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

[Anon42]

(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, consider supporting us!)

Hey everyone! Weekly updates have been gone for a long time thanks to our move across the country, but we're finally back in business and ready for action!

Before anything else, let me address the streams (or lack thereof) - I was all gung ho last week and ready to start streaming again, but as I was gearing up to start a stream, I realized something very important.. I don't actually have a second monitor anymore. My stream setup requires two; one screen for the stream itself, and another screen for all my secret development info, chat, music player, stream monitoring window, etc. So basically, unless I change my stream layout and style significantly, I can't actually start streaming again yet :' ) Orex's situation is even worse, since the only monitor he has right now is his cintiq screen. I plan on picking up a second monitor as soon as possible, but unfortunately it's not financially in the cards until probably next month. Furnishing a new house is expensive. So, for the time being, I won't be streaming just yet - but that doesn't mean work isn't getting done!

This week, I was mostly focused on following through with the Flare Shot+Melee reworks I've been talking about and holding polls on. For those of you who aren't aware, the Flare Shot in its current form (as a flamethrower) is being removed from the game entirely; its functionality of burning enemies/plants will be transfered to the melee attack, and the melee attack is getting some improvements to make it more usable and fun. The Flare Shot's Skills still need to be reworked to fit the new mechanics, and there's still some balancing to do here and there, but one of the major melee improvements happened this week:

Aerial melee attacks! For those of you who've played any of the Castlevania metroidvania games (SotN, Aria of Sorrow, etc), the air melee attack in CPE works very similarly to those games - you have full horizontal movement while doing an aerial melee attack, allowing you to stay very mobile in midair. If you land in the middle of a melee attack, your animation cancels immediately and you can go into any other action (another jump, a ground melee attack, a dash, shooting, etc). This makes aerial melee far more agile than ground melee, with the one concession being that it's a bit trickier to time a hit since you have much more movement during it. To compensate for this, melee as a whole had its damage reduced quite a bit - however, certain enemies now have an inherent weakness to melee strikes that causes them to take increased damage from them! This applies mostly to smaller enemies like the slimes and edovex, making melee a very effective tool for shutting those enemies down quickly and keeping you on the move. I made this change because melee was now far too strong for dealing with most enemy types, but it's also extremely satisfying to use on the smaller guys, so I wanted to maintain that fun without breaking the game's overall balance.

Another small improvement that came with the melee/Flare Shot changes is the game's control scheme, which you can see the changes to here:

As you can see, there is no longer a "subweapon switch" button. The UI element showing which subweapon you have equipped is still present, but that will be removed as well. Essentially, there is no longer any need to switch subweapons; all of them are given their own unique button instead, simplifying the game's controls greatly and allowing you to use all of your tools at a moment's notice with far more consistency. I might even be able to make certain tools more important for taking on specific enemies now, since all players are guaranteed to always have easy access to those tools.

Lastly, a small shot of the new Wire Shot shenanigans!

As you may know, Crisis Point previously had a mechanic I internally called "Wire Rides", which you would attach to using the Wire Shot and then you were able to move left/right/up/down while staying attached to them via your Wire Shot cable. I had a lot of ideas for using Wire Rides, but none of them ever ended up being implemented; because of it, the Wire Ride mechanic as a whole ended up being extremely basic (and rather boring), and was only used in the game a handful of times. In order to simplify things, I've decided to remove the Wire Rides entirely, and replace them with sequential wire shot targets like the ones in the gif up above. Not only are these quicker than the Wire Ride was, they're more mechanically engaging since you have to repeatedly use your Wire Shot to cross gaps, and they can be combined with other platforming hazards/obstacles to create some fun stuff! I'm REALLY looking forward to making use of these in other areas of the game.

Aside from my work, Orexius finished both the Crystal Dragon BE H-scene and that aerial melee attack you see up above this week. With those done, I plan on having him work on some other pressing gameplay animations - like Boss 3's new animations, and some other minor things I've wanted to tweak for a while.

Well, that's it for this weekly update! Thank you all for supporting, and sorry again for the lack of streams! I'll get a second monitor as soon as it's feasible, so we can get back to regular devstreams again. Hope you enjoyed the read, and we'll see you with another update next week!

 

[Anon42]

(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, consider supporting us!)

Hey everyone! There's not too much to show for CPE work this week (and for the rest of this update, really); most of our bigger changes for this update have already been shown off (wire shot, melee, flare shot, etc), and most of my remaining work is still related to those things. They're all pretty huge changes, so a lot of things broke when reworking them, and many of those things still need to be fixed.

The Wire Shot in particular has a lot of things that aren't working properly right now, particularly the horizontal pull blocks and Sentry shields. I was never a huge fan of the way either of these functioned - the pull blocks take a long time to move, and the Sentry shields are TOO weak to the Wire Shot, it takes less than a second to yank them down and make them vulnerable. To solve both of these problems, I decided to have Orexius create a new animation for Alicia where she hooks something with the Wire Shot and gives it a strong tug; once this animation is implemented, the Warped Sentry's shields will take a bit longer to pull rather than being near-instant (I'll balance this by making them stay knocked down longer), and the horizontal pull blocks won't require you to stay in the pulling stance for an extended period, instead just requiring the short tug animation before they move. This functionality is still WIP though, so I can't show it off just yet.

The Melee/Flare Shot on the other hand, while it does still have its fair share of issues, has generally been much simpler to rework; it mostly needs work on the visual side, and fixing some bugs that happen when Alicia's midair melee animation is interrupted. Most of the Flare Shot's skills will remain either unchanged or slightly changed, but the Orbital Flare in particular is being reworked significantly. Again, I don't have footage for it yet, but my plan is to have melee attacks leave a floating trail of fire that burns and hurts enemies that touch it, instead of creating a floating orb that shoots out fire in a circle. This will balance it a bit more by giving it less coverage (the Orbital Flare had frankly INSANE range before), but still keeping the same general function of "stationary fire you can place down whenever/wherever you want". If the reduced range proves to be too much of a nerf, I can either increase the radius, or try tweaking the damage and duration instead; I think it should feel fine though, especially with how much more accessible the new Flare Shot will be.


The last thing I wanted to show this week is just a small gif showing the new special effect for the Crystal Dragon's sucking attack! It's not much to show off, but I wanted to include some kind of fun visual:

The enemy has no proper animation on their body yet, so please excuse the fact that they still look stiff. I still plan on tweaking the effect a bit, too, but I'm pretty happy with it so far - it's definitely a lot better than the flat red hitbox that was used before! This suck attack pulls Alicia faster than it used to, but I've also increased Alicia's general mobility while underwater by a bit, so underwater segments in general aren't quite as slow as before.


Anyway, that's it for this week! I'm not entirely sure when this update will be out, but I plan on trying to release it as early as I can in September. It should definitely be out by the 15th or so, hopefully sooner, but we're still settling into a groove in the new place. I'll be able to pick up a second monitor soon though, so hopefully streams will resume sometime during this next week or so! Keep an eye out for that!

Thank you all for supporting Crisis Point, we'll see you with another update next week!

 

[Anon42]

(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, consider supporting us!)

Howdy ho, it's time once again for that weekly CPE development update! This week we've actually got a few gifs to show off, so let's get into it!

First off, the gif you see up above, which is the replacement for the Orbital Flare skill for the Flare Shot. The Orbital Flare, before the melee change, created a stationary orb of fire that basically acted as a spinning two-way flamethrower; it did a surprising amount of damage, and covered a LOT of screen space with very little effort. Now that the Flare Shot has been reworked into a melee upgrade, it'll be far more easily accessible than before, so I needed to tone it down a little without drastically changing its identity as an easy-to-place damage field; this is what we decided on! When you do any kind of melee attack, a fiery trail is left behind by the swing that stays on screen for about 5 seconds. During that time, it'll ignite and deal damage to anything that touches it. It has much smaller range than the Orbital Flare did, but that downside is offset by how much easier it is to utilize now, plus whenever you lay it down you could also be hitting with a melee attack. I'm still working on the visuals, I plan to improve them a bit more, and I'm still deciding how I want to balance it (whether by limiting how many can be on screen, or by adding a cooldown), but I'm pretty happy with it so far!


Next up is the Wire Shot yank animation I mentioned last week.

(Don't mind the flat-colored wire, Alicia losing her jacket in the last few frames, or any other small oddities - the animation is still WIP)

So this is how using the Wire Shot on a Warped Sentry looks now. Before, you would just use the Wire Shot, and the moment it touched her shield she would get immediately pulled down. It looked pretty silly, honestly, and was overpowered at shutting down that enemy type far too quickly. Now you have to wait for this animation to play, but to balance it the Sentry stays down quite a bit longer than she used to. This animation will also be used when pulling horizontal blocks, but that functionality is still WIP, so no gif for now. Do keep in mind, also, that the Wire Shot is on its own dedicated button now too, so it's more accessible in the heat of combat even though the animation takes longer now!


Those are the two gifs I have for ya today. Aside from that, though, we were also able to finally hold a devstream on Friday! We managed to get another monitor set up this week, so I'm finally able to stream again, and streams will be happening regularly like before. For the time being, we'll be sticking to Monday/Wednesday/Friday streams like we used to, but starting at 5 pm EST. This schedule might change as we get back into the streaming groove, but that's the plan for now! It's great to finally be back to streaming, and I hope to see both familiar and new faces show up to hang out with us while we work! For those of you interested in the streams but not already following us, you can find our Picarto pages at:
https://picarto.tv/Anon42
https://picarto.tv/TheOrexius
You can follow us there to get notifications when we stream! I also announce streams at my twitter: https://twitter.com/Anon42_CPE


Alright, that'll be it for me today! I'm not sure how much longer v0.41 is going to take, I'm further behind than I expected to be thanks to the move. I'm hoping the productivity boost from streams will help catch us up, but it is possible v0.41 won't make my original "by the 15th" expectation. If you need to unpledge (whether it's because of a delay or because of financial issues or anything else), rest assured that if you were pledged at $10+ at ANY POINT during v0.41's development, you will get it once it comes out - don't feel the need to stay pledged to get your rewards, because you'll get them either way! That said, I appreciate the hell out of everyone continuing to support, despite the awkward development cycle for this update. The move really threw things off, but we're basically back to normal now and Orexius is kicking ass with new animations, so expect exciting things ahead!

Thanks for reading, we'll see you in next week's updates (and hopefully at the streams too)!

 

[Anon42]

(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, consider supporting us!)

Hey everybody, time for another CPE weekly update! This'll be a short one, development on v0.41 is getting close to the end so there's not much left to show for this update cycle. Right now it's mostly bugfixes, and finalizing things that have been shown off previously.

