary exposition into optional conversations. I still really want to get work done on our level editor as well, but unfortunately it's going to take a bit of a backseat right now, since I need to focus on finishing all this half-done stuff so the game's not completely broken anymore for our next release. (And just as a reminder, the level editor isn't something I'm releasing publicly - as fun as it would be, the way it works requires direct access to project files, so unfortunately it wouldn't be usable by anyone outside of the team.)


Next up is Puffernutter's work, and this is the most exciting thing in my opinion! Puffernutter (my wife, for those of you not in the know) has been working on the game's background art for a while, but she usually doesn't have a lot of free time thanks to her freelancing work, so she hasn't been able to work on CPE too much. Now that we have our schedules laid out, though, things have been a lot more consistent, and we have some really exciting things to show for it! Feast your eyes:
Cave tiles rework concept 1.png
Cave tiles rework concept 2.png
Cave tiles rework concept 3.png
Cave tiles rework concept 4.png
Cave tiles rework concept 5.png

These are all nowhere near final asset quality, to be clear. All of these were drawn in a single work day, essentially acting as concept art, and it's not even a guarantee that we'll be using all of them - but there's still a lot to talk about here!

One of my biggest problems with Crisis Point has always been our background art. None of it is explicitly bad, it's just often very boring, and areas blend together no matter how much I try to include unique level geometry. It's a mixture of the lack of unique areas and setpieces, and way too much focus on individual asset quality rather than scene composition as a whole. In my opinion, every single one of these pieces of concept art looks better than any of the ingame scenes, even though they're much less polished, just because they're so much more interesting to look at as a whole. There's a couple major things here that contribute to that, and I'll talk about each of them.

Firstly, the perspective in CPE currently is a perfect side-on camera view, meaning that the player can't see the floor or ceiling of any areas. That can help with creating clearly defined collision boundaries, which is good for gameplay, but it also removes entire surfaces from view and makes it a lot harder to make interesting tilesets. So, we're going to be updating every tileset in the game, at least a little bit; even in the areas where we're relatively happy with the background art (like the Summit), we're going to update tiles to add some perspective to the floors, like you can see in all the concept art above. We'll be doing our best to ensure that level collision is still easy to understand of course, but since we're only adding perspective to the floors, I don't expect to have much difficulty.

Second is that we want to start creating a lot more bespoke assets for individual rooms, rather than everything being shared on a tileset - for example, having a specific rock formation that only shows up one time, in a single room. Not only does that help with keeping the game interesting to explore and look at, but it also helps create landmarks in your memory, so you can more easily remember areas you've been to previously. That can be especially helpful for Metroidvanias, when you get a new powerup and need to figure out where to use it. There's a few points in CPE where it's easy to get lost, and I'm hoping more unique assets will help with those moments by making every part of the game more memorable.

Lastly, kinda related to the above, is that we're going to be kinda splitting each area of the game into sub-areas - we already do this to a small extent, like with the building interiors and outdoors areas in the Summit, but we plan to take it much farther. Each of the concept images above were made for the Caves, as an example; rather than one consistent tileset used across an entire biome, there will be multiple sections that each share a similar feel, but ultimately have a lot of visual uniqueness to them. This is all pretty obvious stuff, and most Metroidvanias before us have handled it much better than we have so far. It's something I always wished we could do, but we just never had the time to create enough assets to make it happen. The very nature of a Metroidvania is exploration, though, and if a world isn't interesting to explore, the whole thing kinda falls apart, so I'm excited to finally be able to make improvements on that front!

That's all for the background art for now, but I can't wait to be able to show more off in the future, CPE's about to get a lot nicer to look at!


Last thing to talk about today is Orexius's work. He's been working on a few animations, like a unique animation for sliding down steep slopes (right now we're just reusing another one of Alicia's animations for that), but the one I'm sure you guys would be most interested in is the updated Slime H-scene. It was one of the first H-scenes made for the game, done by me before Orexius was even around, and much like the other early H-scenes, it just doesn't match up with the quality of the game now.

Single_Slime_New_H-Scene_Loop_2.gif

For comparison, this is the old animation, so you can see how much it's been improved:

Old Slime H-scene.gif

He's done a great job on it if you ask me, the improvement is dramatic!


Alright, that's it for us this update! We're still having internet problems, so unfortunately I can't start up streams again yet, but hopefully we'll be able to get that figured out soon. Thanks for reading, and I hope you're as excited for more CPE content as I am to finally be delivering it! We'll see you again in another two weeks!
 

Anon42

Well-Known Member
Dec 3, 2015
123
107
(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our bi-weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, you can try a free demo of the game on our itch.io by clicking here! If you enjoy the game, please consider supporting us on Patreon! We couldn't make this game without our supporters!)

Hey everyone, welcome to this week's development update! Fair warning, there won't be as many visuals this week, but we still have some exciting stuff to show off! Puffernutter has been focusing on polishing assets to a game-ready level rather than pumping out fast concepts like last update, Orexius is still finishing up the slime H-scene and working on a rough animation for a new gameplay feature I'm surprised we haven't added yet, and for my part, I had a bit of an odd pair of work weeks, but the result is really exciting. I'll save the details for the post itself though, so without further ado, let's get into it!


First off, let's look at Puffernutter's work.

Cave tiles rework concept 6.png

Cave tiles rework concept 7.01.png

These are the two environments she was focusing on, and both of them are near-final asset quality now. There's still parts of each scene that aren't quite complete, especially in the first one, but you can see a clear difference if you compare them to the backgrounds we talked about last update!

In general, while working on these new environments, we have one major goal in mind: to bring the individual asset quality down a bit, while bringing the quality of the scene as a whole way up. That may sound counterproductive, but I think the images speak for themselves, if you compare it to the way CPE looks right now. In the past, we've put a lot of effort into making 1 tileset and then polishing it as much as possible - individual assets in the tileset look great, but it takes a HUGE amount of time to bring them up to that level, and once you put it all together in a scene, most of the work we put into them just gets lost. That's been a huge struggle for us, learning what point is "good enough" vs where it's worth putting the extra effort; you can theoretically spend an infinite amount of time polishing a single thing, but at a certain point you're essentially wasting time that could be spent somewhere else, and time is probably the most valuable asset when making a game.

This is something I've really started to learn while paying attention to other games, especially ones made by studios way bigger than us with way more money. If you're looking for it, you can find tons of places where they "cut corners" as it were, but it's done intelligently and with purpose. The end result is that the cut corners are placed in areas where you don't even see them, and it doesn't take away from the final product at all, letting them focus on the areas that DO need that polish. I realize it may come across as lazy at a surface level, that was my view on the matter until more recently, but after spending so much time on CPE's background assets, only to have Puffernutter come in and (in just two weeks) throw together environments that look WAY better than anything we have, it really made the point hit home for me.

One last note about the second image specifically - you may notice a ladder placed in the center of the scene, and that's because we're going to be adding ladders to the game! That's the other animation Orex has been working on, and I'm surprised we haven't done it already honestly. The level design in the early parts of the game was tricky to work with because of how few tools Alicia has for vertical ascension, which lead to me making the levels pretty claustrophobic. Now that we're updating the background art, we're going to do another pass over the level designs themselves as well, and ladders will be super helpful for making verticality easier to work with. Plus, it just makes sense that the humans would've set up ladders to help them get around.



Now, let's get into what I worked on. After putting together the last update post, I wanted to create a small tool for Puffernutter to basically import a background she's working on, and then add the CPE lighting engine on top of it, so she could tune the colors for what they would actually look like ingame. I decided the obvious solution would be to add it to the level editor, since it would be helpful for testing the lighting while designing levels as well. So I got to work late Sunday, and by late Tuesday I had made.. exactly 0 progress. Not because I wasn't trying, mind you, but because I could not for the life of me get the lighting engine to work in another project. I copied everything over directly from CPE, but it's been so long since I messed with the lighting engine that I just didn't even understand it anymore, thanks to the complete lack of notation. I was a total amateur when I started CPE and I'm still paying for those mistakes all these years later, haha.

So, after basically wasting an entire work week, I reconsidered the angle I was attacking it from. CPE's lighting engine isn't terrible, but it is more obtuse than it needs to be, and lacks some features that I would love to have but wasn't skilled enough to pull off back then, like proper colored lighting. I've learned a lot over the years though, and I had some ideas. After thinking things out over the weekend, I started experimenting last Sunday - and in contrast to the slow failure of the previous week, I had gotten enough done by the end of that very first day to know that all of my ideas and theories worked exactly as I hoped.

Long story short, Crisis Point's lighting engine is in the process of being completely overhauled right now. It's nowhere near done being implemented yet - the lighting itself is done and works perfectly, since it was easy to set up a new lighting system in a new project, but actually ripping out CPE's old lighting and replacing it is a far bigger task, especially when I don't even remember how the damn thing is put together. That being said, I did take the time to put together an example:

Old Lighting.png

New Lighting.png

(Note that this example was not put together in CPE itself, since I'm still working on implementing the new lighting; I took a screenshot of this spot with and without lighting, and threw the screenshot into the project I was testing the new lighting in. This is pretty close to how it will look ingame, but there might be some differences - the new system plays off of the environment better, so more complex scenes with walls and such will benefit even more than this, and it also works really well with different-colored lights in a single scene, so you can expect an even bigger difference as we add more lighting pieces into the environment!)

As you can see, the difference is staggering. In addition to the tint of the darkness itself, each colored light source also tints the area around it, unlike before where it was just a simple overlay sprite. There's still a lot of tweaking we can do, like I think the fires do need a little more going on now that they don't have the overlay sprite anymore, but that's something we can work on.

To dive into this a little bit more, CPE's lighting was previously split into two parts. The first was the most important part; in each area, the game screen was drawn twice, first normally and then a separate version above that, with the colors tinted and darkened based on how dark the area was. Then, the "lights" essentially just cut away from that second darker image, which made the normally-lit version behind it visible through the areas where there was light. The second part was technically "colored lighting", but it's hardly even worth talking about - all I did was overlay a partially-transparent colored orb over things that I wanted colored, which is the most half-assed way to handle that, on top of doubling the required draw calls.

Now, this new system doesn't require the layering of the old system, and the colored lighting is a baked-in part of the lighting itself, so it doesn't require any additional draw calls or anything. It looks better, is simpler to implement and understand, AND it's more efficient! We have so much more freedom over the colors and shape now, because all of the lights are tied to gradient maps, which allows us an infinite amount of customization - for example, the orange light in the screenshot up above is using this gradient map:

Orange light gradient map.png

The center of the light is mapped to the right side, while the outer edges are on the left side, and it uses that to tint the image. Pure white means it just draws the color normally, so the very center of the light where it's at its brightest is untinted, just like you would see in a real light. If we want the full light to be tinted, we can easily just give it a different gradient map without any pure white on it, and I can even add animation to the lights by changing the shape of the gradient, and shifting the vertical position the light pulls from over time. The options are quite literally infinite, and we'll be tinkering with it a lot to make the lighting look as good as we can!




Alright, that's pretty much all I have for today. I hope you guys are as excited about this new lighting as I am; between the new resolution, the new lighting engine, and Puffernutter's new background work, Crisis Point is about to get one hell of a makeover, and I can't wait to share more of it with you all! See you again in the next update!
 

Anon42

Well-Known Member
Dec 3, 2015
123
107
(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our bi-weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, you can try a free demo of the game on our itch.io by clicking here! If you enjoy the game, please consider supporting us on Patreon! We couldn't make this game without our supporters!)

Hello everyone, and welcome to another CPE development update! There's not gonna be a whole lot of stuff with this one; Orexius had some minor nose surgery (don't worry, it wasn't for anything serious) that knocked him out for a week, so he had less time to get stuff done than usual, Puffernutter has had a lot of freelance work keeping her from working on the game, and for my part, I did get some good work done, but it was mostly spent on doing more shader experiments! That said, we do have two new WIP backgrounds to show off from Puffernutter, and I've solidified my shader knowledge a bit more with a few new effects I'll be adding to the game!