All I'll really be showing off today is the Wire Yank animation again, but this time, with the pillars instead of the Warped Sentry. This time, I want to show off a comparison between the old version and the new one.

OLD:

NEW:

As you can see, not only is the new animation way quicker, it's also much more visually interesting - instead of Alicia standing still while the pillars gets slowly dragged (which also left you open to attack if any enemies were nearby, which would cancel the animation), she yanks it back forcefully, with a trail of dust kicking up underneath it as it slides up to the wall. The sound effects are similar to the old version, but the new pacing of the animation ended up making it sound really satisfying too, but unfortunately a .gif can't really show those off.

Overall I'm SO much happier with the way it looks now! This is a change I've wanted to make for ages, but we never had the capacity to add a yanking animation before Orexius started working full time, as our animations were already so backed up. You can be absolutely certain that this improvement only happened because of all of your support and pledges, we never would've had the time before! I know this isn't the most exciting addition in the world, but I personally think it's little details like this that really make a game special, so I'm stoked to finally be able to add some of these bells and whistles I've wanted to do for so long.


Alright, that's all the visual stuff for this update. Like I mentioned in the opening, I've been mostly focused on bugfixes and wrapping up everything for this update; it's taking a while because of how many mechanics were changed this time around, so the game needs a much more thorough playtest than normal to ensure there's no really bad bugs. Due to that (and our move) there's not much NEW content this time, but I think it'll be well worth it in the long run.. especially because it's actually worth using the Wire Shot in our level design, now. I might even end up tweaking earlier level designs to make more use of it at some point.. but that's for another update.

Thanks for reading, everybody, and I hope you're looking forward to v0.41! I currently expect to release it sometime this week, or early next week, if everything goes according to plan.

 

[Anon42]

(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our major playable update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, consider supporting us!)

(NSFW trailer available here: https://www.redgifs.com/watch/immaculateinsignificantbedbug)

Hey there everybody! Sorry there was no Sunday update this week, but I hope this makes up for it - Crisis Point: Extinction v0.41 is now released and available for $10+ patrons! As always, the download link will be in a $10+ Patrons Only post just after this one, and anyone that pledged at the $10 tier or higher during v0.41's development will receive a private message with the link shortly. I won't waste any more of your time, though, let's get right into the update details!

v0.41 MAJOR FEATURES AND CHANGES
-Majorly updated the functionality of both the Wire Shot and Flare Shot (now named Flare Strike); also changed the way subweapons in general function, giving them each their own button for easier access during gameplay
-Added a new mobility powerup, Walljump (still kinda WIP, and will be renamed in the future)
-Added a few more areas to explore in the Caves
-Added two new sprite H-scenes; Crystal Dragon BE, and Torguis BE
-Tweaked underwater exploration to slow down Alicia's movement considerably less
-Fixed more bugs and issues (full list at the end of the post)

The main focus this update was the Wire Shot and Flare Shot/Melee reworks. The Wire Shot especially has been a bit of a stain on the game for a long time now, the original implementation just wasn't fun to use, so now it's been given a complete overhaul and - in my opinion - it's honestly one of the funnest upgrades now! The Flare Shot wasn't really problematic before, but it also wasn't very useful, so it's been incorporated into the melee attack now, and melee has been given a big improvement with a new mobile aerial attack. All subweapons are now on their own dedicated button, as well, which allows them all to be used much more quickly during gameplay - no more fumbling around with a subweapon switch button! (The control changes mean that your custom control schemes will need to be edited as well, so make sure you head to the options menu and tweak them if you've played previous versions!)

v0.41 isn't as large as I would've liked, but I had a feeling it wouldn't be, because of the cross-country move in the middle of working on it. It slowed us down quite a lot, and it's taken a while to get our house in working order and get things back to normal. The good news is we've passed that point; honestly, the majority of the work for this update happened in the last month, after things had settled down. We're working at a really good pace now, and I expect v0.42 to be kickass because of it!


v0.42 PLANS
-Add more areas to explore and secrets to find around the game world
-Add Kertalus CG
-Add/update more H-scenes
-Put serious work towards Boss 3 rework
-Update unfinished and missing cutscene animations
-Fix more bugs and issues

The v0.42 plan list may look rather small, but that's because it's going to be mostly focused around what v0.41 didn't do - filling in more places in the game world, and putting some serious work into the Boss 3 rework. Now that we've reworked the Wire Shot, all of the upgrades in CPE are a lot more satisfying to use, and I want to spend some time designing challenge rooms and upgrading old level designs to make more use of Alicia's toolkit. Boss 3 rework has been on the roster for a while now, as well, but we haven't been able to make a lot of concrete progress on it because of our animation pipeline being backed up; thanks to Orexius going full time and working hard, our important animations are finally getting caught up, so I plan on putting some serious time into it this update! If we don't manage to finish it, it'll at least be very close to being complete.


Anyway, that's enough typing out of me. I'm super tired and ready for some relaxation time.. until bug reports come in and rouse me from my slumber, anyway!
This update cycle was supported by all of our amazing patrons, especially these fine folks:

SeraphStarliege
Katsune Teku
HURTZ
NobodyXV
Benjamin Arnold
Fortunekuger

Thank you so much for your generosity, guys - the amount of support you give us is astonishing, and we're so thankful to have you!
See you in the next update!
-A42




v0.41 MINOR CHANGES AND BUGFIXES
-Fixed a minor visual bug where skipping a certain cutscene wouldn't move NPCs and Alicia into the proper post-cutscene positions
-Fixed bug that caused slimes to sometimes clip into the ceiling if meleed while on a sloped ceiling
-Fixed a bug that caused the amount of guard/power orbs you collected to not be saved or loaded, but the collectibles were still removed from the game permanently
-Fixed a bug that caused Torguis' to not decelerate during their stagger animation, causing them to shoot off into the distance if they were staggered while running after the player
-Crystal Dragon now has properly-shaped hurtboxes on attack animations
-It is now possible to press the Jump key to skip libido and BE animations, like with other H-scenes
-Warped Sentries no longer cancel their "fallen" animation when the player melee attacks them while they're knocked over
-Basic destructible blocks can now be destroyed with melee as well as bullets
-Fixed a bug preventing Boss 1 (and his projectile rocks) from being damaged by melee attacks
-Fixed a bug preventing the shine effect when a Force Shot charge was gained
-Fixed a bug where Scientist's BE vials didn't give Alicia i-frames
-Reworked 'coated' animation to no longer slow Alicia down and lower mobility, but to instead temporarily restrain her completely (but she can now struggle out of it faster)
-Cumshooter no longer causes animation bugs when Alicia has torn clothing
-Status menu now properly displays Alicia's attack and defense percentages, allowing you to track how many Power Orbs and Guard Orbs you've collected
-Fixed a bug where Female Torguis, and the Warped Sentry death animation, were not censored when the game was in SFW mode
-Crystal Dragon suck animation can no longer pull you in during an H-scene with another enemy
-Greatly increased the speed at which the Crystal Dragon pulls you in
-Finally fixed a missing room inbetween one of the transitions from Caves and Summit
-Fixed a level design issue where it was possible to softlock yourself by doing a very precise jump to get over the wall to the left of the Kilogrip upgrade, before grabbing Kilogrip
-Reduced damage dealt by melee to maintain balance after other melee improvements, but made certain enemies (like Slimes) more susceptible to melee damage
-Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash when entering an H-scene with a gallery enemy shortly after respawning during a gameplay H-scene
-Slightly boosted damage of Auto Shot (from 0.75 to 0.85)
-Boosted size of Heavy Trigger projectiles (from, 1.15 to 1.25)
-Boosted damage of Seeker Shot (from 0.5 to 1.0)
-Warped Sentries now take double damage from any attacks while they are knocked over, and their knocked over state lasts a bit longer
-Slightly boosted damage of the starting blaster type (from 1.8 to 2.0)
-Added an Extra Credits screen to the end-of-demo menu, displaying licensed audio credits

-Reduced some enemy HP values:
Warped Soldiers (from 20 to 14)
Edovex (from 4 to 3)
Cumshooters (from 8 to 6)
Lurker (from 20 to 15)
Kertalus (from 44 to 35)
Crystal Dragon (from 80 to 60)

 

[Anon42]

(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, consider supporting us!)

Hey everyone! It's been a while since a weekly update; we took a slightly longer break than usual before starting up v0.42's development, due to some IRL events. Development started up a while ago, though, so we're back to the regular updates!

First up is the gif here, which is a new hazard I worked on this week. The visuals are still very much incomplete, but essentially it's a hazard that warps you back to a certain location (usually the beginning of the room) if you touch it. I've been wanting to add something like this to the game for a while now, for the sake of designing non-deadly challenges. In many cases, you can just tank damage to get past platforming challenges in CPE, so I wanted some way to design platforming challenges that WON'T result in a game over, but also actually require you to platform skillfully to reach the end, and here's the solution! No risk of death since these don't damage you, but the only way to get past it is to complete the challenge. I plan on using them a lot in optional challenge rooms.

Next up, a general status update. We finally finished planning the entirety of the Boss 3 rework this week, so now it's full steam ahead on the assets and implementation. It's definitely more complex than the first two bosses, so while we've had a good idea of what we wanted for the fight for a while, we've still been mulling over some of the particulars, and we've finally arrived at a fight design we're happy with. Orexius will be spending a lot of time this update working on that fight, but we'll still do our best to make sure there's some new H-content too!

..Speaking of H-content, our CG artist Red is nearing completion on the Kertalus CG, so here's a preview of that!

This is obviously very zoomed in, so there's a lot more to see in the full image. The actual CG is in final coloring stages and will be completed soon, as well, but for now you'll have to whet your appetites with this


And that's it for this week. Weekly updates will likely be pretty simple for most of this update; a majority of my work is just designing rooms to explore, so there's not a lot to post there, and then the rest of our work this update will be spent on Boss 3. Since Boss 3 has been in the game for a while, I don't mind posting updates on the reworked fight, but we might not have much else to show off visually!

With that said, thank you for reading, and we'll see you in next week's update!

 

[Anon42]

Hey everyone, before I post this week's weekly update here, I wanted to apologize for not having any weekly updates here the past two weeks - we had weekly updates as usual on Patreon, but they were barebones and not a lot happened, partially due to the nature of v0.42 (being a mostly level design-focused update) and partially because I was struggling a bit mentally (thanks 2020), so I just never bothered posting them anywhere else. I'm feeling better this week and we got more done, though, so here's the update - and sorry again that I left you guys out of the loop for a bit!