To start off, here's two of the backgrounds Puffernutter has been working on, this time for the Deep Soil:

deep soil rework ideas 2.png

deep soil rework ideas 3.png

The Deep Soil has always been a bit of a sore spot for me. It's by far the most organic area in CPE by design, and because of that it has suffered the most from our limited background art. My original idea for the area was to have massive vines shooting up from the ground to seemingly infinite heights, spearing through large clumps of dirt to create a twisting organic maze, where you spend half the time navigating the vines themselves and the other half along the dirt that they hold suspended in the air. The original art for the area captured.. baaaasically none of that. It's a testament to my inexperience; I wasn't able to get across what I wanted to our background artist at the time, and the entire area suffered as a result.

Those of you that have been around for a while might also remember that the Deep Soil is the only area in the game to undergo a complete redesign from the ground up; its original iteration was confusing to navigate with too many small rooms, so in general it's always been one of the areas that I was least satisfied with. All that to say, Puffernutter's early concept work for redesigning the area makes me SO EXCITED! She's doing a wonderful job of capturing what I always wanted the area to look like, and while we're mostly focusing on the Caves and Summit for right now (to get the early parts of the game polished up as much as possible), I can't wait til we can focus our efforts on the Deep Soil.


Next up, my work. Before I get into the shader stuff I worked on, a quick update on the lighting engine upgrade. I've managed to cut out the old lighting system and implement the new one at a basic level, so the hardest part is done. The main things left now are fixing some of the visual bugs that happen with different video settings, and more importantly, to re-add lighting functionality to all of the different light sources in the game now. That part will take the longest, since there are so many of them, and since the new lighting has more features it'll be more effort than just a simple conversion. Regardless, I'm happy with how it's going, and I fully expect it to be included in the next playable update!

Now for the shader experiments, I have 3 things I managed to figure out: an outline shader, a (very) simple bloom shader, and a distortion shader. I won't bother showing off the outline shader, that one's self-explanatory, but it will allow me to try out a few effects I've been interested in. The bloom shader is a bit hit-and-miss; if you're worried that I'm about to introduce a ton of bloom to the game, don't worry, I know it's a rather polarizing effect, so if I do use one I intend to do so in moderation. That said, there are a few places I think it would be beneficial!

I decided to start by implementing it specifically on light sources, and this was the very earliest version of the effect:

bloom1.png

As you can see, it's uh.. it's a bit much, haha. The one exception is the laser fence on the right, which I actually think the effect looks really nice on! Here's a comparison of the fence with and without the shader:

fence_bloom.png

We could just bake that visual into the fence by hand, it's not complex at all, but using a shader means I can do some fun stuff with it like giving it some procedural animation. So at the very least, for simple things like this, the shader works pretty well. I tinkered with it A LOT to see if I could make it play nicer with the lights and torch, but I haven't found a solution yet that I'm satisfied with, so I won't talk about those any further for now. I have some ideas to make it look nicer, so I'll definitely be messing with it more, and you can rest assured that it won't look anywhere near that jarring if it makes it into the game!

Lastly, and the most exciting for me, is a distortion shader, essentially allowing me to warp images in real time, like so:

distortion_shader.gif

(Apologies for the quality not being great, gifs aren't a great format! It looks a bit nicer ingame but the gif gets the idea across just fine)

The first use in this gif is the heat distortion on the torch in front of Alicia, which is something I fully intend on adding to the game proper, I'm super happy with how it came out. The crazy warping effect on the bottom right was just me playing around with the effect and seeing what I can do with it - it's using the exact same shader and concepts as the heat distortion, just with a rotation effect applied to it. The shader allows for distortion in any direction, so I can do just about anything I can think of with it.

I'm not 100% satisfied with it yet - you can't tell from the gif, but when multiple distortions overlap with each other, they don't merge in the way I would like them to, and instead one distortion seems to take priority at random - but I had already spent multiple days of work to get it to this point, so I put that aside for future Anon to deal with. Who knows, overlapping distortions might not ever be an issue anyway, so if I spent even longer on it now that might just end up being wasted work.


And that's all I have to talk about for this week! Sorry again it's not as big of an update, but 2/3rds of the team was unable to work for most of it, and I've definitely been bit by the shader bug now that I'm starting to understand them lmao. I intend to bring my focus back to the game itself, so we can try and push out a playable update before too long, but it's still going to be a bit before we have one ready for release.

On that subject, I do have one question I'd like to pose to you all: most of our work recently has been on upgrading old systems and art, and not really on "new" content. We try to maintain a balance between the two, but we're in a bit of an odd place right now; the playable builds are rapidly approaching some important story moments, but we're actively updating and retooling some parts of the story right now. Even though nothing major will be changing, creating more story content right now is iffy, as it may need to be changed or altered soon after. Because of the lack of new content, I've been very hesitant to try and push out a playable update, but at this rate it's going in the same direction as the previous playable update, where I put it off repeatedly because "it's not big enough to justify the time everyone waited", and I don't want that to happen again. So with all of that considered, are you guys okay with updates that contain no/limited new content, and are instead focused on reworking and polishing things, for a bit? Once we finish ironing out the remaining story beats, I fully intend to get back to more balanced updates, it's just awkward right now - so please leave a comment to let me know how you feel about that so we can plan accordingly!

And as a reminder for our patrons, if you've pledged at the tier for a demo at any point since the last update came out (so, for the entirety of 2022), you WILL be getting the next playable update even if you unpledge. If you're not okay with waiting a bit longer, I completely understand, and you can safely unpledge for the time being without sacrificing the rewards you pledged for.

In the meantime, thank you so much to all of you who stick around! I know new sexual content is what a lot of folks are here for, so I really appreciate that you guys are understanding and let me focus on other parts of the game as well. I'm still feeling great about being able to work consistently again, and with all this new knowledge and experience, we're well on our way to making CPE a better game than it's ever been before. Thanks for reading, and we'll see you again in the next update!
 

Anon42

Well-Known Member
Dec 3, 2015
123
107
(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our bi-weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, you can try a free demo of the game on our itch.io by clicking here! If you enjoy the game, please consider supporting us on Patreon! We couldn't make this game without our supporters!)


Hey everyone, and welcome to another CPE biweekly update! Sorry this one is a day late, I wasn't feeling great yesterday so I took the day easy, but we're here now!

Like last week, we don't have a ton of visual stuff to show this week, and this update is going to be pretty short because of it - rest assured that it's not due to a lack of work, though! Puffernutter has been busy with freelance work again, so she hasn't had much time to work on CPE; Orexius has been doing minor tweaks to a lot of Alicia's old gameplay animations, to bring them more on-model with her current sprite design, so it's important work but nothing really worth showing in an update; and for my part, my focus has been split between 3 things: the new lighting system, the game's story, and just a bit more shader experimentation. If it seems like I'm spending a lot of time on the new lighting engine, please forgive me - to try and prevent getting burnt out again in the future, I'm trying to shake up what I'm working on more often to keep things fresh and fun, so unlike before I'm not picking a single task and focusing on it until it's done anymore. Anyway, enough preface - on with the update!


Since I don't really have anything to show from Orex and Puffernutter, I'll just be focusing on my own work for this post. Out of those things, I don't have anything worth showing from the shader experimentation yet, so I won't talk about that much; I did learn some more stuff though, and I'm enjoying tinkering with them! I expect to be able to add a lot of little polish tweaks to the game as my shader knowledge improves, and it's a good creative break from other work when I need it.

As for the lighting, some of the visual bugs I've found with the new system have given me more trouble than expected, so I've spent a good amount of time fixing those. I still have a few more things to fix, but most of the issues have been squashed now, and I've started working on updating all of the old light sources to function properly in the new system. Each light takes a decent amount of effort to update; putting them in at a basic level is pretty quick, but the new system is so much more robust that I'm trying to give each light a bit more attention than that. It'll take longer of course, but that bit of extra polish is super worth it while I'm already in the code and actively working on them.

The game itself kinda looks like a mess right now, with all of the half-finished things being updated, but I put together this scene using Puffernutter's concept art as an example of what things are eventually going to look like!

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I put some color-shifting functionality on here to show off some of the fun stuff we can do with lights in the new system. This only scratches the surface of what we can do, and I'm excited to see how the game ends up looking by the end of it! An important note; while this is using Puffernutter's new background art, the backgrounds aren't really going to be updated for v0.46. We are trying to give the Caves a new base tileset, and hopefully that'll be done in time for v0.46, but none of the rooms are going to be this complex or interesting looking just yet. We need more time and a few more things in order to make that happen, like my custom level editor, so it'll still be a while yet for the full glowup - but the lighting itself WILL be updated for v0.46, so it'll still be a big upgrade!


Aside from the lights, which are the only visual thing I have to show off this week, there's also the matter of the game's story. I've mentioned several times that I've been messing with the game's story recently, as there are some things I'm unsatisfied with. The reason I keep bringing it up is because it's taken me a long time to really figure out something I'm happy with, so it's been on my mind for a long time now. CPE wasn't anywhere near as thoroughly planned in the early stages as I would've liked; I didn't even know when I started this project that it would end up being a career for me, so it was much more casual early on, and I've been paying the price for that lack of planning for years now.

During these past two weeks, though, I finally had some big breakthroughs! I can't get into any details without spoiling things, so forgive me for not really having anything concrete to talk about here. The things I finally figured out are core to the game's story, though, so now that they're finally settled I can really start doing the necessary rewrites and improvements to the script. There's still plenty of stuff I need to finish planning out, but by far the biggest one has been taken care of now.

Just to be clear, the story of CPE isn't going through any massive changes or anything like that, so don't worry that this is going to be a huge time sink - all the basic story beats are still the same, but with all the uncertainties ironed out, so I can inject a lot more stuff like foreshadowing and lore into the script.


One piece of concrete information I can give you guys is regarding the game's multiple endings. I haven't talked about this in a long time, but I originally planned CPE to have two endings, one "sexy" and one "SFW" ending, pretty much. As part of these story rewrites, I thought a LOT about that concept, and I've come to the conclusion that multiple endings just isn't the way I want to go. Before you get upset, this DOES NOT mean that there will be no difference between a NSFW and a SFW playthrough! CPE already has a number of dialogue lines that change depending on how naughty Alicia has been, and I fully intend to keep that aspect of the game, and maybe even lean into it harder - so basically, instead of having 2 explicitly different endings, we're going to focus on having 1 story with 1 ending, with a lot of small dialogue changes depending on how lewd the player is while playing. It's substantially less work for the team, and allows us to really focus and polish up the one experience, while also avoiding the pitfalls that come with multiple endings - for example, if there are 2 completely different endings, at what point does the game shift over from the SFW to the NSFW ending? How do we relay which ending the player is going to get? Is it a dialogue choice the player makes? If so, that means their behaviors don't actually matter in determining the ending, just that one dialogue choice, which is lame. Do we add more endings to smooth out those "middle ground" playthroughs that don't focus exclusively on being pure OR horny? That would undoubtedly be a better experience, but it's WAY more work than just 2 endings, and we're quickly going far beyond the story's intended scope. CPE was always intended to be a gameplay-first experience, and putting that much emphasis on story changes feels at odds with the rest of the game.

My original plan for the different endings is something that doesn't really fit our goals anymore, with how the game has changed during development, and after thinking long and hard on it I realized that I was keeping the idea alive not because it's the right choice for the game, but because it's what I said I would do in the past.

I hate disappointing people by changing plans partway through development, but sometimes it's just not healthy to keep old ideas alive when they no longer fit in, and I believe this is one of those cases. I understand that this will be a disappointing change for some of you, and I'm very sorry for that. I do think this is a change that needs to be made for the sake of the game, though, and I hope you can understand why I'm doing it. The spirit of the idea will live on in those SFW/NSFW dialogue changes I've talked about, but we're going to be focusing on one story, and putting the idea of multiple, completely different endings to rest.


Well, that's about it for me this week. Sorry the update is on the smaller side, most of the exciting visuals are coming from Puffernutter lately, so when she's got a lot of freelance work coming in, we generally won't have too much visual stuff to show off. Progress is going great though, and while the updates right now might not be the most exciting, a lot of our efforts right now are creating the groundwork for future updates, so I expect development to pick up the pace pretty significantly by the end of the year! Thanks for reading everyone, and for continuing to follow the game - see you in the next update!
 

Anon42

Well-Known Member
Dec 3, 2015
123
107
(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our bi-weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, you can try a free demo of the game on our itch.io by clicking here! If you enjoy the game, please consider supporting us on Patreon! We couldn't make this game without our supporters!)


Hey everyone, welcome to another development update! This one is, again, going to be a bit light on content. The TL;DR is that we're still pretty much working on the same stuff as last week, so there isn't too much to talk about, but nonetheless, let's go over what we've been working on!

Puffernutter has had limited CPE time due to her freelance gigs, but in the time she can spend on CPE, she's working on updating the Caves tileset still. We had a discussion about tiles this week, and we've decided to NOT try and rush them for v0.46. With how comprehensive the visual overhaul we're working on is, and with how much content the game has that we need to update, we'll be working on this for many many updates, and we don't want to rush it out before it's ready. We'll continue to keep you all updated on the art rework, and we don't plan to hold all of it back until the whole game is redone or anything - but at the very least, we want my custom level editor before we start implementing the new tilesets, since it will make the job far easier.

Orexius finished up the Duo Slime H-scene animation, and has started on the BE Vines animation rework, as well as continuing work on various gameplay animations.

For my part, I've still been plugging away at the lighting engine update. I swear every week I write about how I ran into more issues but fixed them, and this week is no different! It's likely I'll find even more bugs that need fixing, but as of right now pretty much every bug I've found has been squashed and I'm just continuing to update all the lights to work with the new system. Since I've been doing that for a while now, I wanted to post a comparison of one of the lights that I put extra work into, so you can see a bit more of what goes into it:

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So stuff like this is the reason the lighting rework is taking a while! With the Power Orb collectible, I decided to give it two layers of lights: one is a stationary red glow, for the item's core, and the other is a rotating yellow light for the ring that circles it. It shrinks and grows and rotates with the ring, and generally just looks a lot cooler than it did before. The same lighting has been applied to the Guard Orb as well, naturally.

So basically, I'm not just tweaking some numbers, and updating lights like this can take an hour or two each depending on complexity. There are a fair amount of lights that ARE simple to transition over, but since I'm already in there messing with the code, I've been taking extra time to update and improve any light sources that seem like they should have additional work put into them - even small things, like previously every light was based on a circle, but we've been adding new lighting shapes for things like the diamond-shaped Skill Point collectible.


That's all I really have to talk about this week, but I did want to leave you guys with at least a small teaser for something I have cooking in the background. We've talked a lot recently about all of the visual overhauls we're doing to Crisis Point - animations being redone, lighting overhauled, revamped UI, the screen size update - and as we've been working on these things, and seeing how the game is evolving, we started to wonder if there were any gameplay elements that felt outdated and would be worth revisiting. After all, we reworked the Wire Shot before, and the new version of it feels SO much better to use - who's to say we can't do the same with other parts of the game? Maybe even some of the game's core mechanics could be improved.. reworked to suit a more modern experience, rather than mimicking games from 20 years ago? That's all I'll say for now, but I think you guys will be pretty excited to see where we're going next!


A final word before the post ends. Crisis Point development is in a very weird spot right now; we haven't put out an update in so long because of my mental health issues, and we have SO many things being reworked and improved that are all really exciting and will make the game so much better.. but all of them are "complete overhaul" types of things that just can't be released half-finished. Because of that, it really doesn't lend itself well to putting out playable updates - anything we release here on Patreon needs to be thoroughly polished, since you never know which version will be a person's first experience with the game, and a bad experience can ruin our chances of finding an audience. So, what we're going to do right now is we're going to start really focusing on getting a playable update out for you guys ASAP, but just please be aware that it won't be as substantial as I would like, despite the loooong development cycle. It won't really contain new content (like I've talked about before), but will be mostly focused around the lighting and screen size updates, with maybe a few other things squeezed in. At this point, expectations for what v0.46 will be like are higher than we're ever going to be able to pull off without killing ourselves with crunch, and I refuse to do that to myself or the rest of the team - but the pressure is still there, so I just want to get something out there.

Anyway, sorry to kind of end the post off on a bit of a bummer. Playable update releases for CPE might continue to be weird like this as we work on all this foundational stuff, and I'm sorry if we fail to put out updates on a regular schedule, but we'll keep you updated with our progress every step of the way. Once all these foundations are created, the rest of the game will be SO much easier to build. All I can ask for until that point is your patience and understanding, and to give the biggest thanks to all of you who stick around with us! Thanks for reading, I'll see you again in the next biweekly update!
 

Anon42

Well-Known Member
Dec 3, 2015
123
107
(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our bi-weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, you can try a free demo of the game on our itch.io by clicking here! If you enjoy the game, please consider supporting us on Patreon! We couldn't make this game without our supporters!)



Hey everyone, time for another CPE development update! This is going to be another relatively quick one, but not due to a lack of excitement!

Before we get into the real meat and potatoes of the update, I'll quickly just give you a rundown of what everyone has been working on. Puffernutter has been hard at work on the UI overhaul, to make sure it gets done soon enough that we can implement it for the next beta release. The current UI is EXTREMELY broken in the new screen resolution, so rather than putting a bunch of work into making it look right only to rip it out and replace it with the new UI next update, we're just focusing on getting it done now. Orexius has continued work on the new BE Vines animation, but he's also been focusing on gameplay animations, specifically ones related to the thing I'VE been working on, which brings me to "the big reveal".



I spent most of my work hours these past two weeks on the thing I teased during our last biweekly update, and I've progressed far enough with it that I'm ready to fully reveal it. We've been working on a lot of overhauls (environment art, lighting, UI, story, etc), but most of those are visual changes, nothing too crazy on the gameplay front.. but like I said in the last update, this one is big - a complete overhaul to one of the fundamental parts of CPE's gameplay. Without further ado..

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I'm proud and excited to confirm that Crisis Point is getting full 360 degree aiming, and full gameplay mouse support along with it!

Those of you that have been following CPE for a while might know that I've addressed this idea a few times, and declined to add it. There were a few reasons for that; feature creep, difficulty of implementation, the possibility of enemies being easily cheesed by sniping them from their blind spots, etc. Now that we've been overhauling so many aspects of CPE though, I revisited the idea, and decided that none of those reasons were good enough to justify not adding it. Samus Returns and Metroid: Dread both proved that 360 degree aiming feels amazing in a gun-focused metroidvania, and there are so many other excellent entries in the genre that felt so modern compared to CPE's retro 8-directional aiming. After spending a lot of time thinking about it, I felt like I was doing the game a disservice by not modernizing the gameplay while we were already upgrading so many other things, so here we are!

There are a LOT of small gameplay tweaks that will be coming along with this, and we'll likely be polishing and tweaking it for a while, but I fully intend to have an early version of this included in v0.46 when it comes out. We've decided to narrow down the scope of v0.46 so we know exactly what to focus on, and I'll detail that at the end of this post; for now, let's talk about the other thing I wanted to show off this week, the UI update!



A quick preface: none of these images are finished yet! We're still tweaking layouts, and we haven't even started messing with colors or aesthetics yet, which is why all of them are in greyscale, so don't take any of this as finalized images.

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As you can see, we're not just doing a simple visual update, the pause screen is getting a total overhaul from the ground up! The old menus were cramped, and only utilized a tiny part of the screen space, which made them feel even more claustrophobic. They also caused a lot of issues when it came to adding in new sections, since there just wasn't room for it. The new UI is being designed for maximum modularity, so it won't be a huge pain to update them as time goes on. We're also considering a vector graphics aesthetic for menus specifically, for the sake of clarity and readability; though like I said in the preface, we're focusing on function over aesthetics right now, so we might still use stylized pixel art for menus, it just depends on what feels right.



That's all the major stuff for this update, hopefully you're as excited as I am about it! Before I go, let me just update you guys on exactly what v0.46 is going to have.

Crisis Point: Extinction v0.46 plans
  • New 360-degree aiming system, along with full gameplay mouse support
  • Completely overhauled lighting engine, along with other small special effects improvements
  • Increased screen resolution, bringing the game to a more modern 16:9 aspect ratio
  • Updated UI with improved functionality
  • A handful of updated H-scene animations, such as the Slime and BE Vines animations
  • The usual bug fixes and such (and probably some new bugs to go along with the new features, if we're being honest)
So that's everything we plan to add in v0.46. We won't be adding any "new" content, like I've mentioned before; our team's goal right now is to lay all of this groundwork, so that once we do start working on new content again, we'll have all the tools we need to really crank it out. To that end, once v0.46 is complete, I'm going to fully shift my focus towards finishing our level editor, since that needs to be done before we can work on updating the game's level design and artwork.



Alright, that's it for this biweekly update! If you have any questions about the stuff I talked about, feel free to leave a comment - these are some pretty dramatic changes, so I'm happy to answer anything y'all have to ask. Thanks for reading, and we'll see you again in the next update!
 

Anon42

Well-Known Member
Dec 3, 2015
123
107
(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our bi-weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, you can try a free demo of the game on our itch.io by clicking here! If you enjoy the game, please consider supporting us on Patreon! We couldn't make this game without our supporters!)



Hey everybody, welcome to another CPE development update! In this update, I'm going to be focusing on Puffernutter and Orexius's work; I've been having a rough few weeks thanks to having a LOT of doctor appointments, to figure out some of the health issues that have been plaguing me long-term, so to be honest I just didn't get a lot of work done. Appointments generally give me anxiety (especially when it's something new), and thanks to the sheer amount of them I had, I was almost always feeling some level of anxiety this past week and a half, and that gets pretty exhausting. Still, even though I personally didn't get much done, there's still a few fun things to show off and talk about, so let's get into it!


To start off, something that I've planned to add to CPE for a long time, but we just never had the time to do. Introducing, BIG ALICIA

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Standing at about 3x the size of Alicia's regular ingame sprite, this massive Alicia sprite is going to be used in the pause menus, as you can see below.

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The nude version might not even be available ingame, since Alicia always has some level of clothing on during gameplay, so think of that one as an exclusive easter egg for following the development of the game!

Big Alicia probably won't have any animation, because we're planning on changing her based on what's going in ingame; clothing state, BE status, libido/HP levels, etc. There's not too much else to say about it, but we figured it would be fun to have a much larger sprite of Alicia, so here she is!



Next up, those animations Orexius has been working on. His focus right now is split between the BE vines animation, and preparing the new gameplay animations Alicia will need as part of the 360 degree aiming update. They're all still VERY WIP, but we figured it might be fun to show yall what our animations look like in the early stages, so let's start with those gameplay animations!
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Because Crisis Point wasn't designed with movement and aiming being separate, we never needed backwards movement before, but that's not the case anymore. In order to avoid the dominant strategy becoming "run away from the enemy while shooting at them", Alicia's backwards movement will be slower than regular movement; but if you stop shooting for a brief moment, then Alicia will go into her regular running animation at full speed. I'll probably tweak this a little bit based on player feedback, so once the update comes out feel free to let me know how you feel about it, but I'm personally pretty happy with the way it feels now - it prevents strafing from being too powerful, but cancels quickly enough to not feel annoying if you're just trying to run away.