(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, consider supporting us!)

Hey everyone, time for another weekly update! Honestly, I don't have much more to show you this week than I did last week - most of our work is still on non-visual stuff, or too heavily WIP to be worth showing off. That said, though, we got a lot more done this week, as well as some streams, and I'm feeling a lot better because of it! Sometimes there's just not a lot of interesting stuff to show off in game dev, and since v0.42 is focused on almost entirely level design and boss 3, it has a lot of that less interesting work. Ah, the joys of a Metroidvania.

I spent most of my time this week designing levels (one of which you can see in the video up above, showcasing one of the obstacle courses I've created with the new warp hazards), as well as tinkering with some background assets. I have an upgrade planned for later in the game that will require tweaking the visuals of some areas, so I've been thinking about how I want to handle that, even though the upgrade itself is still a ways off. Before you ask, yes I'm being intentionally vague, and no I won't be explaining it more than that :^)


I'm probably going to spend some time in the near future revising the Summit area a bit; there are some obstacles (like the arrow traps) that are really underutilized, and with the Wire Shot changes from last update, I've gotten multiple comments asking if I would be adding in more spots to use the Wire Shot, which is great to hear! Everyone is enjoying the new Wire Shot so much more, it was definitely worth the effort of reworking it. As you can see in the video, I'm already utilizing it more for platforming challenges, but I'd like to add in more uses around the Summit in general too, now that it's so much more fun to use.


I'm gonna be doubling down on level designs and trying to get as many as I can done for the rest of this update, but there's also some dialogue I want to write, and some other stuff I've been putting off (like hiring a new voice for Lucas). In any case, I expect the remaining weekly updates for v0.42 to be pretty light on visuals, but I'll at least include another level design video or gif like the one posted in this update.

Alright, that's it for this week! Thanks for reading, and we'll see you in the next one!

 

[Anon42]

(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, consider supporting us!)

Hey everyone, hope you all had a good week! Much like the previous weekly updates, there's not a ton to share here - level design doesn't make for particularly exciting updates, but it's been sorely needed for some time now. That said, Orexius was able to start working on Boss 3's new combat animations this week, so I wanted to share the rough versions of a few of them with you guys!

First off is her knife throw ability. In the original fight, boss 3 would leap up to one of the corners of the arena and then dash across, throwing knives downward as she went. Now, she still has a knife throw, but it functions differently. The boss will leap up into the air and do one of two attacks: the first is the one up above, where she tosses out a fan of knives directly towards Alicia, requiring you to quickly dash through them to dodge.

The second option is a divekick towards the player. You can't really tell with these roughs, but the divekick comes out much sooner, while the knife throw is delayed a bit, so even though both animations have similar startup animations, you can tell which one is coming if you pay close attention and keep your dodging fingers ready!

Next up is a seemingly simple vine ball toss, but this vine ball is special: after being tossed, it spins and hangs in the air briefly before exploding into a cross-shaped cluster of projectiles. The path of the projectiles are clearly marked, but the vine ball itself doesn't stop spinning until it bursts, so the difficulty of the move is in predicting where the markers will be once it bursts. The vine ball always lasts the same amount of time after being thrown, so as long as you pay attention to it you can pretty easily figure out the timing.


And that's all I plan on showing for today! The boss has a few other moves as well, but I don't want to spoil everything. We're still aiming to have the reworked fight ready for v0.42, but if we do keep it in, some of the animations will likely still be roughs like these.

In other news, like I mentioned I spent my time this week working on level design, as well as more tinkering with new background assets. Aaand just like last week's update, my tinkering had mixed results. I did rough up some asset ideas that I'm happy with though, and every little bit helps!

Red finished off the Kertalus CG this week, so I'll be working on implementing that now, and he'll be working on the Sentry CG rework next.


And that's it for this week! For anyone unaware, we're still streaming every Mon/Wed/Fri, usually between 5-6 pm EST, so make sure you come check those out if you're interested in watching the development of Crisis Point! Hope you enjoyed the read, and we'll see you in the next update!

 

[Anon42]

(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our major playable update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, consider supporting us!)

Hey everybody! Sorry for not posting a weekly update in a bit; the last few we posted on Patreon were very light on content as we were focusing in on finishing the update. Good news, though: v0.42 is now released and ready to be played for our $10+ Patrons!

You can watch the video up above for an overview of what's changed, and here's a slightly more detailed list along with a few words about some of them:

v0.42 MAJOR CHANGES AND FEATURES

-Added lots more areas to explore and secrets to find around the game world
-Rework Boss 3 from the ground up
-Added Kertalus CG (missing Birch voice acting for now)
-Finished H-scene animation between Lucas and Verreda
-Re-added Lucas Atticor voice acting with his new actor, Leo Greystone
-Fixed more bugs and issues

As always, a list of bug fixes will be at the bottom of the post. The main thing this update was the Boss 3 rework. It's still not FULLY complete, as the animations are on the rougher side (please forgive the vine arm grapple animations especially), but as far as the fight itself goes, it's functionally complete, and in my opinion it's MUCH more fun than the old fight, so I hope you guys enjoy it!

Aside from that, we also added the Kertalus CG (which is missing Birch's voice lines, but is otherwise complete), and Orexius spent a bunch of time finishing up the Lucas+Verreda scene. That animation took much longer than anticipated because of the complexity of it; there are several versions of the animation that change throughout the cutscene, on top of the climax, so it took much longer than an H-scene usually takes. Unfortunately there's no way to rewatch the scene on a file where you've already passed it, so I'm afraid you'll have to replay the game in order to see that scene - in the future we'll probably implement a way to re-view cutscenes, but we haven't had the time yet. Lastly, Lucas Atticor has voice acting again, thanks to his new actor Leo Greystone getting the lines done just in time, so big shoutouts to him! He's done a phenomenal job!


v0.43 GOALS

-Finish Boss 3 rework visuals, and add cutscenes related to Boss 3
-MORE areas to explore and secrets to find
-Add some more bullet chip types
-Fill in some more environmental dialogue conversations at various parts of the game
-Add more H-scenes, if time permits
-Work on a new enemy type (might not be added this update)
-Fix more bugs and issues

v0.43 will be focused on pretty much the same stuff as v0.42, namely adding more content, and finishing the boss 3 rework. There's a lot of story stuff that will be coming up soon in CPE, so I'll be making preparations for some of that too. In general, we should be making a lot of progress towards the completion of the game in the near future, so I hope you're looking forward to it!

That's enough outta me for today, though. As always, the download link will be in the post after this one - and for those of you who have unpledged, keep an eye on your DMs, and you should be receiving a link from me soon if you were pledged at $10+ during development of this update!

Thank you SO much to all of our patrons, and an extra super massive shoutout to our top patrons for this dev cycle:

SeraphStarliege
Katsune Teku
HURTZ
Benjamin Arnold
Fortunekuger
Leon Kiske
Resident Jojo Reference
Pedro Fraga

You guys are all such damn awesome people and I can't possibly thank you enough!
See you in the next update!
-A42




v0.42 MINOR CHANGES AND BUG FIXES

-Fixed Alicia not having a Torn Clothes variant on one of her Wire Shot animations
-Fixed instances where the Warped Scientist would not turn to face Alicia when throwing a vial, leading to him throwing the vial backwards
-Fixed some misplaced background assets in the 5th area
-Considerably boosted the damage of the Vampire Shot to compensate for its life-draining effect
-Fixed a long-standing bug causing Laser Shot and Needle Shot bullet types to hit single enemies much more frequently than intended, making them deal far more damage than intended; slightly buffed their per-shot damage to compensate
-It is no longer possible to kill boss 3 by shooting her from the room entrance before the fight starts
-Fixed a bug in which the Force Shot's ammo refund skill could be used to gain a single Overcharged Force Shot, before the Overcharge upgrade was obtained
-Doors now open up automatically if you dash towards them (including extended Hoverjets dash)
-Fixed an issue where you could go up steep ramps without the Hoverjets upgrade by repeatedly melee attacking
-Fixed an issue where certain vertical room transitions could get locked to a black screen if the player was holding left or right while entering them, until the player let go of left and right
-Fixed an issue where a room transition in the Caves would result in the player being inside a wall
-Fixed an issue where thin platforms in a room in the Summit were misplaced

 

[Anon42]

(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, consider supporting us!)

Hey everyone. There's not too much to talk about this week, but I do have some more personal thoughts at the end of the post if you care to read through. First, though, the development update itself: as you can see by the animation up above, I started work on some new blaster types, as well as continuing the writing work I mentioned last week.

There's not much to say about the writing, but I'll detail the gif above! The blaster chip in the clip above is the Sawblade Shot; it fires a small projectile that bursts into a rapidly-spinning sawblade when it collides with an enemy or a wall. The damage it deals is on the lower end of the spectrum, but the rapid hits make it extremely effective at generating Force Shot ammo, which more than makes up for the low damage. The visuals are still very incomplete, so it should look a bit fancier when v0.43 is in your hands.

Aside from that, I also spent some time this week gathering up a list of sound effects that are missing in Crisis Point; I'll be sending the list off to our sound effects guy as soon as it's ready, so hopefully v0.43 will have a lot of missing sounds filled in, like the Crystal Dragon and Boss 3 sound effects.



Lastly, before the update ends, I want to share some thoughts, considering this will be the last weekly update of 2020. It's nothing new to state that this was an incredibly difficult year, I'm sure you've heard it a million times before from other people - I was personally hoping Crisis Point would be further along by now than it is, but between covid, my own struggles with depression/mental issues, moving across the country, and difficulties adjusting to the shift in work dynamic that comes from hiring on a new employee, things didn't quite go as far as I wanted them to.

I don't think it's right to apologize for that, though. Our progress may not have been as great as I wanted, but we still did a lot of great work this year! For the first time in a while, we managed to mostly stick to our release schedule; v0.41 was a bit late due to the move, but v0.40 had an even faster turnaround time than usual, with only 1.5 months in development. The end result is that we had a solid amount of playable updates this year, and made lots of progress towards completing the game. Crisis Point's story (and content as a whole) is coming together quickly, and I expect it to only speed up from here as we gradually approach the finish line.

Despite 2020 not signaling as much progress as I hoped, Crisis Point is in a better, and more consistent place, than ever before. We're still a ways away from the game being done, but we have an internal roadmap detailing what needs to be done before the game is complete (and to keep scope creep in check), and things are most definitely looking up. Above everything else, we have all of you, our Patrons and followers alike, to thank for where Crisis Point is today; looking back on the game's early days compared to now is truly striking. The game might be done by now if we had kept all those early assets, but it certainly wouldn't be anywhere near the level of quality it's at today, and it wouldn't be the quality you all deserve. I can't thank you enough for giving us the opportunity to really make something fantastic.