And lastly, the BE vines H-scene update:

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Obviously none of these animations are anywhere near finished, but hopefully it's fun to get a look at what they look like early on in the process!



That's it for the development updates this week, but I haven't been talking about personal life much lately, so here's a fun life update for everyone:

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Our family has grown by +1, 'cause we adopted another cat! We named her Bug, on account of her insane cuddlebug levels. We adopted her a few weeks ago, and she was extremely shy and nervous at first, but she's opened up to us pretty quickly and she's already a joy to have around the house.

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Our other cat Papyrus is still struggling to adjust to no longer being a "single child", so to speak, but for the most part they're getting along well now.

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I mean c'mon, how can you not love this little dork?

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I'll stop overloading the post with cat pics now, but I don't think I've talked much about ours before, and everyone on the CPE dev team absolutely loves cats. Plus, they act as our HR team and keep us all happy, so technically they're relevant to the project :p



Alright, that's all I have for today. I can't say for sure how the next biweekly update will be; after my anxiety caused so much work trouble for me these past two weeks, I've been cutting down on the amount of appointments I have going on so I can get work done more consistently. That said, I do have an invasive exam happening in about a week to hopefully figure out what's causing one of my biggest health problems, so I'm definitely feeling nervous there - and then the week after that is my birthday, so it's a hell of a hectic month for me haha.

This was a bit of a small update, but we're all working hard to get the next playable update out as soon as we can, so I hope you're excited about it! Thank you all for reading, and for continuing to follow the project - we'll see you again in the next update!
 

Anon42

Well-Known Member
Dec 3, 2015
123
107
(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our bi-weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, you can try a free demo of the game on our itch.io by clicking here! If you enjoy the game, please consider supporting us on Patreon! We couldn't make this game without our supporters!)



Hey everyone, welcome to another CPE development update! Sorry this one is a day late - I managed to mess up my thumb over the weekend so typing was difficult, and I generally wasn't feeling well yesterday, so I decided to wait a day. I'm feeling much better today, so here we are!

This one isn't going to be too big, and I'll get into the details during the post. The only visual I have to show off this week is the progress we've made on the UI rework, so let's start with that!

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Here's how things are looking so far. Keep in mind these are still very WIP, so anything and everything on these is subject to change - but since the last version we showed was in greyscale, I wanted to show how things are shaping up now that we're adding color. Let me know how you feel about it so far!



Things have been pretty standard for the rest of us since the last development update. Puffernutter has had a LOT of freelance work, so her time to work on CPE has been limited; Orexius has been continuing work on the BE Vines animation update, and the new gameplay animations needed for 360 aiming; and I've still been working on 360 aiming, the lighting update, and the screen size update. I've been changing between tasks as needed to keep my programming life interesting, so even though I'm still working on a lot of different things I talked about several weeks ago, they'll probably end up all being finished at about the same time.

Aside from that though, I also had the realization last week that I was falling back into the trap of having too much going on, and I was starting to run myself ragged again. My work hours on CPE are MUCH healthier than they've ever been before, so that part isn't an issue, but I had too much going on in terms of appointments and such, and it was starting to take a toll on me. In the last weekly update, I talked about getting a health examination, and I ended up canceling that for a few reasons - the first one was to give myself a break from major appointments, and the other was because the exam is a fairly expensive one, and so I decided to save it for early next year so it can count towards next year's health insurance deductible. Gotta love US health insurance.



In any case, now that I'm done with physical therapy for my knee, the only major appointments/obligations I have are standard life things, working on CPE, and going to therapy every other week. I'm already feeling a lot better now that my todo list has been simplified, so I'm going to really be able to dig in and focus on getting all these major CPE overhauls completed so we can get you guys a playable update! I really do have to thank you all for being so patient; I know development is weird right now and I'm so grateful to you all for being patient with me while I figure things out. Because of my upbringing, I have a lot of difficulty dealing with high-stress situations, and I get stressed/overwhelmed more easily than anyone else I know - leading a game dev team can often take a lot out of me, but I've been able to really enjoy working on CPE again lately, and that's entirely thanks to both my team, and all of you supporting us, who have been so patient and understanding even when things are slow and I'm struggling. All of your comments mean the world to me, too - it's easy to feel rather isolated when working on a game like this, but seeing you all cheer us on really keeps my morale up, so even if I don't respond to all of your kind words, please know that I am reading them and I appreciate the hell out of each and every one of you!



Before I finish up this post, we're almost out of the "fun" stuff to show off for this next playable update, so the next few biweekly updates will probably be pretty simple, just updating on our progress for the stuff you already know we're doing. Since these updates are getting pretty straightforward, I want to make up for that by doing regular streams until v0.46 is completed and in your hands. Our internet here is still having some issues, but it's usually fixed by just rebooting our modem and router, so it should be stable enough to do streams even if it blinks out every once in a while.

With that said, we're going to tentatively schedule streams for Monday and Wednesday, starting at 4 pm AKST(Alaska standard time). Not today of course, since we're already past that point, so our next stream should be this Wednesday. I always tweet (and @ in our discord) when we're starting up a dev stream, so if you want a reminder, you can either follow me directly on Picarto (https://picarto.tv/Anon42), follow me on twitter (@Anon42_CPE), or join our Discord and give yourself the Picarto Streams role in our #roles channel! https://discord.com/invite/MveBYb2 Because our Discord server is NSFW, I can't post the link to it publicly here on Patreon, but I'll post one on all the other places we post dev updates - and if you're pledged to us, you should be automatically invited into our server if you link your Patreon and Discord accounts.

Alright, that's it for me today. Thank you for reading everyone, and I hope to see you at our stream on Wednesday!
 

Anon42

Well-Known Member
Dec 3, 2015
123
107
(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our bi-weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, you can try a free demo of the game on our itch.io by clicking here! If you enjoy the game, please consider supporting us on Patreon! We couldn't make this game without our supporters!)


Hey everyone, time for another CPE progress update! Just like last week, this will be a quick overview of what we've been doing - we've already talked at length about everything that's going to be in v0.46, so all I really have to update you guys on is how far along we are.

My goal at the moment is just to get this update out before the year ends, and I'm still hopeful we can pull that off, but in the interest of transparency I am getting a little worried about the time crunch. All of the things we're working on for this update are all-or-nothing, so if they aren't done there's nothing I can do to really push the update out faster. I just want to warn you all of that ahead of time so you're aware of it; we're going to continue doing 3-4 streams every week until the update is done, and I'll keep you all updated every step of the way, but it's possible the update might end up being pushed a week or two into 2023. I'm confident we'll have it done very soon, so don't worry about there being a big delay or anything like that, I just don't want to rush out a crappy update with lots of issues if we end up needing just a little bit more time.



With that out of the way, here's the progress report on the 4 major parts of this update:
  • The 360 aiming update is around ~85% complete. Mouse support is pretty much functionally complete at this point, with only a handful of animation-related things left, and I started gamepad testing recently. The added complexity of supporting both gamepad AND mouse is making things more difficult than I expected, since the two control schemes work VERY differently (as opposed to keyboard and gamepad, which are both just 'buttons' so they're nearly identical code-wise), but progress is going very well nonetheless.

  • The lighting update is basically finished at this point, probably 98%. I didn't work on it too much the last two weeks because there's not much left to do, and because this is the only part of the update that doesn't cause huge issues if it's slightly unfinished; all of the important light sources have been updated, and now it's more a matter of adding NEW light sources and taking advantage of the new features, so this part is close enough to call it pretty much complete.

  • The screen size update is at around ~95%. I've done a playtest of the full game, and there are only two major things left to fix: first is some visual issues with fullscreen mode, and second is that some cutscenes have animation problems - mostly, NPCs that are supposed to walk in from offscreen (or walk offscreen) are now spawning/despawning in view of the camera, since there's a lot more horizontal screen space now. None of that will be hard to fix, thankfully, and aside from them, the only other thing is that the menus are all completely broken - but I'm not going to bother fixing that, because..

  • The UI rework. This is my next major project, and I'll be starting on it during tomorrow's stream. This is the biggest question mark left for me right now, and the only thing making me uncertain if the update will be done in time; everything else is nearing completion, and would certainly be done by our next biweekly update, but since I haven't started on the UI rework yet it's hard to say how much work this is going to take.
I did consider just fixing the old UI temporarily to get this update out in time, but because of how broken the screen size update made it, it would still be a LOT of work to make the old UI functional again - and it would look like crap with the extra screen space going unused - so it's not really worth fixing that up instead of just biting the bullet and doing the whole rework.

If it was just a simple job of replacing the UI, it might not be too difficult, but this is also an opportunity for me to address some of the serious technical issues the game's menus have. I won't get into the details, it'd be rather boring, but here's one quick example: the Options menu from the Main Menu, and the Options menu accessed from the pause screen while ingame, only share some code despite being functionally identical - they each have a lot of unique code, purely because there were issues I couldn't figure out a more elegant solution for at the time, so whenever the Options menu is updated or changed, there's a good chance I'll have to do testing and fixes on each version of the menu separately. Suffice it to say that there's a lot of old code from my early days that have been causing problems for a long time, due to my inexperience as a programmer back when I started CPE, so there's a lot of underlying tech debt that needs to be addressed and now is the most logical time to do it.



So, all that is to say that I'm really not sure when this update is coming out. It will depend ENTIRELY on how difficult this UI rework ends up being. I still have almost a full month to get it done, so I think there's still a very good chance v0.46 will be out by the end of the year, but I should have a better idea of our chances by the next biweekly update.

And that's it for me today! Seriously, thank you so much for how patient you've all been. I know v0.46 is a lot later than anyone was expecting, but thanks to all the work I've done on myself this year, I'm in a healthier mental place than I've EVER been before, I'm genuinely enjoying working on CPE again for the first time in a long time, and I am beyond excited to finally get this update in your hands. This is the single biggest gameplay update CPE has ever had, and during my playtests I'm having so much more fun playing it than ever before, so I can't wait to see what you all think of it!

Thank you for reading! If you want to follow our progress on v0.46 more closely, don't forget to come hang out at the streams (https://picarto.tv/Anon42), and we'll see you again in another two weeks for the next biweekly update!
 

Anon42

Well-Known Member
Dec 3, 2015
123
107
(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our bi-weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, you can try a free demo of the game on our itch.io by clicking here! If you enjoy the game, please consider supporting us on Patreon! We couldn't make this game without our supporters!)


Hey everyone. So, we've officially entered 2023, and the update isn't out yet. The closer we got, the more certain I was we were going to miss the date; to be honest, we still have quite a bit more to do before it's ready for a release, and if I had forced the update out it definitely would've been rushed, so as bummed as I am about missing the 2022 release window, I'm a little relieved that the pressure to do it is gone now. Everyone has been waiting so long for this update, I don't want it to have loads of issues when it finally does, if I can avoid it.

So, like I said in the last biweekly update, now that we've entered 2023 with no update release, I'll be posting weekly updates instead of biweekly until the update comes out. I'm going to keep them simpler, so they don't take up much of my time compared to usual, and I can focus more on getting the update itself out, so let's get right into it.


The main things left to do are testing, and the UI. With testing, this update has SO many radical changes to the game that odds are, there are tons of issues I haven't run into yet. It'll be hard to find all of them before releasing the update, so I'm probably going to save testing until everything else is done, and then get some close friends to help me test the game as thoroughly as possible. I'll let you know when we get to that phase, since it'll hopefully be right before the update comes out for everyone.

For the UI, progress is going very well. The Blaster and Skills menus are both complete, and I've started on the Options menu as well, which is the most complex menu but also the last major one. There's a few smaller menus that also need an update, like the difficulty selection menu when you hit New Game, and the Warp menu, but those are extremely simple and should only take a few hours of work each. There's also the Database menu, which I haven't started yet, but the good news is the Database menu isn't a very interactive menu, unlike the other ones - it's just a menu to display information and lore, so it will be more complicated than the super small ones like the Warp menu, but much simpler than any of the main ones like the Options or Skills menus, so it shouldn't take too long to complete.

There's still a bit of work that needs to be done for 360 aiming, but Orexius is still working on the animations for that, so I can't finish it up on my own. I've been adding animations as he finishes them though, and almost all of the most important stuff is finished, so it won't be much longer til 360 aiming is done enough for a release.


So that's where things stand right now. I'm sorry we missed the 2022 window, but we're going to continue streaming ~4 times a week and posting weekly updates until it's out, so you'll all be updated every step of the way. Thank you all for being patient with us while we finish this up! This is the biggest update CPE has ever received, despite the lack of new content - playing it is like playing a completely new game and I'm so excited to get it in your hands, I'm positive it's going to be worth the wait! Thank you for sticking with us, and I hope all of you had a fantastic holiday season and brought in the new year with style. We'll see you during this week's streams, and next weekend with the next update!
 

Anon42

Well-Known Member
Dec 3, 2015
123
107

(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our bi-weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, you can try a free demo of the game on our itch.io by clicking here! If you enjoy the game, please consider supporting us on Patreon! We couldn't make this game without our supporters!)


Hey everyone, weekly update time! Like last week, this will be a quick rundown of how v0.46 is coming along. I don't want to spend too much time on these updates, so I can put more time into finishing the update itself, so let's get straight into it!


The Options menu was basically completed last week, only missing a few small functions that won't take long. The Controls menu took a bit more effort than I expected (and I already expected it to be the toughest menu in general), so I wasn't able to get to the other small things like the Warp and difficulty selection menus yet. That being said, the Gamepad Selection menu I implemented this week is nearly identical to how the warp and difficulty selection menus will function, so I'll be able to reuse most of the code and those ones will be even faster to implement. Fingers crossed, the UI rework should be done by the end of the week, unless I'm forgetting something major!

For 360 aiming, all of the truly essential animations are finished, so we can call it complete enough for release now. Orex will still be working on more animations for it, there's plenty of room for more polish, but from here on it's non-essentials!


The menus and 360 aiming were the only two major things left before this update is ready to come out, and now that one of those is done and the other is nearly done, we're finally approaching the finish line! I still need time to do bug testing/QA, so I don't think the update will come out before next weekly update, but I think the major work will be done by that point. Then it's just a matter of polishing and bug testing, and we should finally be able to deliver the update to you by the end of January.


And that's it for this update! I hope you're all excited to finally play this thing, I know I am - 360 aiming has been such a massive gamechanger, CPE feels better than ever. As usual, we'll be streaming a bunch this week to try and get the update finished, so come hang out on Picarto (https://picarto.tv/Anon42) if you're interested in watching us work. Thanks for reading, see you again at the next update!
 

Anon42

Well-Known Member
Dec 3, 2015
123
107
(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our bi-weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, you can try a free demo of the game on our itch.io by clicking here! If you enjoy the game, please consider supporting us on Patreon! We couldn't make this game without our supporters!)


Hey everyone, and welcome to what will hopefully be the last weekly update before v0.46 is in your hands!

Things are going to be a bit different this week, compared to the last few. As you all know, we've been streaming 3-4 times a week to try and get this update finished, and now we're finally just about at the finish line. There are a lot of logistical things involved in an update release, and I can't really stream that work, so we might not be streaming at all this week; we're definitely not streaming today, and the rest of the week will largely depend on how playtesting goes, which I'm going to be starting in earnest today. If I run into any major issues that could take a few hours to fix, then I might stream that work, but otherwise I'm going to be focused on the things that I need to do in order to release this update - preparing the trailer and marketing materials, fixing smaller bugs, playtesting the crap out of it, and so on - so don't expect any streams from us.

I guess that whole paragraph covers most of the important info, namely the fact that v0.46 is entering final testing now. The only things still strictly missing are the Database menu, where you access the bestiary, and the Gallery on the main menu, which is only used to rewatch the Lucas+Verreda scene at the moment. Since those two menus aren't strictly necessary, I decided to hold off on them for now, so we can get this update out before the heat death of the universe - they'll either be readded in a hotfix to v0.46, or in v0.47, depending on how badly folks want them back (and if v0.46 is stable enough that I don't have to spend all my time releasing hotfixes for more important issues).

Well, that's about all I have to say for today. We're finally at the finish line, so bear with us while we make this last push to finish things up, and get you all the update you've been waiting for so patiently! See you again soon, hopefully with that update release post!
 

Anon42

Well-Known Member
Dec 3, 2015
123
107

(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our major playable update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, you can try a free demo of the game on our itch.io by clicking here! If you enjoy the game, please consider supporting us on Patreon! We couldn't make this game without our supporters!)


I almost can't believe I'm finally writing these words, but.. Crisis Point: Extinction v0.46 is finally here, and ready for all of our $10 patrons to play!

You can watch the trailer above for the main highlights, though the NSFW stuff has to be censored due to this being a public post. For those of you who prefer reading, here's a list of all the major things added and changed in this update:


v0.46 MAJOR CHANGES AND FEATURES
  • Complete gameplay overhaul; aiming the blaster is now handled with the mouse (or right analog stick, on gamepads), and Alicia can aim freely in ANY direction, rather than being locked to 8 angles. This also means that aiming and movement are now completely seperate, and you can move in one direction while shooting behind you, instead of always shooting forward - shooting backwards will make Alicia move a bit slower than normal, but if you stop shooting for a brief period she'll go back to moving full speed.

  • The size of the game window has been increased from 640x480 to 960x540, giving you WAY more visible screen space. Please note that some levels in the game were designed at a size of 640x480; because of that, rooms that are too small to fill the full screen space will have black borders on the edges. Additionally, many of the game's cutscenes have minor visual errors, such as characters appearing/disappearing near the edges of the screen; this will be fixed in the near future.

  • The lighting engine has been reworked from the ground up, and now supports animated lights, colored lighting, and a variety of lighting shapes. More work will be done with the lighting in the future to take advantage of all these new features.

  • Due to the screen size being increased, all of the menus and UI have been reworked completely to take advantage of the extra space. Please note that the cutscene gallery from the main menu, and the ingame Database menu, are not implemented yet; because they don't contain any gameplay-crucial functions, we decided to hold off on them a little longer to get this update out sooner. They will be re-added by the next major update, if not sooner.

  • A new BE H-scene was added to the Poison Alraune, which can be accessed both during gameplay and from the ingame gallery. Additionally, the BE Vines injection animation has been redone and majorly upgraded, the normal Slime Duo H-scene has been improved, and xrays have been added to all Slime H-scenes.

So those are the major bullet points. In addition to all that, there's definitely some more stuff that was added or improved in this update, but to be honest I'm not entirely sure what they are - this update was in development for so long, and because I was grappling with my mental health issues during it, I didn't keep a very thorough record of changes. There is no new additional story content, though, so I HIGHLY recommend starting a new playthrough with this update! The changes are so dramatic that Crisis Point feels like a brand new game, and I really hope you guys enjoy these updates as much as I do.


Normally at this point in the post, I would detail what's being added in the next major update, v0.47, but I'm going to be doing things a little differently this time. Rushing to finally get this update out has taken a lot out of me these past few weeks, so I need a short break. I also plan on releasing an update to our free public demo with the new features (same content as before though, ending at the second boss fight), and due to an upcoming deadline for an event, I'll be focusing on getting that done ASAP. Once I've finished the public demo update and refreshed myself a bit, I'll write up the plan for v0.47 in another update post. I don't think we'll be going back to bi-monthly playable releases just yet, there's still some behind-the-scenes stuff I want to finish (like that custom level editor) that will make the rest of development smoother and easier, but like always I'll keep you guys up to date on what's going on with the CPE team.

One other thing to note, about the standalone Gallery at the $5 tier - because of all the changes added in v0.46, the Gallery will need to be redone AGAIN, and I just don't have the energy to do that along with this update release. I will be updating the gallery at some point during February, but it will take a bit longer, sorry!


As always, the download link for v0.46 will be in a Patron-only post right after this one, and I'll also be sending the link in a DM to everyone who pledged at the $10+ tier at least once since the last update came out.. so, the entirety of 2022 and January of 2023. The good news is, Patreon has had some feature updates during that time, so I should only have to DM everyone once rather than sending a DM for every month, so no DM spam this time for those of you who have been around for a while!

Before ending the post, it's time for a super mega gargantuan omega thank you to ALL of our patrons who supported us during these extremely long release drought, and an even MORE special thanks to our top patrons:

SeraphStarliege
Katsune Teku
Leon Kiske
Pedro Fraga
Bombastic Black
patricio cancino
Thomas Kleis
Zero the 1st
Joseph J Hall
Zackery Shivers
Ingrid Blackflame Discordia
Dakota
Lars Alexzanderson
MC KiraY4U
Slightly_Dark
King
Sniperrihno
Nicholas Ziccardi
John Wilson
kenyama
Cole Brandon
Kong Wick
ManuTheBloodedge
Mortec
Angel Tinkerer
John hamby
Shadow-DK
VinGareth


I don't know how I can possibly convey how grateful I am to each and every one of you. You guys are literally the reason CPE exists, and why I was able to finally get help for my mental and physical health problems. Thank you all so much. It's easy to get wrapped up in my own day to day struggles, but even if I don't always respond to them, I see every one of your comments, and they genuinely mean the world to me. The fact that you all enjoy the stuff we create so much that you'll keep supporting us and cheering us on, even during times like 2022.. there really are no words for it. I'm so glad that Crisis Point has resonated with so many of you, and I hope you enjoy this update, easily the biggest one the game has ever had! Go forth, my friends, and enjoy v0.46! -A42
 

Anon42

Well-Known Member
Dec 3, 2015
123
107
(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our bi-weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, you can try a free demo of the game on our itch.io by clicking here! If you enjoy the game, please consider supporting us on Patreon! We couldn't make this game without our supporters!)

Hey everyone! Hope you're all doing well. February kinda disappeared right out from under me, and I didn't even realize how late it was getting! Before the month comes to a close, I wanted to put out one last hotfix for v0.46. This one has a LOT more fixes than the previous ones (thanks to everybody who reported bugs!), and also one relatively large feature, so here's the list:
  • Added ingame support for using high-resolution CGs from the CG pack
  • Readded the Bestiary menu
  • Fixed an issue causing the mouse cursor to not scale properly with screen resolution, causing it to become extremely small on large monitors
  • Fixed a crash in the gallery when changing animations mid-climax
  • Fixed being unable to type the letter "v" in map notes
  • Fixed an issue where several menu options would not save and load properly, causing them to reset between sessions
  • Fixed an issue where, if talked to at a very specific point early in the game, Rodriguez's advice would refer to the first boss fight as if you had beaten it already, before you ever encounter it
  • Fixed an issue where the HUD didn't come back after leaving the "End of Demo" menu screen
  • Fixed an issue where the Auto Shot couldn't properly target Tentacle enemies
  • Attempted another fix for Alicia's shooting arm getting stuck in a direction, when using the Wire Shot in certain circumstances
  • Fixed an issue where the Azulisk would slide off into the sunset when hit by a melee attack
  • Fixed an issue where, in the map screen, any map note located at the cursor's default position would not be read until the player manually highlighted it
  • Fixed an issue where the pause menu is not centered properly while in fullscreen, on monitors with non-standard aspect ratios
  • Added a prompt after toggling Fullscreen or Vsync that asks the player if they want to keep the new setting. If no answer is selected, the screen will auto-revert to the previous setting after 10 seconds.
  • Fixed an issue where double clicking with the mouse on any part of the screen would cause you to start writing a map note; now, it only triggers if you double click within the map itself
  • Fixed a crash that occurs when some environment traps hit you during certain animations
  • Fixed an issue with the Lurker CG that caused it to display the wrong images sometimes
Like always, you can download this hotfix from the same link as before. It will read "v0.46.5" on the main menu if you have the latest version.