2020 was an awful year for everyone, but you all have taken an immeasurable weight off my shoulders by keeping a roof over our heads and food on our plates. Thank you so much for sticking with us, for supporting and believing in us, and for letting us take the time to make Crisis Point as good as it can possibly be. I hope your holidays were a bright spot in this overwhelming year, and that things continue to look up from here! We'll see you on the other side, friends, in 2021!

 

[Anon42]

Hey everyone! Before I get into the weekly update, I have a very special announcement to make!

(NSFW trailer available here: https://www.redgifs.com/watch/popularlankybedbug )

Crisis Point: Extinction v0.42, the Patron-only playable update that was just released in December, is temporarily available for free, for everyone, starting right now!

https://anon42.itch.io/cpe42

If you go to the link above, you'll be able to download a standalone copy of v0.42 to keep forever. The download will only be available for a week, until the end of the 10th, so make sure you jump on it quick!

Our $10 Patrons were unbelievably generous, and unanimously voted to allow me to give this out to all of you, as thanks for supporting and following me during the hellish year that was 2020. My community helped me keep creating during what was easily the hardest year of my generation's collective lifetime, and I will always be grateful for that, so I felt it was only right to give back in some capacity.

This download won't be replacing our public demo; after a week, v0.42 will be removed from itch.io, though you can of course keep the download indefinitely if you already got it. But until then, download it and play away! Make sure you share it with anyone you know that might be interested, too; v0.42 is the culmination of all our work up until this point, and there's a lot of game there to enjoy!



With that done, now for the weekly update!

https://soundcloud.com/anon-42-498945869/crisis-point-extinction-camp_a

Here's a music preview up above for you to listen to and enjoy, the theme song for the Torguis encampment. That track will be in the next update, and will play during their introduction cutscene and whenever you go to the camp after that. We plan to add a song for the human camp too, eventually!

Aside from that, it's been a pretty slow week, to be honest. Between new years celebrations and festivities, and me somehow managing to throw out my wrist (I'm writing this in a wristbrace now lmao), things were slower than I'd like. Orexius has been kicking ass on the animations though, and I did still make progress in various areas - I implemented the Torguis encampment theme you hear up above, fixed a major visual bug with the Map screen that I was unable to replicate on my own (thanks to Temp3h on the f95 forum for bringing it to my attention and helping me test a fix!), and did some work on the UI for Bullet Chips to accommodate the addition of more chips (like adding a scrollbar, since there's more than 10 A-type chips now).

Now that things have calmed down from New Years, I'm hoping to get back into streaming regularly again, so keep an eye out for that! Until then though, that's about all I have for this update. Thank you all so much for continuing to support us through thick and thin; I wouldn't be here doing this without all of you, and it means the world to me. We'll see you next update, and I hope you all enjoy v0.42!

 

[TheDarkMaster]

I'm glad I happened to check this today.

 

[TheDarkMaster]

I've played several hours now of the new demo. Up to the third boss fight and the ability to walk underwater. I have a substantial report on my playthrough to share.

Bugs
-Auto shot cannot hurt warped sentries. Front, back, lying down. None work.
-Pierce shot, needle shot, boomerang shot, and boom shot can all go through warped sentry's shields and damage them normally.
-The 'ascending the summit' save room is missing the save room map colour. (x 52, y 18)
-Alrune animations seem to glitch out a lot when trying to move to a masturbating Alicia. Broken walking animation and rapid flipping back and forth.
-Quitting and reloading the game will still have enemies defeated from the previous session.
-If a sex scene is triggered in a room with multiple enemies. The enemies not involved will enter the 'move towards Alicia' behavior immediately after the scene finishes.
-After getting the flare shot, the game got stuck in dialogue mode. Everything was quieter and there was an occasional audio crackle. Possibly caused by opening the menu while dialogue was occurring. Restarting the game did not fix the problem.
-Poison Alrunes will not move towards Alicia while she's masturbating to initiate a sex scene. They'll only start one if she's right on top of them when she masturbates.
-The poison alrune in the animation rooms is the non-futa version, with futa on. Neither alrune seems to respect the futa toggle in the animation rooms.

Quality of Life improvements that would be nice to have at some point.
-Let us shoot doors while standing on top of them.
-Let us fire blast shots while standing on top of breakable walls.

Misc notes
-Video/audio is an odd place to put sexual content options. Usually those are in gameplay or have their own section on the menu. You have to scroll down to see them too, so they're easily missed.
-Alicia's clothes are torn the moment you touch the masturbate key. Feels odd. Maybe have her clothes appear behind her for this and in most scenes and put them back on afterwards? Then reserve torn clothing for situations like post breast expansion or as its own status effect? At a minimum she should need to actually have sex with one of the enemies before her clothes are lost.
-When encountering the Torguis, Alicia makes no mention of the precursors who built the Summit. She goes so far as to say there isn't any high tech around.
-When the Torguis are first encountered, they're called the first sentient species humanity has met. However this contradicts the bestiary. Slimes are described as sentient as well. Which is technically correct. Sentience implies the ability to feel and have emotion, so a dog would be sentient. Sapience is the term for an intelligent creature capable of building a civilization, which a dog clearly is not.
-A shame we can't watch Rod hit an Alrune.
-Water immediately to the right of the south deep soil save point should be removed. It blocks a route back towards where the player needs to go next. If the player went to this save point after dealing with the poison alrune, they have no choice but to backtrack due to it.
-As my previous note probably indicated, I didn't realize until later that you're actually suppose to go up through the water from the deep soil south save point. It wasn't until I'd explored all possible routes opened up by killing the alrune that I went back to investigate. The game had taught me until this point that water was always an impassible obstacle. I only worked out you could get passed there due to familiarity with how games are made and that there was no other routes opened up by defeating the poison alrune.

Balance notes
-I do not think that balance is a concern during this stage of development. Nevertheless I want to note a couple small things for when the time for balancing does come. This was on the second hardest difficulty setting, normal I think.
-First is that homing health pickups skill is overpowered. I was able to tank most enemies and keep a net positive health from just one skill. The lurkers were the only thing that out DPSed my healing.
-Super force shots are extremely powerful. Especially since using them does not consume a regular force shot, so it's easy to keep a full set of them.
-All of the shot options are at least interesting and offer something that would make me consider using them. None of the triggers seemed worth using over the basic trigger. They didn't seem to offer anything to offset the lowered DPS that a shot didn't give already (needle shot or split shot gives spread, boom shot or siphon shot damage). I got the five trigger options on the top row.

 

[TheDarkMaster]

I finished the game up to the 'end of demo' message. I did not go and get every last bit of content and location on the map I could go to.

Report
-The subterranean caves are the best looking region in the game. Ideally some of the background work done here should be added to the caves, deepsoil, and catacombs.
-Unfortunately the subterranean caves are probably the weakest part of the game so far. There's a lot of wide open rooms with very little in them and being in the water makes it take a lot longer to get around. You move slower and cannot dash. Many of the obstacles require you to wait to pass them and you cannot dodge past enemies, forcing you to fight them. Speaking of enemies, they're all the same as the ones you've been fighting earlier. This could be a symptom of the early stage of development of this area, but I strongly encourage you to add more enemy variety. More slimes and tentacles aren't engaging foes and by this point I have no difficulty dispatching them.
-How surprised the characters are to find an underground base is again strange considering the existence of the summit. Alicia can read the keycards and the terminal in the base, so everyone should immediately think that humans built it. Especially since the dialogue implies that the base is built around the needs of humans.
-Side note, if it isn't on the queue of things to do, props to make the base and the Torguis village look like a base and village would make the areas feel like actual places. So things like chairs, beds, storage, food production and preparation, entertainment, and any other essentials for life and living.
-There's an alert for the crystal dragon being added to the bestiary, but no entry for it.
-Map error, no down door at caves x23,y22
-Map error, save point colour missing at s. caverns x27,y52
-Map error, save point colour missing at s. caverns x24,y59
-Caves x27,y27 is missing the vine door on the inside of the challenge room.
-The space x23,y48 in the deep soil can never be reached.
-After exploring the summit, there doesn't seem like there's that many skill point pickups anymore? I started finding more flat stat ups instead, along side the health increases I'd been finding throughout the game.

 

[Anon42]

Thank you for all the feedback, TheDarkMaster! I hope you enjoyed the game, despite the issues you had with it. I've already fixed a handful of issues you noted, and I'll keep the rest of your feedback in mind going forward.





Hey guys - I'm so sorry I haven't updated here in a bit! Things have been so busy, my household did a complete schedule change to try and make 2021 a better year (including actually exercising for once in my life) and I guess I just completely spaced on updating anywhere outside of Patreon. We HAVE had weekly updates every week, just the last three never made it here; I'll go ahead and post the link for the first two missing updates, and then post the most recent update from yesterday in its entirety. Sorry again for forgetting, I'll try not to make a habit out of that!

(Note that you DO NOT need a Patreon account to view these updates if you want to read them, they're public and free!)

1-10-2021 weekly update: https://www.patreon.com/posts/weekly-update-1-46049345

1-17-2021 weekly update: https://www.patreon.com/posts/weekly-update-1-46334343



(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, consider supporting us!)

Hey everyone! Gonna be just a text update this time, but despite that we had a very productive week!


For starters, boss 3 is now pretty much finished! All of her fully-detailed animations have been completed and implemented, her attacks were given the proper effects, and it's all looking pretty great. The only thing missing from her right now are voice clips and sound effects. The voice clips won't be coming this update, but the sound effects will hopefully be finished and implemented before the update goes live. It took a bit longer to finish the boss 3 rework than I would've liked, but I'm still happy with how fast the new fight came together! Orexius did a killer job on the animations and added some great little details that really add a lot of life to her movements.

I also "finished" the cutscene viewer this week, which will be accessed via a Gallery button on the main menu - and by "finished", I mean it's functionally complete, but only with Lucas and Verreda's H-scene cutscene. There's still a few minor visual issues involving the menu that I want to fix before the update is released, but even if it were to come out now, the cutscene itself works great. The groundwork has also been laid for implementing future cutscenes, so doing it should be pretty easy in the future, too!

Another thing that got done this week was implementing the dialogue I wrote. Most of the conversations are still missing voiceover, but they're all functionally implemented, so it'll be as simple as dropping the voice clips in once our cast is finished recording. I do want to note again, however, that some of the lines may be unvoiced due to one of our actors getting sick, so don't be surprised if any of the conversations are partially silent.