So, aside from the numerous bugfixes, and the bestiary menu being readded, the main headline here is that the game now supports external high-res CGs! Large images like those have huge filesizes (the CGs alone are over double the entire game's filesize), so the game comes with CGs at around 640x480 by default. In v0.46.5 and onward, though, you can now use the High-Res CG Pack that's available for all $10 patrons, and have them actually show up ingame. The instructions for making that work are included in the CG pack download, which I'll be putting up for download as soon as I'm done writing this post! Using them is completely optional, but it's there for anyone who wants it.


Aside from that, since I haven't made any major posts since v0.46 came out, I wanted to give a quick update on what's going on with us.

I took an extended break after v0.46 came out, but I got back to work about a week and a half ago, and that time has been spent on story plans and this hotfix. There were a lot of issues to fix, and the whole high-res CG thing required a lot of learning on my part, since I've never dealt with loading external files like this.

Now that this hotfix is out, I'm going to be focusing on an updated public demo; I mentioned it briefly before, but there's an adult games event happening soon, and I want to have a free demo update available before then, so anybody who's seeing CPE for the first time can play a version with 360 aiming and all that. Since it'll be a free demo, it'll still have the same content as our 2019 demo did (ending after the second boss fight), just with all of the new features in v0.46.

Once that public demo update is done (which shouldn't take too long), I'll get the v0.46 gallery finished and released as soon as possible (sorry to make you all wait so long for it), and then we'll figure out where to go from there. I'm not sure if we're going to start v0.47 development immediately, or wait a little longer; I really want to have our story plans finalized and have that custom level design tool ready to go, before we get back to making content on a regular schedule, but I also don't want to make you guys wait too long, so we'll see what happens and how we're all feeling once the immediate deadlines have been taken care of.


Alright, that's it from me today! We'll probably be starting up streams again soon, now that a lot of my more boring work has been taken care of, so keep an eye out for those. Thanks for reading, everyone - see you again soon with that gallery, and our plans for the near future!
 

Anon42

Well-Known Member
Dec 3, 2015
123
107
Hey everyone, really sorry updates haven't been posted on here for a while. Life has been busy and stressful, and my wife (who usually handles reposting updates everywhere that isn't Patreon) was out of town for a while, and I completely forgot to do them myself. Work has been getting done, so this is going to be a long post to dump all the update posts that haven't been posted here yet. Sorry again for the mix up!

(The following update posts are (mostly) a copy-paste from these updates posts on Patreon: Biweekly Update 3-21-2023, Biweekly Update 4-9-2023, Biweekly Update 4-30-2023, and Biweekly Update 5-21-2023. If you like what you see, you can try a free demo of the game on our itch.io by clicking here! If you enjoy the game, please consider supporting us on Patreon! We couldn't make this game without our supporters!)

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Status update - 3-21-2023


Hey everyone. So first off, big apologies for how quiet things have been since v0.46 came out. I'm going through a pretty big funk right now to be honest, and I'm trying to break myself out of it, but it's been a struggle. If you don't care about the personal life stuff, feel free to skip to the end of this post, I'll put all the work-related stuff there.

The flow of time has felt really strange the past few months, it's like the days are just melting away and I feel like I can't keep up. A huge part of the struggle is because I started a diet a few weeks ago - and don't worry, it's not some stupid fad diet that does more harm than good. I'm working with a professional dietician to try and get my weight under control, which has been a huge struggle for me my entire life. I haven't been a healthy weight since I was a literal child, and I'm nearly 30 now, so.. almost my entire lifetime of unhealthy eating has led to a looooot of baggage and bad habits. For one, I'm pretty sure I have a food addiction and just never realized it - we started with a very strict diet where all my meals were replaced by a nutritionally-complete bar or shake, and I only made it 4 days on that before needing to get an early appointment to change it. Hell, I didn't even make it to the end of day 1 before getting horrible food withdrawals, 4 days was just my absolute limit - but for that entire 4 day period, I wasn't sleeping well, I couldn't focus on anything, it was just misery all day. It's not a willpower thing either, I haven't cheated on my diet even once since starting it - my stubbornness comes in handy sometimes - but the emotional/mental ramifications of dieting have been just.. unbelievably brutal.

So, needless to say I'm glad I'm seeing a dietician and therapist, so I can work through that addiction with people who are qualified to help with it. The dietician got me on a plan that works a lot better for me, but dieting in general is still one of the most difficult things I've ever done. I'm losing weight consistently, which is more than I can say for all of my previous attempts at getting healthy, so I take that as a win - it's just been very difficult for me to focus on other aspects of my life while dealing with this dietary shift. That's one of my biggest struggles in general, honestly, making healthy changes in my life without those changes consuming all of my focus. I can make genuine improvements in some areas, but it always seems to come at the cost of others. That's something I really want to get better at, and I'm sorry that it's impacted all of you and my ability to work on CPE.

My therapist is also seriously considering the diagnosis of OCD, which makes sense because my mother had OCD and it's a genetic disorder.. which would mean I have this lovely little combo of ADHD and OCD, two things that sound like complete opposites, but they totally can exist together, and it's a brutal combo. It would explain why ADHD medication on its own has never really felt like it "fixed" my brain, like it does for most ADHD people. I'm still trying to figure my own brain out, the manager does a terrible job of keeping things tidy so it's a bit of a mess :p


With all of that being said, my therapist tells me one of the best ways to combat OCD tendencies is to just force yourself to break out of them, so that's what I'm going to do. The gallery update is finally out now, so I'm going to start streaming again like we were before v0.46 came out - starting next Sunday, we'll be trying to stream every day from Sunday to Wednesday, unless something comes up that prevents me from doing it. No specific time of day, I have appointments on some of those days sometimes so we might end up streaming early one day and late the next, but if not having a consistent streaming schedule ends up being a problem, then we'll figure that out when we get to it.

We aren't going to be starting on v0.47 proper just yet - my #1 focus right now is going to be creating that custom level design tool, to make the rest of CPE's development SO much easier, and I'm also going to focus on finishing the story rewrites so that we can actually implement those. We have a LOT of it planned out already, we just need to nail down a few more details before we can start working on assets, to make sure we aren't wasting development time. I'm also going to make a better effort to not skip update posts on here anymore; I never intended to skip any, time honestly just got away from me and before I knew it, nearly a month had passed. Again, I'm really sorry for the lack of communication there!

That's all I have to talk about today. Whether you care about the personal stuff or not, thank you all for always being so understanding and supportive of myself and the rest of our team! We have some really exciting plans for 2023, and I can't wait to share some of them with y'all. Thanks for reading, and I hope to see some of you at the streams next week!

_____________________________________


Biweekly Update - 4-9-2023 (Story rewrite and level designer progress)


Hey everyone, hope this update finds you well! We're back to our regular update post schedule now, so it's time for another biweekly update.

There's not a huge amount to talk about today, so let's get right into it. Our focus right now is mostly split between two things: the story rewrites, and my level design tool for CPE. I made some huge strides with the story rewrite these past two weeks, and nailed down some important story beats that make up the core of CPE's plot. I wish I could talk about this stuff in depth, but I don't want to spoil anything, so I'll try to be vague and focus more on what we're trying to achieve with the rewrites, rather than anything specific. The main goals with the story rewrite are:

  • Give certain characters more history and screentime, the most obvious example being Kara, who comes out of nowhere in the current story
  • Flesh out each character's personality a bit more (e.g. giving them flaws so they feel more like real people)
  • Improve the pacing of the story by making the beginning of the game less exposition-heavy, so you can get into gameplay faster
  • Update some of the lore and dialogue to accommodate the ways the story has changed since those early conversations were written

For the most part, you can expect the first chunk of the game to not change too much, mostly just some altered dialogue and cutscenes. It's when Alicia reaches the Deep Soil that things will start to change pretty heavily. The most important part of this story rewrite is preparing for future content, though - we had reached a point where the game was missing story things that are necessary for creating more content, which is part of why we haven't been working on strictly new content for a bit now. Once this rewrite (and the level design tool) are complete, we'll be in a MUCH better place to focus on new content. In the meantime, I really want to thank you all for being so patient with us about this stuff - I know reworks and rewrites aren't nearly as exciting as new content, but CPE has grown a lot since we started making it, and I've been really feeling the need to overhaul some of this stuff for a while now.

As far as the level design tool is concerned, progress is going very well! I've said this before, but just to clarify again, this level editor tool is ONLY for internal use by me - it's not something I can give out to players, unfortunately, because the method I'm using to inject the levels into the game requires me to manually edit project files, so it would be impossible for anyone else to use it.

Anyway, it's still a ways off from being usable, but it's getting closer every day! I managed to solve a few important technical challenges this week, and other than that the focus has been on designing the UI, laying down the groundwork for all of the features I want it to have, and doing data entry (basically filling out the list of placeable objects with the ones from the game itself, so I can actually put together levels).

I'm getting to a point now where I think the level editor is going to start progressing very quickly; I put a major focus on early optimization, since the main reason I'm making this tool in the first place is because the built-in level editor in my engine runs like shiiiiit. Because of that, the early parts of working on it have taken quite some time, but it will start paying dividends soon by making it much easier for me to add in new features without needing to worry about how optimized they are. I'm super excited to be working on this; not only will it be ridiculously useful and allow me to make much detailed levels much more easily, but it's also just kinda fun to make my own development tool! It's been a fun change of pace from the content grind.


Anyway, that's it for me today. It's still going to be a bit before we get back to regular content development, but once these two things are done, we'll be in a much better position to get new stuff out. Thanks for sticking with us while we prep for the future, I can't wait to show you what we have in store for the game! Thanks for reading, see you at the next biweekly update!

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Biweekly Update - 4-30-2023 (Story rewrite nearly finished!)


Hey everyone! Sorry I missed last week's update; 2023 feels like it's disappearing out from under me, with how quickly time is passing, and I honestly thought today was the 2 week mark. Oops. Nonetheless, we're here with an update now!


There's not too much I can talk about this week, because my main focus has been on Crisis Point's story rewrite, and I don't want to spoil everything for y'all. That's also why I haven't been streaming; I don't like writing in front of people, so.. yeah. Here's the exciting, non-spoilery news, though: the story overview rewrite is finished! I'm still in the process of rewriting individual scripts for cutscenes and dialogue, but the overall story, what order events take place, etc., is all fully planned out now.

I was never happy with the latter parts of the game's original story, and the ending never really came together how I wanted it to, so I'm THRILLED to finally have a version of the Crisis Point story that I'm completely satisfied with! To be clear, the story as a whole (especially the parts you guys have seen) is still pretty similar to how it currently is - there's a few major changes, like (trying to be as nonspoilery as possible) we'll be introducing a certain character much earlier in the game, so you get to know them before a certain story event happens. There's also a LOT of small details that have been changed, and the script for a lot of early cutscenes is being rewritten to reference those new details (and also try to be a bit less verbose), but the biggest change by far is that the later parts of the game have changed completely. That's why I wanted to take the time to sit and do this rewrite now and not later; if we continued with the original story plan, we would've basically had to throw ALL of it out when we did this rewrite, which would be a huge waste of development time and resources, so now was the perfect time for it.

I'm not sure how quickly all of these story changes will make their way into the game itself - some of them will be very quick changes, like recording a few new lines of dialogue, while others will require a lot of animation work and such, so they might take longer. As one example, we plan on changing the cutscene that happens early on where one of the giant worms attacks the human camp and Birch captures it; currently, that cutscene happens totally off-screen, with Alicia just standing around while you hear the sounds of battle over the communicator. Now though, we're going to rework it to have Alicia teleport back and see the capture happening, which is a lot more animation work, but about a million times more engaging. In general, we're trying to add more life into the game's cutscenes, with more camera movement, more character animations, and more exciting things happening. I'm really excited to see the new story come together, I know you guys are gonna love it!


So that's what I've been focused on these past few weeks. Now that the outline of the story is there, we have the answers to a lot of questions I've been asking myself for years, and putting together the actual script rewrites is coming pretty easily! I expect to have the game's current cutscenes fully rewritten (or at least close to it) by the next biweekly update. Then, Orex's focus will be doing all of the new animations the story rework requires, while our voice actors works their magic bringing the CPE cast to life. I'll be switching back to focusing on the level design tool, so once the story rewrite is done you can expect our development streams to return in full force! Sorry to everyone who looks forward to them, but some of my work just isn't conducive to streams.

Anyway, that's about all I have to talk about this update. I really wish I could get into more of the details, but since Crisis Point's story is rather ~mysterious~ by nature, talking about it too much would ruin the fun, and I don't want that. So for the time being, I'll just say THANK YOU to all of you for being so patient! I know development continues to be a bit on the slow side right now, but once this is all done, we'll be in the perfect place for content to come out hot and fast. I hope you're all looking forward to it, and we'll see you again in the next biweekly update!

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Biweekly Update - 5-21-2023


Hey everyone, time for another biweekly update. To be honest, I don't have a very good one here, and I'm sorry about that - things have been stressful in my personal life, and my depression has been flaring up again because of it, so I've been really struggling to keep my work output up.


I've still been picking away at the script rewrites, which didn't go quite as smoothly as I had hoped, but they're making good progress. Since I've been struggling to focus on script writing more than I hoped, I plan on getting back to streams this week, and splitting my time between scriptwriting when the mood strikes me, and working on the level editor when it doesn't. Because of that, I don't plan on having an exact streaming schedule, but you can probably expect streams to start at around 1-2pm Alaska Time.

Aside from me, Orexius has been hard at work doing more cutscene animations. I think I've talked about it before, but as part of the script rewrites, we want to make cutscenes more visually exciting by adding more character animation; even though the rewrite isn't finished yet, we have enough information for him to get started on some of the more important ones, so that's what he's been doing.


Again, I'm really sorry I don't have a better update for y'all. I'm trying to get my depression back under control as fast as I can, and I think streams will help with that - whenever I'm struggling to get work done I always start to feel really useless, and streams/community interaction usually help with that, so fingers crossed that after some work streams, I'll have a much better biweekly update for you next time.

I know I've said it many times before, but it bears repeating how much I appreciate how patient you guys are with us. Slow periods in development always suck, but it means the world to me that you continue to stick with us during them, and it really does brighten my days to know just how much people are looking forward to this game. That's it for me today, thanks for reading, everyone - and here's to a better update next time.
 

Anon42

Well-Known Member
Dec 3, 2015
123
107
Hi everyone, apologies for not posting an update in a while. This is Puffernutter, Anon's wife. I am the one usually posting the Patreon updates on forums. However, my anxiety has been at an all-time high which led to depressive episodes. I'm starting new medications so hopefully that will improve. One of my big stressors has also been alleviated (my mom was diagnosed with cancer about 10 months ago and the lab results she got back last week show that she is now in remission). So I should be able to stay on top of updating forums from now on. Thank you for your patience with us!

(The following update posts are (mostly) a copy-paste from these updates posts on Patreon: Biweekly Update 6-11-2023, Biweekly Update 7-2-2023, Biweekly Update 7-23-2023, Biweekly Update 8-7-23, and Biweekly Update 8-27-2023. If you like what you see, you can try a free demo of the game on our itch.io by clicking here! If you enjoy the game, please consider supporting us on Patreon! We couldn't make this game without our supporters!)

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Biweekly Update - 6-11-2023 (Personal stuff, high-res pixel art, and starting development on v0.47)

Hey everyone. So, without beating around the bush, the last few weeks didn't go quite like I hoped they would - we only ended up streaming once, and I've still been struggling to get myself back to full working capacity. I'm not going to try and BS you with this post to make it seem better than it is - things are slow right now, and I'm trying my best to get over this funk, but life keeps finding new and exciting ways to make that difficult.

I won't be talking about this beyond what I'm writing now right now, because it's a very serious and personal thing that I'm not comfortable being open about, but one of my close friends recently admitted to being suicidal. They're okay for now, but I probably don't even need to explain how the situation has been affecting me. I hate to have to ask you all for even more patience, when you've already been so patient with me and the CPE team, but it's all I can really ask for right now while we try to navigate this.


With all that being said, I don't want to make it sound like we're not getting anything done, because that's also not true. Our musician is back at it, working on some of the new music tracks we need for the story rewrite, and I've still been picking away at the game's scripts to alter them for the new story. In particular, I finally figured out an answer to one of the remaining uncertainties about Alicia's backstory, so I'm really happy about that, it'll help a lot with writing certain cutscenes.

Aside from me, Orexius has been working really hard, both on cutscene animations, and on something new we're experimenting with.

NiZdle.png


Pixelated cutscene illustrations! This is obviously still extremely WIP, so parts of it are either unfinished or just need some more work. As part of the story rework, there will be a lot of new and/or altered cutscenes, and we wanted to experiment with illustrations to help add more life to them. Aside from CGs (which only Alicia is present in), there aren't any moments in the game where you get to see the characters in higher resolution, so we don't have much chance to show them in detail. Illustrations will help get around that problem, and I'm hoping they'll allow everyone to get even more attached to the cast. Orex previously had very little experience with higher-resolution art, but he's been really improving lately, and being able to have someone on the team handle illustrations instead of outsourcing makes it a lot more feasible for us to have them.

And here's another, more NSFW piece - this one is just for fun and practice, not actually going to be ingame, so enjoy it here:

XbRWCK.png


One last thing before this post is over, just want to update everyone on what our near-future plans are. It's been a bit since the last playable update came out, and I don't want there to be another year between major updates, so after deliberating on it for a while, the team has made the decision to start work on v0.47 now. We're at a pretty lucky point in the game's story right now - without any spoilers, the events that come next aren't really changing at all from the rewrite, so we can make a bit more content now without worrying about needing to replace it later when the story changes.

Our development priorities won't change too much in the short term, I'll still be working on the level design tool, but now the focus will be to get it to a usable enough state to start making new levels ASAP. I figure it'll be easier to develop it that way, anyway - make it usable but basic, then steadily upgrade it with new features as I figure out what I want from the tool. It's still going to take us a while to get v0.47 out - there's a new biome included (and possibly a new boss fight), so there's a lot that needs to be done to make it happen.

Spoilers for a late-game ability in v0.46 in the next paragraph, so skip over it if you haven't gotten there yet and don't want spoilers: I'm also going to be experimenting with a completely changed version of the Hoverjets powerup. Currently, the Hoverjets have two functions: holding Jump in midair to slow your descent, and extending a grounded dash indefinitely. I have no issues with the first part, but I've realized that I really don't like the way the "infinite grounded dash" function affects movement; it's such an accessible, powerful, and fast form of movement that the moment you unlock it, horizontal travel is "solved" for the rest of the game. I'm thinking about this mostly from a speedrunning perspective, and it feels like movement in the second half of the game will be really boring to watch, and also not that exciting to play. An ability like the Hoverjets extended ground dash makes more sense for near the end of the game, I think. I have an idea for a completely new ability that also fits the Hoverjets name, so I'm going to be experimenting with that ingame, and I'll share more about it when I have more concrete info. Some of the lategame level design will need to be altered, of course, so if the Hoverjets rework goes well, the new version of it + altered level design will also be in v0.47.

Alright, I think that's about it for me today. Again, thank you all SO much for being so understanding even though things are slow right now. We're doing our best, and with the focus on v0.47, I fully expect to have some good stuff to show off in the next few weeks. I still fully intend on getting back into streaming, even if it's not as usual as often right now, so keep an eye out for those. Thanks for reading everyone - hope to see you at the streams, and if not, we'll see you again in the next update.

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"Biweekly" Update - 7-2-2023 (Reworked (upgrade name redacted) preview, lots more background art incoming!)

Hey everyone. So, the past few weeks may not have been quite as productive as I'd like, but despite not really doing any streams, things have been steadily improving! I managed to get some good work done on the (upgrade name redacted) rework I mentioned recently, and I also have some great news for the near-future of CPE that we'll get into in a bit. First off, the ability rework!


Spoiler for a late-game ability in v0.46 ahead, so skip the next few paragraphs and gifs if you don't want to see that!
Like I mentioned in the last update, I've been considering reworking the Hoverjets ability that you acquire late in the game. The old Hoverjets has two functions: first, holding Jump in midair allows Alicia to fall much slower. Second, doing a grounded dash and continuing to hold the Dash key will allow you to dash indefinitely, until you stop holding it or get hit. The main goal in reworking it was to keep the same general utility, but make it more interesting than "hold a button to dash forever". Now, keep in mind this is VERY EARLY FOOTAGE; all of this is subject to change, and none of the proper animations are in place. The current animations are just repurposed from other parts of the game, so focus more on the way it functions rather than the way it looks for now:

Hoverjets-charging.gif


The new Hoverjets has two major functions. First, while Alicia is in midair, she can press and hold Jump to start charging up the Hoverjets. While she's charging up, her falling speed is DRAMATICALLY reduced, but her horizontal speed remains unchanged, allowing her to hover over wide gaps with ease. However, Alicia can only stay in this charged state for a short period of time, and if you stay in it too long, the charge will be canceled and Alicia will start falling again at full speed. This works fairly similarly to the original Hoverjets midair function, with the two main differences being that it reduces your falling speed even more than before, but now has a limited duration.

Of course, if that's all there was, this would be a pretty lame rework, but that's only the first half of the new Hoverjets. The more interesting half is this:



After charging up in midair, if you hold any movement direction and press the Dash key, Alicia will use that built-up energy to rocket in whichever direction you're holding; it may not be super easy to tell from the gif above, but you have full control over the direction you burst in - you can even go downward. This can only be done once per jump, though certain actions (like walljumping, or bouncing off an enemy with the Weighted Boots slam attack) will refresh your ability to use it, allowing skilled players to chain some truly ridiculous platforming tricks together. I've played around with it for a while, and I love how it changes the way you move around the world; I'm STOKED to see how y'all can use this to break the game wide open :p

Spoilers end here!

So aside from that upgrade rework, I have one really huge life update that will heavily affect CPE.. but for once, this time it's in a good way! As you probably know, Puffernutter (my wife) has worked with us on Crisis Point on and off. She's been in charge of improving our background art - if you remember some of the really nice concept stuff we've shown off in the past, she was responsible for those. If you've been wondering why none of those nice backgrounds have made it into the game yet, it's because she just hasn't had the free time for it. Her main job has been freelance graphic design, and her clients usually keep her very busy, so she unfortunately doesn't often have time to work on CPE.

However, due to burnout from working for big corporations (as well as issues getting them to pay her on time), she finally made the decision to cut ties with her primary client this past week, leaving her with a LOT more free time, a large amount of which is now going to be dedicated exclusively to Crisis Point! She's not going COMPLETELY full time with us; our income on Patreon isn't quite enough to cover all of our bills comfortably, so she's planning on pursuing other work at the same time, but it's going to be a night and day difference compared to before. I'm also hoping that getting to work with her more often will help me stay motivated, too, so with any luck this will be a hugely positive change for everyone on the CPE team!


So that's all of the major stuff. Orex has still been plugging away at the animations needed for the new cutscenes (there's a lot), and he'll be starting on animations for the aforementioned upgrade rework soon, but that's about all we have to show off/talk about for today.