Aside from those three major things, I also fixed a good handful of smaller issues this week, like adding button prompts to the in-game H-scene gallery, since a lot of people didn't realize you could watch BE/group scenes in there. I've also implemented recolored versions of the Warped Scientists that hit harder than their early-game counterparts, so they'll be populating the later areas of the game.

Red was able to join us for two of our three streams this week, as well! He's working on the reworked Warped Sentry CG, and you should really come check out the streams sometime to see how it's going, if you haven't already! It's looking reeeeal good. Hopefully it will be ready in time for the release of v0.43! If you don't already follow us, we stream CPE work on Picarto here, come check it out sometime: https://picarto.tv/Anon42

And that's all for the weekly update this week! I'm definitely getting back into the swing of things, which feels great. Streams are a big help for my productivity, so I'll definitely be sticking to them more going forward. The rest of the update will be my personal health/fitness update I've started doing, so if you don't care to read that, feel free to stop here, and thanks for reading the update!



Exercise this week went pretty good! I'm finally starting to see some slight improvement in my stamina; our household (me, puffernutter, and orexius) are all working out together to try and improve our health, and I've been seriously lagging behind the other two, probably because of just how long I've been out of shape. I pushed myself harder this week - maybe a little too hard, given how sore I was a few days ago lmao - and I managed to reach a new length of double my previous times. It's still not very long at all, frankly, but it's a great step in the right direction! I'm feeling the most optimistic I've felt in a long time, regarding my ability to get my health back on track, and that's something to be proud of.

I hope any of you that are trying to make a positive change are doing well, whether it's health, creativity, or anything else! Keep it up, and remember to be proud of yourself for making an effort, even if you can't push as far or as fast as other people you know. It's not a race, we'll all get there eventually; what matters is that you never give up!

Best of luck to everyone reading this, and thank you for reading the update!

 

[TheDarkMaster]

Thank you for all the feedback, TheDarkMaster! I hope you enjoyed the game, despite the issues you had with it. I've already fixed a handful of issues you noted, and I'll keep the rest of your feedback in mind going forward.

If I hadn't enjoyed the game, I wouldn't have bothered with a bug report. I wish you luck as a fellow game maker.

 

[Anon42]

If I hadn't enjoyed the game, I wouldn't have bothered with a bug report. I wish you luck as a fellow game maker.

Fair enough! I very much appreciate the detailed reports, thank you for taking the time to make them!




(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, consider supporting us!)

Hey everyone! This week was a bit of a slow one. We're starting to wrap up development on v0.43, so this one will be text-only again, not too much visually to show off.


I spent most of my time this week polishing up odds and ends from earlier in the update - stuff like the Blaster Chip menu (which still had a minor few issues remaining from the process of adding a scrollbar), tidying up the visuals for the Cutscene Viewer, and making sure the recolored versions of the Warped Scientists actually spawn where they should in place of the weaker scientists.

On the subject of recolors, I did some thinking this week about how I could add some minor changes to the recolored enemies to make them more distinct from their early-game counterparts, aside from just dealing more damage - more specifically without making them too time consuming to create, since the whole point of recolored enemies to cut down on development time (compared to adding completely new enemies) and keep early-game enemies relevant later on. I have some ideas in mind, like giving the Warped Soldier the ability to aim directly at Alicia instead of only in straight lines; I won't be working on any of that for v0.43, but I plan on adding some in the next update! Hopefully it will keep the game feeling fresh in the later parts, even though our enemy roster is relatively small and you see a lot of the same enemies throughout the game.

Aside from that, I spent some time picking out takes from our voice actors, giving the Warp hazards a proper visual instead of just being little glowing orbs, adding some more areas to explore, and implementing a powerup that will show up in a future update. I expected that powerup to be a little tougher to implement so I wanted to get a head start now, but it turns out it wasn't too bad! It won't be in the game for a while yet, but I'm excited for it when it does get added officially.


Red is still working on the Warped Sentry CG, but I'm not sure it'll be done in time. I might delay the update a little longer to include it, since it won't be out until February anyway, and it'll be the only porn in this update; I'll talk to Red and see what sort of timeline we're looking at and decide from there. I'm also still waiting on those new sound effects, too, but luckily once our sound guy is done with them it'll be easy to drop them in.

Orexius has been working on cutscene animations for boss 3, but there's quite a lot of them to do, so I don't think those cutscenes will make it into the update either unfortunately.


As I mentioned, v0.43 development is wrapping up, and I'll probably just be cramming more level design and bugfixes into the game between now and then. I haven't done much level design yet for this update, so it's a bit lacking in new content at the moment. Hopefully I can fix that before it releases! Anyway, that's all for the CPE update this week! Thank you for reading; the rest will be a personal update, so feel free to stop reading here if you're not interested!


Our exercise/personal health goals stagnated a bit this week, but we're still keeping it up! There's honestly not much to report; we ordered some cheap exercise equipment to help give us some more variety, and we're gradually starting to convert an extra room in our house into a home gym. Even though we didn't really make progress towards pushing ourselves further this week, the very fact that we're continuing our daily exercises and fasting with decent consistency is still something! Having multiple people to hold you accountable helps a lot, so if you're struggling to make a change like this, I definitely recommend reaching out to some friends to join you, or at the very least help remind you to keep it up.

I hope you all are doing well and making positive changes as we round out the first month of 2021. Here's to making this a better year than the last one! We'll see you in the next update!

 

[TheDarkMaster]

Adding new attack patterns, speed, and behaviors is a good way to help keep the enemy recolours fresh. Simple examples could be stuff like slimes that rapidly slide along the ground and don't jump, another jumps several times in succession and then briefly pauses before doing it again. Then use the level design to complement these variants so they present new challenges and experiences for the player. Unfortunately this is much more difficult for the humanoid enemies, given their more limited behaviors. Different projectiles might help, at least to avoid recolours just being the same enemy with more damage and health.

 

[Anon42]

(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, consider supporting us!)

Surprise, weekly updates are changing schedule (slightly)! Instead of posting them on Sundays, I'll be posting them on Saturday from now on!

Prepping weekly updates every week can take a few hours, from writing to prepping gifs and making sure they're posted everywhere. I'm changing the schedule to make room on Sundays, so I can get some light work done on the early stages of another game project - our next game after Crisis Point! I won't be discussing it in detail just yet, but we've nailed down what our second project is going to be, and have decided to begin early development now, so that when Crisis Point is finished we should already have an early playable version of the next game to show off! We're only dedicating one day a week to this new project, and it will only be on weekends, so don't worry about it conflicting with Crisis Point development - if anything, having a second project to work on something new every once in a while helps prevent burnout!

Anyway, enough about that. As I mentioned last week, development of v0.43 is wrapping up, so there's not a lot to show or talk about this week. We do have one visual, though, which is the gif up above, showcasing a new obstacle I created this week. It functions similarly to the falling platforms in the Summit, but if you continue to stand on the platform, it will start rising instead. The speed the platform rises at isn't final; I might make it faster since it is a bit sluggish right now, but it should make for some fun obstacle courses!

Aside from that, I spent most of my time this week adding the sound effects our sound guy finished (I'm still waiting on some, but the ones he has delivered have been added now), and continuing to tweak and polish things to get ready for the release. Not a lot of level design happened, since I wanted the rising platform obstacle to use in the new levels; I'll be spending time this week trying to actually add in a few new rooms to explore, but it's likely that v0.43 will be pretty light on the new content front. Boss 3's rework and cutscenes took up a lot of our time, so future updates should be better in that regard.. at least until it's time to add another boss fight
It's kind of hard to know when to cut off this update cycle and just release the thing. The longer it takes, the more likely the Sentry CG rework will be complete and we can include it. Red finished most of the character shading in our last stream, but the background is still only in sketch form, so there's still quite a bit of work left to do. We've also officially reached the 2 month mark now, so the update is technically "late" already. I guess we'll see how things are looking by next week's update. I can't guarantee that the update will be in a good enough state to be released by next Saturday, but I'm hoping it will be!


That's the end of the development update this week; thank you for reading, and for continuing to support us! The rest of the post will be my weekly health/fitness update, so feel free to skip it if you don't care about that!

As far as exercise goes this week, things didn't go super great. I must've pushed myself too far at some point, my legs were experiencing some sharp pain when bending certain ways for maybe ~4 days this week - for the first few days, I tried to continue exercising daily and just keep it very light, but that seemed to make the pain worse, so I had to take a few days off exercising entirely to let them rest and recover. I feel fine now, I just tried to go too far too soon, so I need to be a bit more careful about how far I'm pushing myself. After so many years of living a completely sedentary lifestyle, it seems I've got a ways to go to get my body in working order! The good news is that we finished setting up our spare room into a home gym, so it all feels a little bit more official now. Since we've put in that effort, it would be lame of us to give up on the exercise now, so we're in this for the long haul!

Thank you for reading the update, and I hope things are going well for all of you! We'll see you in next week's update!

 

[Anon42]

(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our major playable update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, consider supporting us!)

(NSFW trailer available here: https://www.redgifs.com/watch/bountifultiredgazelle )

Hey everyone! Sorry we didn't make our update post yesterday like normal, but there's a reason for that! Drum roll please... Crisis Point: Extinction v0.43 is finished and ready for our $10 patrons to play! You can watch the video up above for an overview of some of the major changes, and keep reading the post for a more detailed list, as well as our plans for v0.44!

v0.43 MAJOR CHANGES AND FEATURES

-Boss 3 rework pretty much done (just missing cutscenes and some voice acting now)
-More areas to explore and secrets to find
-Added two new bullet chip types, the Sawblade Shot and the Crystal Shot (Crystal is missing sound effects)
-Added some more conversations that play as you explore certain parts of the game, including two "hint" dialogues that play in areas players commonly get stuck in
-Sentry CG was redrawn and has new artwork now
-Added a Cutscene Viewer to the main menu (only the Lucas+Verreda H-scene is viewable in this mode currently, and is unlocked automatically for now; in the future, cutscenes will unlock for re-viewing as you progress through the game)
-Fixed a number of bugs and glitches (full list at the bottom of the post)

v0.43 was largely focused on filling out various areas of the game that were incomplete, rather than developing brand new content. The Boss 3 rework now has close-to-complete visuals, more bullet chip types were added, there's more dialogue to hear as you explore the game world, and there's a few more areas to explore, in addition to some minor tweaks to existing areas that were flawed or frustrating. The Warped Sentry CG has been redrawn by Red, leaving only one CG remaining that needs to be updated. We've also done some work on new stuff that isn't actually in the update, but will show up later on, like a new enemy design.


v0.44 GOALS AND PLANS

-Add in cutscenes for Boss 3, to finish up the rework
-Add further story cutscenes and a new small "biome"
-Continue work on new enemy type, hopefully add them in
-Add new H-scenes
-Start work on Boss 4 (will be kept secret)
-Rework Edovex CG, which will finalize CG reworking
-Implement Crystal Dragon CG
-Give some recolor enemies altered behaviors/attack patterns
-Fix more bugs and glitches

If v0.43 was mostly about polishing up previous content, v0.44 is the opposite, and focused on new things! I speak for the entire team when I say we're looking to speed up development of CPE and get the final game in your hands as soon as possible. We're going to start pushing hard into new content territory from here on out, and once the game is nearing completion, do one final polish pass; stuff like new special effects, additional sounds, adding any still-missing H-scenes to enemies, and so forth. My goal is to no longer have any updates where the main focus is reworking/finishing content, until the game is almost finished. There will inevitably still be polishing done between now and then, but it shouldn't be the focus of any updates for a while.


One last thing before this post is done. There was a bit of uncertainty after last week's update, when I announced we're starting the early stages of development on our next game; I want to clarify that development of the next game is ONLY happening on weekends, and is coming out of our free time, not out of Crisis Point's work hours. Additionally, the only reason we're starting on it now is because we have an internal estimate and roadmap for when we're aiming to finish Crisis Point. We've still got a ways to go (I don't expect the game to launch this year), and I do not plan on sharing this estimate - it's a fairly ambitious one and who knows what could happen - but we do have a planned timeframe we're working towards!

Alright, that's it for this update! We'll be taking a brief break, so there won't be a stream on Monday and maybe Wednesday, but they will start up again soon. Thank you SO MUCH to all of our amazing Patrons for your support during this update's development, and an extra huge thanks to our top Patrons during this cycle:

SeraphStarliege
Katsune Teku
Benjamin Arnold
Leon Kiske
Pedro Fraga
TCTheorist
Joshua Woodward
Skraflar
Skrabyzarc
koldkanadian

Thank you so much for reading the update, and to our $10 patrons, I hope you enjoy v0.43! See you in the next update!

-A42







v0.43 MINOR CHANGES AND BUG FIXES

-Fixed Poison Alraune not approaching Alicia for H-scenes
-Fixed an issue where Alraune would enter their walk cycle, but stop animating when they got near Alicia, when approaching her for an H-scene
-Sentries no longer continue running at Alicia when she's in a sex scene they can't participate in
-Opened Rodriguez's eyes to the secrets of the universe
-Fixed an issue where, in some instances, Alicia would be facing the wrong way during a late-game cutscene
-Fixed Yellow slimes having green glow lighting instead of yellow
-Added slight ambient lighting to Torguis enemies, and glowing red eyes to the Lurkers, to help identify them in dark areas
-Added short hint dialogues in a few places, when the player seems to be stuck there long enough
-Made the Wire Shot return to Alicia MUCH more quickly, if she somehow misses with it (such as when the Warped Sentry lowers her shield just before the Wire Shot grapples it)
-Added button prompts to the in-game H-scene gallery explaining all the available controls
-Fixed issue where enemies killed in recent rooms do not respawn after the player quits to main menu, then reloads their save
-Fixed "Ascending the Summit" save point not having the proper Save Point room color on the map
-Implemented potential fix for an issue where Boss 3 would get stuck in her Divekick animation when hitting certain walls
-Fixed a bug where hitting a warp hazard orb while grappling with the Wire Shot caused the Wire Shot noise to continue looping indefinitely
-Fixed a level design issue in the Catacombs where Sentries and a Wire Shot target would compete for the Wire Shot's auto-targeting feature, making its behavior inconsistent
-Fixed a freeze that would occur if Alicia somehow got inside of certain collision geometry
-Attempted fix for a rare crash during Boss 3 if her sniper ends up inside of a wall while aiming at the player
-Fixed a bug that was causing the initial controller layout for Gamepads to be incorrect, placing both Melee and Dash on the same button
-Fixed an issue where the player could dash while underwater, if ledgegrabbing
-Fixed an issue where the player's gun could stick through some walls, allowing them to shoot through the wall
-Player can now use the Force Shot even when their gun is inside of a Force Shot-destroyable block
-Fixed a bug where Sentries could not be hit by the Auto Shot when they're knocked over
-Altered level design and moved save point before Boss 3 to better facilitate the puzzle
-Fixed a room in the Subaquatic Caverns being misplaced on the map
-Fixed a bug where the map screen duplicates over itself on some systems, becoming cluttered and difficult to read

 

[Anon42]

(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, consider supporting us!)

Hey everyone! Feels like it's been a while since I wrote a weekly update, since the last major update came out on a Saturday and we were on break last weekend! Development of v0.44 started up in full force this week, and we've already gotten a lot done!

Before I get into anything else, the cutscene linked up above is one of the major things I worked on this week. Both the intro AND outro cutscenes for boss 3 were completed this week, which means boss 3 is finally (pretty much) complete! There's lots of little polish tweaks I'd like to add if we ever get the time, like better effects and visuals, more cutscene animations, and more sound effects, but that will all come later in development, during our final polish pass. The video up above is just a small sampling of the scene, so I hope you're looking forward to seeing the full thing!

Aside from that, I also received the remaining sound effects from Green and implemented those this week. The Crystal Dragon and Crystal Shot both have proper sound effects now, as well as a handful of missing things around the game!

Another major thing I worked on this week was some secret planning stuff related to Boss 4. I've never talked about Boss 4 before, but my plan for them has gone through some changes, and said changes necessitated some changes in our late-game story. It's nothing major, so it won't impact the consistency of our story at all, but it should lead to some more interesting storytelling later on in the plot!


Aside from the things I worked on, Orexius spent this week animating the BE Tentacle H-scene (which he's nearly done with), and Red worked on some concept art for the new enemy we're working on! Their combat abilities are all planned out, and I'll be working on implementing them next week, just without visuals. Hopefully we'll figure out a design we're satisfied with and give them proper visuals by the time the update comes out.


And that's it for us this week! The rest of the update will be personal/life/fitness stuff, so if you just wanted to read about Crisis Point, feel free to stop here, and thank you for reading!

Sooo tearing the bandaid off, fitness hasn't been going great. We haven't given up or anything, far from it, but our consistency isn't so hot lately. I wonder if the weekly updates have been more motivating than I realized? We're still fasting pretty consistently, so there's that at least, and I plan to fix the problem starting today and make sure I exercise daily again like when we started. No sense in crying over the mediocre performance of the past week or two, just gotta stand back up and get into it again!

And that's it for the whole update. Thanks for reading guys, and I hope your 2021 plans are going great so far! Thank you so much for continuing to support us, it really means the world. We'll see you in the next update!

 

[Anon42]

(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, consider supporting us!)


Hey everybody! Pretty small weekly update today, I spent all my time on one major thing this week, but the good news is that one major thing is pretty much done!

As you can see in the video up above, I was working on a new enemy this week. There are still a few minor things left to do to polish it up, programming-wise, as well as the fact that it has almost no graphics yet, but functionally it's more or less complete now!

This guy has a more complex moveset than most other enemies, but it's not a full-on boss fight, more like a miniboss; it starts off being protected by a barrier of crystals (in the video there's only 1, but in the full fight there are 3), and no attacks are able to hurt it during this phase. Instead, you have to aim for the crystals spinning around him instead, and break them one by one. Once the crystals are broken, the enemy will immediately go into a powerful spinning laser attack. Once that attack is over, it returns to its normal behavior pattern, but with less downtime between attacks and with another laser attack every ~20 seconds until it's defeated, making it much more dangerous. Once the barrier is down, you'll need to focus on taking it down as soon as possible!
Like I said, most of my time this week was spent working on this enemy. I've also been brainstorming names for the Crystal Dragon enemy, so he can actually have a real name for once - don't know why I've been struggling with that specific one for so long, but I think we're finally on to something, so he shan't be unnamed much longer! We've also got more work coming from our musician (for the 3rd boss fight), so I hope you're looking forward to that - I know I am!

Last week, I said that Orex was nearly done with the Tentacle BE H-scene. He ran into some difficulties with the climax animation, so he's still trying to finish that up this weekend. Once he's done, he'll be starting up the next H-scene right away, so there should be a solid amount of H-content in this next update even though it's going a little slower than we hoped.

Red, who's the only one on our team that has experience working with 3D, has been working on a 3D model for this new enemy. It's something we haven't done before, but want to try incorporating into our development process - essentially, creating a simple 3D model of the enemy, animating it in 3D, then tracing over the renders for the final art in the game's pixel style. It's a technique we'd like to incorporate more in the future, so hopefully it works out! Once he's done with the model, he'll be working on some more CGs.


And that's it for us this week! The rest of this update will be a personal update, so feel free to stop here if you just wanted CPE news. Thanks for reading!


As far as personal health/fitness goes this week, it went pretty well! I didn't quite meet my goal of working out every day, but I worked out for 4 of the 7 days of the week, which is a good step up over how last week went! Any improvement is worthwhile, so I'm choosing to be proud of it instead of wishing I did better; I'll just make sure this next week is even better than that. We've also succeeded in ordering out a bit less and cooking at home a bit more, which is another good step forward; exercise is only one piece of the getting-healthy puzzle, after all. One more piece of good news, too - our household started the Covid vaccination process this week! We all got our first shots yesterday afternoon, and our second doses are scheduled for a month from now. I'm looking forward to being at least a little more protected; things won't change too much, we'll still be masking up when outside, and spending our time at home and avoiding crowds, but the extra peace of mind helps a lot.

And that's it for this week! Thank you so much for reading everybody, and for continuing to support the development of Crisis Point! We'll see you next week!

 

[Anon42]

(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, please consider supporting us!)

Hey there, everyone! Got a jam-packed weekly update for you this week, so let's get into it!

First off, the gif up above. While working on the recolored enemy variants this week, I realized just how sad and lame the Tentacles looked, so I decided to take the opportunity to update their animation! Now, instead of just sinking into the ground, they have a proper digging and attacking animation. There's still a few tweaks I want to make to keep it visually interesting (like making each tentacle dig at slightly different times), but it already looks way better!