CPE development has been slow lately, and I'm really sorry for that, but with Puffernutter taking on a much more active role in the game, I think we're about to see a really big change in CPE's development speed, and I'm super excited to see what comes next. Thank you all so much for sticking around, and continuing to be excited for Crisis Point! Hopefully we'll see you at the streams (I swear we'll do them regularly again eventually), but if not, we'll see you again in the next development update!

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"Biweekly" Update - 7-23-2023 (Tilesets and depression)

Hey everyone. So, in the interest of full transparency here, I don't have much CPE stuff to talk about in this update, so it's going to be mostly personal stuff. That's not to say we don't have ANY CPE work to talk about, though, and we'll get into that after the personal stuff.


My depression has been flaring up pretty badly the past few months, and I've been really struggling to pick myself up out of it. The doctor that handles my medications apparently had too much work on her plate, so she stopped seeing me a while ago, and I haven't found a replacement doctor yet, so my medication situation.. isn't great. I'm still able to get most of my prescriptions thankfully, but my ADHD medication requires seeing a doctor in person to keep the prescription going, so I've been off that for a while now - and unfortunately, I think my antidepressant isn't really doing the trick anymore, and it hasn't been for a while. I really want to try out some new kinds, or even just a higher dosage of my current one, but I need to find a new doctor to make that happen, which.. is much harder to do when you're depressed. I'm sure any of you who have ever dealt with depression know exactly how this cyclical song and dance goes. The GOOD news, though, is that the process is in motion now; last time I saw my therapist, I talked to him about all of this, and how I've been struggling to even get help with the medication issues. He told me their office also has medication management staff on hand, so he's writing me a referral to one of those people and I'll be able to start handling medications at the same place I have therapy. With any luck, I'll have a new medicine doctor very soon, and I can get back on ADHD medication and start trying out new antidepressants to get my mental health under control again.

I know I've mentioned before that my therapist thinks I might have OCD too, and if that is true, then new medication should help a lot - right now my antidepressant is Wellbutrin, which we started with because it often helps people with depression and ADHD, but it has no impact at all on OCD, so if OCD is a thing I'm dealing with then it's currently totally unmedicated. Could certainly explain a lot.

In any case, I'm really sorry that my mental health issues keep impacting CPE so heavily. This has been a life-long issue for me, and I wish I could just work through it, but.. well, that's not how mental health works. Still, I promise that I'm doing my best to figure it out, even if my best isn't very good sometimes. I can't overstate how grateful I am that you've all stuck by us - and especially me - even when this keeps happening. I feel terrible about it every time, but I'm trying to let that guilt go and just focus on making things better for tomorrow, so I can repay all of the patience and kindness you've all shown me.


Not everything is doom and gloom, though. CPE work is still getting done, just not nearly as fast as I'd like. These past few weeks I continued working on the level designing tool - specifically, I started on one of the biggest reasons I wanted to make the tool in the first place, which is an auto-tiling system. It's been a while since I streamed any level design work, but if you've ever seen me working on one of those, you might know that tiling a single level with GMS's built-in level editor can take literal HOURS. It's always been a huge pain point for me, especially in the context of making a Metroidvania, which naturally requires a lot of areas to explore. I did some research on auto-tiling algorithms and decided to utilize bitmasking; I won't go in-depth on the technical side of things, but it's essentially a way of auto-generating numbers for specific tiles based on how it should connect to nearby tiles, while ensuring there's never any overlap. It also happens to be the system Godot uses for auto-tiling, and since I plan on moving to Godot after Crisis Point is finished, it makes a lot of sense to learn how to use them now. Anyway, the auto-tiling implementation is near finished, now it's mostly just a matter of updating our tilesets to have all of the tiles required for bitmasking; it's a total of 255 tiles, which is a lot, but thankfully the vast majority of those tiles are just combinations of existing tiles, so it won't be too hard to do - and once it's done, designing levels will be SO much quicker it's not even funny.


Aside from me, Orex is continuing work on cutscene animations, and we also have an update on Puffernutter's work situation. The company she was working with contacted her again to try and convince her to come back, and after contemplating it for a while, she decided to say yes - but with some MAJOR changes to their work contract. For starters, they're going to be using a retainer instead of per-project payments, which means she'll be getting a consistent amount of income on a consistent schedule, which will totally fix the payment issues that made her quit in the first place. Additionally, the retainer is only for 30 hours a month, which severely limits the amount of time she needs to spend on them, and should help her avoid the burnout she's been dealing with. It's less than a week of full-time work, which leaves her with WAY more free time than before, which can go towards other things - like Crisis Point! So even though she's decided to work with them again, all of the things I talked about in the last update are still true, and you can expect to see a lot more CPE work coming from Puffernutter in future updates.


I think that about does it for this update. Again, I'm sorry I don't have a better one, but at the very least I'll keep everyone up to date on how things are going with me - and I can promise that I'm doing the best I can to get my mental health under control again. I know my posting schedule has been really inconsistent lately too, with mostly updates every 3 weeks instead of every 2 weeks, and I'll be making a concerted effort to stop doing that, even when I don't have much to write about - you all deserve that, at the very least.

Thank you all for reading, and for continuing to support us, even through all of my depression and inconsistency. It means the world to us, and especially to me personally. We'll see you again in the next biweekly update.

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Biweekly Update - 8-7-2023 (Building momentum; streams and medication)

Hey everyone, time for another biweekly update! Sorry this post is a day late, buuuut it's better than a week at least, right?

So, things obviously haven't been going well with development the past few months, due to all the reasons I talked about in the last update. I can't say these last two weeks were a dramatic improvement, but they ARE getting better! We held our first dev stream in a while on Saturday, and it went pretty well. I continued working on the bitmask auto-tiling I talked about recently (it's now being properly implemented into the level editor itself, rather than just a test project), and I also worked on the ability to undo/redo in the editor, which.. works properly sometimes! It just has a lot more issues to work out before it's usable. Still, it was good progress for a rusty dev stream, and I'm feeling good about it.

Since I finally got the ball rolling again on streams, I plan on keeping that momentum and doing a lot more over the next two weeks. We'll probably aim for 4 streams a week right now, though the timing will be inconsistent - I'm trying to move my sleeping schedule around, which is always a difficult process for me because of my insomnia. In the meantime, we'll be streaming at whatever time works for both me and Orex, but eventually I'd like to start holding our streams MUCH earlier in the day, something like 9AM Alaska time. If you're intested in watching us stream dev work, but that timing doesn't work for you, then please let me know in the comments! The streams are really helpful for me when it comes to working consistently, but they don't work as well if nobody is around to hang out, so I want to make sure the timing will work for everybody.


Aside from work-related stuff, I'm also working on trying to get my health under control again, both mental and physical. I haven't mentioned it in a while, but I'm still dieting right now, and I've lost a good 35 pounds so far! It's slow but steady progress, and I think it's the largest amount I've ever lost while actively trying to diet, which feels great. I still have another ~100 pounds to go to reach my target weight, but the dietitian we're working with has us make smaller goals to help stay motivated during the process, and it definitely helps a lot. Food has always had a lot of control over me, and to be honest it absolutely still does, but it's nice to feel like I'm regaining some of that control. I also finally stopped beating around the bush with exercise, and I pulled out our old rowing machine. I've been having some knee problems the past few months that are thankfully mild enough to not really impede my mobility, but it's painful enough that I have to be careful with it, so hopefully some low-impact exercise like this will help fix me up, while also improving my mental health bit by bit.

There's also my medications, which I'm going to have a wait a while longer for, but the ball is rolling on that front too. I have a medication doctor picked out, and appointments scheduled with them. They're on vacation right now, so I won't have anything to share about it for the next biweekly update, but once they return I'll be able to get back on ADHD medication and start trying other antidepressants. With any luck, it won't be long before I can get my mental health back under control, at least a little bit. Incremental progress is a lot better than no progress at all.


And that's all I have to talk about this week. Before I wrap up, I'm going to make the statement right now: this will be the last disappointing biweekly update. We ARE going to stream regularly these next two weeks, and I WILL have more to talk about in the next update because of it. I'm tired of feeling guilty and hating myself for not being able to get my work done, and this is the end of it, I refuse to keep spiraling down this cycle of depression and self-hatred.

Thanks for reading, everyone. You've been so patient and understanding with me, it's time to get shit done so I can at least start trying to make it up to all of you. If you're interested in checking out the streams, you can follow me on https://picarto.tv/Anon42 - hope to see you there, and if not, we'll see you again at the next biweekly update!

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Biweekly Update - 8-27-2023 (Blaster effects, new environment WIP, level editor simplification)

Hey everyone, and welcome to another CPE biweekly update! Sorry this one is late; I lost a small chunk of time these past few weeks trying to transition my sleeping schedule, so I can stop being a night owl. I've mostly settled into the new schedule, but thanks to my sleep issues, it led to a solid few days where I was too tired to do much. That being said, this post isn't about excuses, because we have some good stuff to show off this week!


To start with, this is what I spent a good chunk of my time on: a new shader-based effect for Alicia's blaster.



Shaders are difficult to wrap my head around (especially in GMS where you have to write the code from scratch, unlike most modern engines that have a visual shader editor), so it may not seem like much, but it took me a while to program this. I managed to figure out a few important shader things this week, which I used to create an effect to make Alicia's blaster disappear when she stops shooting, rather than having her keep it in her hand. This has a few major benefits: for one, we no longer have to worry about where Alicia's gun is during non-shooting animations (such as a ledge grab), which simplifies Orex's work a bit. The other benefit is going to be a lot more fun, though: because of this change, the only animations in the game that have Alicia's gun in them are her arm's shooting animations, which are on a separate layer from her body, so we can reuse the arm animations across many of Alicia's body animations (like running or jumping). Because the total amount of arm animations is so small, it's now feasible for us to give Alicia's gun a bit more flair, in the form of new gun designs!

We don't have any visuals to show off yet, and nothing is set in stone, but my current idea is to have each bullet chip affect the shape or color of the blaster; Trigger chips will change the shape, while Shot chips will change the color. This whole system honestly shouldn't be very hard to implement, so you can expect to see it in v0.47! I'll show off some more shots of this in future updates, once we've had time to design the new blaster shapes and color schemes.


Aside from that, we also have a small preview for you of an upcoming environment:



This is early concept art from Puffernutter of an area that's going to appear in v0.47. I can't say too much about it without veering into heavy spoiler territory, but it certainly is unlike anything we've seen in the game so far, isn't it?


Lastly, I also decided this past week that I'm going to simplify my plans for the level editor. Designing a full level design tool is taking longer than I'd like, especially for something that's internal only, just for this project, and not planned for public release, so I'm trimming a large part of the planned features and instead making it into a tileset tool. I'll still design the collision geometry, place enemies, and so on using GMS's built-in tools, but the tileset work (by far the longest part of the level design process) will be handled using the editor, with features like auto-tiling that GMS doesn't have. I should be able to finish the editor a lot quicker with the reduction in scope, and it'll take care of by far the biggest timesink I have when making levels for CPE.


And that's it for this week. It's not a ton, but for once I'm glad to finally have some good work to show! I'm not up to my full speed yet, but I've been trying really hard to get my shit together this past month, and it's nice to have something to show for it. We're finally back to streaming regularly (with a goal of 3-4 streams a week), which has helped a lot with keeping me on track, and I just started seeing my new medicine doctor, so I'll be able to get back on ADHD medication within the next few weeks. Things are finally starting to look up for me and the CPE team, and I can't thank you guys enough for sticking with us through thick and thin.

We have a lot more fun stuff in the works, and I can't wait to share more of it with you. Make sure to keep an eye out for streams, if you like the idea of watching us work; in the meantime, thanks for reading, and we'll see you again in the next biweekly update!