I also worked on recolored enemy AI this week, and giving them new/altered behavior for higher-tier versions of enemies. So far, the Warped Soldier, Slime, and Tentacle are all complete! The higher-tier Warped Soldiers now aim directly at Alicia instead of only in a straight line (which you can see in the gif above), Slimes move much faster along walls and have less downtime when jumping and landing, and Tentacles not only dig faster, but higher tiers will dig a few times in a row before resting. I'm really excited for these changes; it should help the lategame combat stay exciting and challenging, even once Alicia's toolkit has expanded!

Next up, Orexius started working on the Slime BE H-scene this week - but before he started work on that, we decided to touch up the Slime sprite, which hasn't been changed since development started. It was pretty ugly before, if you ask me, and this new coat of paint brings it in line with the rest of the game's visual quality standards!

And as far as the Slime BE H-scene itself, goes...

One last thing before this update ends, about our streaming schedule - I've been doing some thinking about why it is that we seem to miss at least 1 stream every week, and the conclusion I've come to is that a dedicated stream schedule just doesn't work well for me, creatively. I was diagnosed with ADD as a child, and it's shaped me creatively in a lot of ways, and I get the feeling that hard schedules just don't really benefit me, and instead cause a lot of stress and anxiety.

To try and fix it, I'm going to be changing the way our streams work: instead of a stream Mon/Wed/Fri at 3 pm EST, I'm instead just going to be aiming for at least 3 streams a week, whenever it feels right! Ideally, the amount we stream won't change (and might even go up!), they'll just be unscheduled. If it doesn't work out that way, I'll figure something else out in the future, but that's what I'm going to be trying for now!

And that's all for this update! The rest of this post will be a personal health update, so you can stop here if you just want to read about CPE. Thanks for reading and for supporting our work!


Health was a mixed bag this week. The fitness part didn't go so great, I only worked out a few times - however, one big change this week was in the food department. I've been terrible about ordering out a lot and barely cooking this year (and since way before then, if we're being honest), but this week I managed to go the entire week without ordering out once, and cooked more than I have in the past month. That may not sound like a lot for most people, but for me it's a pretty big deal as it's something I've always struggled with. I've also been managing to eat a bit less, and my weight is finally starting to move downward ever so slightly, so despite the workout failure, I'm calling this week a win - and next week will be even better!

Alright, that'll be it for this update! Thanks so much for reading, we'll see you in the next weekly update!

 

[Anon42]

(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, please consider supporting us!)

(Doodled by our animator, Orexius!)

Hey everyone, welcome to the weekly update! We had a nice productive week, so let's get into it!

https://soundcloud.com/anon-42-498945869/crisis-point-extinction-boss-3-theme-preview

First off, our musician finished up the boss fight track for Boss 3, and you can listen to a preview of it up above! I love how it came out, so hopefully you'll be excited to hear the full thing once the update releases! I wasn't sure if I wanted to give each boss a unique theme at first, but our composer does such amazing work every time that any excuse to get more music from them is a good excuse in my book!

Next up, Puffernutter started work on a brand new tileset for a new area, an offshoot of the Summit, this week! Absolutely EVERYTHING in this image is subject to change, as most of the assets are either placeholders or are still in a very rough state at the moment, but we were so happy with how it was turning out that we wanted to show off a preview now!

Next, on top of some other stuff (like increasing the speed of Boss 3 so the fight's not so easy), I worked on a system this week to allow for player choices during dialogue! This likely won't be used super often in CPE - we're not going to have a branching storyline or anything - but it will be very useful for chatting with folks back at camp. I hope to use it to help flesh out their personalities by giving everyone optional dialogue here and there.

Also, to help out anyone struggling to make their way through the game, I'll be giving Rodriguez an "advice" option (as you can see in the image above) that has him point you in the right direction on where you should explore next, so hopefully getting lost won't be as common in the future. I like this implementation a lot, both because it's organic within the world (as compared to a waypoint marker or something like that), and it's also completely optional for the player; if you prefer figuring it out for yourself and don't want to be told where to go, just don't ask him for advice!

Lastly, Orexius finished the animation a while ago, but I don't believe we ever showed off the Tentacle BE H-scene, so here's an in-game preview of that!
And that's it for this week! We didn't end up holding any Picarto streams this week, sorry about that, but we DID go ahead and set up a second, more casual form of streaming on our Discord server! Unlike Picarto, our Discord streams aren't archived (and don't have audio), so I plan to use them for shorter casual dev streams rather than the usual 4+ hour streams we do on Picarto. I'm hoping it'll help fill the gaps when we're not feeling up to a lengthy stream, to allow us to still engage with people while we're working on a smaller scale. At the moment, anyone can watch the Discord streams by being in the server, but only Patrons are allowed to use voice chat, so hopefully the streams won't get too crazy!


The rest of this post will be a personal health/life update, so feel free to skip it if you want. Thanks for reading, and we'll see you next week!


Fitness took another dip this week, and I didn't do any real exercise, unfortunately - BUT, we've been sticking strong to eating better! We've fallen into a rhythm of only eating out once a week, ordering less when we do eat out that one time per week, and cooking a LOT more (and with healthier, fresher foods) at home, so I'm still feeling pretty good about it all things considered! Once I finish posting this update I'm gonna head to our exercise room and get back on that exercise train immediately, so next week will already be off to a better start than this one was.

And that's it for this week! Thank you so much for continuing to follow and support us, everyone, it really means the world to our team! We wouldn't be here without you!

 

[Anon42]

(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, please consider supporting us!)


Hey everybody! This week's update is a bit smaller, we only have one real visual to show ya, since I've been working on mostly non-visual stuff this week, like writing the Azulisk CG scene. That being said, let's get into it!


First off is the one major visual from this week, showing off new functionality for the Warped Scientist's red vial. As you likely know already, the Warped Scientist has 3 vial colors - red (damage), blue (BE status effect), and white (immobilizing status effect).

For recolored, higher-tier Scientists, I decided to handle the damage and status effect vials differently; for the red damage vial, as you can see in the gif above, it now creates a lingering flame effect that will cause damage to Alicia if she runs into it. The flame doesn't last forever, but it means that you'll have to be more aware of your positioning when fighting Warped Scientists.

I don't have a gif for blue and white vials, but instead of changing the effect of the vial itself for those ones, I decided to make the scientist throw 3 vials in quick succession. When he does this, all 3 vials will be of the same type as the first one, so you won't need to keep track of what types he's throwing and you can focus on avoiding them. I decided to go that route with the scientist because I realized the biggest issue with enemies in Crisis Point is that it's too easy to simply dodge one attack, then kill them before they pose much of a threat, due to their cooldown period between attacks. These enemy recolor AI changes will hopefully lead to enemies either having more difficult to avoid attacks, or having longer "attack phases", meaning the player has to dodge properly for a longer period before getting the opportunity to kill. It'll be exciting to see how all of this changes the later parts of the game, in any case!


Aside from that, Orexius finished up the Duo Slime BE H-scene (it's much like the non-BE scene, with a second slime jumping on Alicia's face), and also started working on some general cutscene animations, like this one:

Up until now, the majority of Crisis Point's cutscene animations have been bespoke animations made for a specific moment in a specific cutscene (i.e. Rodriguez putting his hands up when Alicia draws her gun during their first meeting). These animations are great, but the characters in cutscenes don't do a lot of animating outside of those rare bespoke animations, so the goal is to give each character a small library of reusable animations unique to them and fitting to their character (i.e. Alicia crossing her arms, Birch flipping through his book), and then adding those to existing cutscenes whenever they feel fitting, to give each character some more life and movement without every animation needing to be unique.

Last thing I wanted to mention for this week is a small one, but I implemented right analog stick aiming for gamepads this week! This system does NOT change the way aiming in Crisis Point works - you're still limited to 8-directional aiming, and when running you still can't aim behind you or anything. All of the existing limitations are still in place, but I figured some players would be more comfortable, for example, using the right stick to aim and R1 to shoot. If it makes even 1 person more comfortable playing the game then I'm glad to have added it!

Oh, one more final note about streams - sorry to anyone who's waiting for Picarto streams again, I decided not to do any this week because Picarto had some website changes and they were causing issues for a number of people, so I figured it would be better to wait it out a bit. We did a few Discord streams instead, and hopefully Picarto has smoothed out the issues well enough now for me to start streaming there again this week.


And that's it for this week! Sorry it's not as exciting as the last two weeks; Orex can only work on H-scenes so much before other animations need to be done Thank you so much for supporting and reading! The rest of the update will be a personal one, so feel free to stop reading here if you want, and we'll see you next week!
As far as personal stuff goes this week, it was pretty alright! Exercise was still a bit of a bust (but not completely, I did exercise a few times which is better than last week!), and more importantly the house talked about why exercise has fallen off for all of us. We've realized that it's because our exercise room is on the smaller side and can only really comfortably hold one person, so exercise has become a "wait your turn" thing rather than a group event like it used to be when it was in our living room. The lack of community and encouragement between the three of us, for lack of a better term, resulted in a lot less pressure to keep it up, and we all gradually fell off the wagon. We're not entirely sure what we're going to do about it yet, but now that we know what the problem is we can work on fixing it! I'm happy to report we're also continuing to do well in regards to eating better and cooking more, so all in all I'd call it a pretty great week in terms of personal health and improvement.

And with that, the update is done! Thank you so much for reading everybody; I hope everything is going great for all of you, too! We'll see you in the next update!

 

[Anon42]

(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, please consider supporting us!)

Hey everybody! So, just to preface this weekly update, you might be expecting a really big one since we skipped last week's update due to the covid vaccine shots (we're all doing fine now, so no worries), but this update is going to be pretty normal sized. I've been struggling pretty hard this week with mental issues, which is something I've dealt with for years but it's been especially bad this week. I don't really know why, but I'm planning on seeking some mental help soon, now that our household is fully vaccinated.

First up in the update is something from last week. In the video up above (which is playing in slow motion to make the effect easier to see), you can see a comparison shot of the game's screen transition fade effect - before, the fade was as simple as drawing a transparent black box on top of the screen, which makes for a perfectly workable transition, but it looks kinda muddy and flat. I decided to rewrite it using a very simple shader that adds a flat amount of color to each pixel instead, and the result is an effect that fades the darker colors very quickly, while the brighter colors stay visible for longer. You can see the effect most clearly by looking at the lights and windows, or the metal bits of the room transition doors. It's a simple and subtle change, and I'm not sure how much anyone but me will care or even notice lol, but the effect is much nicer if you ask me.

For this week, I spent most of my work time refactoring our H-scene code, which was an absolute spaghetti mess and made it so adding new H-scenes into the game required hours of work, even after the animation was done. Refactoring it took a lot longer than I thought it would, but I decided to rework it now because of how many new H-scenes were added this update, which made it very clear how inefficient (and frankly annoying to work with) the old code was. The refactoring is pretty much done now, thankfully, and should make implementation of future scenes much quicker.
My work may have been a struggle, but Orexius has been cranking out work like crazy - here's some of the cutscene animations he did for Birch and Alicia this week.

We also have the finished version of that 3D model I mentioned a few updates ago, and he's here to say hi!

This guy won't be in the next update just yet, unfortunately; we don't have the time to give him proper animations, so he'll be making his ingame debut in v0.45 instead.

Lastly, Orexius also updated Alicia's.. "solo" H-scene, which you can see a preview of right here. It now includes a second variation of the animation, as well as an "outro" of sorts.

And that's it for this weekly update. We're going to try and wrap up development of v0.44 as soon as possible, but it might end up being released somewhat late in the month, or having some intended features delayed until next update. My apologies ahead of time if either of those end up happening; we're going to try to get it done on time, but I can't make any promises as there's still quite a bit to do to wrap it up. If it does get delayed longer than you'd like, don't forget that you can unpledge and you'll still receive the update when it comes out. In the meantime, though, thank you so much for continuing to support us!

 

[Anon42]

(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our major playable update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, consider supporting us!)

Hey everybody! Before I start with the post proper, I apologize for not posting outside of Patreon for the past few weeks - if you want to know why in detail, you can read the post about it here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/status-update-50409809

If you don't want to read it, suffice it to say the past few weeks have been rough for us for a few reasons, and things were moving very slowly. That being said..

(NSFW trailer available here: https://www.redgifs.com/watch/lightslatebluequaintpooch )

Despite running the timer down to the absolute wire, Crisis Point: Extinction v0.44 is now complete! I told ya I'd release it by the end of the month, didn't I? ..well, it's still April in my timezone, at least.

Anyway, you can watch the trailer up above for a few highlights, and here's a quick list of the major things we did this update cycle.


v0.44 MAJOR CHANGES AND FEATURES
-Added in cutscenes before and after Boss 3, along with new boss fight music, to finish up the Boss 3 rework
-Continued work on new Golem enemy, which will be added in officially in v0.45
-Added several new H-scenes
-Added a handful of new animations to various cutscenes throughout the game, to give them more spice
-Started work on Boss 4 (will be kept secret)
-Gave many recolored enemies altered behaviors/attack patterns, to freshen up the late-game combat and exploration
-Fixed more bugs and glitches (full list at the bottom of the post)

A good few of the things that were intended to be in v0.44 didn't end up making it in, including a few things I teased in weekly updates, and I'm sorry about that. The last few months have been rough and I let some things fall through the cracks; that's not an excuse though, and I'll do my best to avoid this happening again in the future.

v0.44 doesn't offer much in terms of brand new content, but it DOES offer many much-needed changes to the game so far; the recolored enemy behaviors make playing through the game much more exciting, and the new cutscenes before and after Boss 3 are my personal favorite scenes in the game so far! I highly recommend playing through the game on a fresh save file to really see the most of what this update has to offer.

As far as our v0.45 plans are concerned..

v0.45 GOALS AND PLANS
-Implement new Golem enemies
-Add more new and updated H-scenes
-Add more cutscene animations to be used in cutscenes throughout the game
-Implement new mobility upgrade
-Implement Azulisk (Crystal Dragon) CG, and hopefully redo Edovex CG
-Add further story cutscenes and a new small "biome"
-Continue adding altered behaviors/attack patterns to enemy recolors
-Finish implementing dialogue choice system
-Fix more bugs and glitches

v0.45 will be focused more on pushing forward with new content, since v0.44 revitalized and finished up existing parts of the game. Many of the things in v0.45 have already been started; Orexius has already finished roughing out almost all of the Golem's animations, Red is already hard at work on the Azulisk CG, etc. I have confidence it'll be a great update, especially with things finally calming down and returning to normal around here.

Oh, one last thing before the post ends, regarding the $5 tier Gallery and $2 tier Gifsets - I will be updating these as soon as I can, but I'll need a few days first. I've been crunching hard the past few days and I need a small break, and the Gallery update in particular is going to be more time consuming than usual to do, both because of the large amount of new H-scenes to add and because of the reworked H-scene code. The gallery is basically going to have to be remade from scratch, so I ask for your patience - I'll have their updates out asap.


Alright, that's it for this update! An endless amount of thank yous to all of our incredible Patrons for their support during this update cycle, especially these amazing and gorgeous people here:

SeraphStarliege
Katsune Teku
Benjamin Arnold
Leon Kiske
Pedro Fraga
TCTheorist
Joshua Woodward
Skrabyzarc
koldkanadian
7mod Al-rby3
Marumatsu
HOELS
Lukas Binder
Dezren

Thank you so very much for reading, and to our $10 patrons, I hope you enjoy v0.44! See you in the next one!
-A42





v0.44 MINOR CHANGES AND BUG FIXES

-Fixed an issue where the fade-to-black effect at the end of the demo might not cover the entire screen, in some situations
-Fixed a missing background graphic and a misplaced Edovex nest in a late-game Summit room
-Fixed bug where Warped Soldier bullets were not properly recolored to match the color of Soldier they came from
-Fixed bug where Hoverjets Hover sound effect would continue looping if the player grabbed a ledge while using it
-Fixed bug where Hoverjets Dash sound effect would continue looping if the player was hit during an extended dash
-Fixed an issue where Warped Soldier bullets would go through walls
-Fixed a room just before the Deep Soil being improperly labeled as a save room on the map
-Fixed a potential bug where Birch wouldn't show up during the camp cutscene where he upgrades your blaster
-Fixed a bug where Warped Sentries would always stand up to block Force Shots that explode in front of them, even if the Sentry was stunned
-Altered the lighting used throughout the game slightly
-Fixed issue where some background pillars in Subaquatic Caverns clipped through into the underwater section very slightly
-Updated screen transition fade effect; the new effect is similar (fade to black), but now uses a shader for a more colorful, visually interesting fade
-Fixed a minor longstanding camera issue where, if the player didn't move for a while, the camera would appear to come to a rest, but then suddenly move 1 more pixel before stopping
-Updated Screen Shake code to look nicer
-Fixed an issue where Power Orbs didn't scale burning damage on enemies
-Fixed an issue causing Alicia's H-scene voice clips to not change sometimes, when entering a duo scene
-Fixed a slight positioning issue with Tentacle H-scenes
-Increased Boss 3's HP and the speed of all her attacks, to make the fight more difficult
-Made the burnable vines next to the Kilogrip in Deep Soil less annoying to hit
-Added sound effects to Crystal Shot bullet chip, and Crystal Dragon enemy

 

[Anon42]

(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, please consider supporting us!)

Hey everyone, this is gonna be a pretty short weekly update. Development is progressing pretty well overall; I personally ended up not getting too much done this week, due to a combination of tax-related stresses and personal issues, BUT the updated gallery is nearly finished and I should have it out early next week, and now that taxes are done I'm going to be scheduling a doctor's visit to hopefully, finally, help take care of the other part.

The good news is I'm the only one taking it a bit slower right now; Orexius has been tearing through animations, and Puffernutter has finally had some free time to work on tilesets as well, so even though I'm struggling a bit we still have good progress happening.

I'll be posting a bunch of animations Orexius has worked on, but first, I wanted to ask for some additional info from anyone out there that's run into the H-scene crash bug in v0.44.1. If you've encountered that crash, can you provide me with any additional information about your crashes, other than the error log? To be a little more specific, I know the crash can happen as a result of H-scenes after you run out of health (and I'm working on fixing that), but has anyone had it occur during regular gameplay when you haven't died? I haven't been able to make that happen, and unfortunately the error log isn't very specific, so trying to find and fix all instances of the crash has been rough.

Anyway, with that out of the way, here's a bunch of animations Orex has worked on:

These golem animations in particular aren't quite complete, yet, and only have basic flat shading; I haven't been able to work on actually implementing the animations yet, and we want to get them ingame and make sure no changes need to be made before Orex fully details them.

There are a few NSFW animations, too, but they're still WIP so I'll save them for a later date

Alright, that's it for this week. Sorry that I don't have more to talk about in this weekly update; things should improve soon, once I get the gallery update out and can get back to working on the game proper. Thanks for your patience, everybody! My personal issues are holding me back right now and I'm sorry for that, but because of you all, I can finally afford to see a doctor to try and work through the things that have been plaguing me since.. well, before I even started CPE. This is certainly not the first time it's made me struggle with work, but with any luck (and thanks exclusively to all of your support), it WILL be the last.

 

[Anon42]

(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, please consider supporting us!)

Hey everyone. I won't beat around the bush, this week was a struggle for me again - I managed to get the Gallery update out, which I'm happy about, and I did some writing work as well, both for an upcoming CG and story scenes, but things were pretty slow on my end.

I'm still waiting on the doctor to get back to me about scheduling an appointment, but hopefully once that's done it won't be too long before I can get some help in dealing with some of my depression, ADD, and anxiety. I don't think I've ever specified what kind of mental issues I'm dealing with (even though some of it is probably obvious if you've been following me for a while), and I'm not sure why that is; there's not really any value in being private or secretive about it, and I guess Mental Health Awareness month is as good a time as any to talk about it. I'm not sure why my depression is flaring up so heavily right now, nothing is going wrong in my life at the moment - if anything, we're doing great now that Puffernutter's health issues have been clearing up.. but I suppose that's the nature of depression, isn't it? It doesn't always make sense; if it did, it might be easier to deal with. Anyway, I won't talk your ear off about it - it's not an excuse for not getting more work done, and I'm sorry for that. Thankfully, the rest of our team is helping to pick up the slack while I try to figure out how to work with my own brain.

I mentioned Orexius was working on some NSFW stuff last week, and one of those animations is the new Edovex BE scene!

There's still a little bit of work to be done here (like giving Alicia her regular clothes), but enjoy the preview! We're doing something special with the animation that I'm excited for you all to see, too; you won't know what it is just from the loop, though, so you'll have to wait and find out.

Puffernutter also had some time to work on tilesets this week; we posted a scene from this new area a while ago, and things might not look TOO different, but last time the scene was cobbled together from non-tile images that weren't actually possible to make levels with.

Now, this scene is made up of actual tiles prepped for use ingame, and there's been a lot of extra detail and polish too, so it's looking much nicer overall and I can start putting together rooms with it. Everything is still WIP, and the background still needs work, of course, but that'll come in due time. Oh, and ignore the fact that there's 2 Alicia's, Puffernutter just uses her sprite for scale reference when zoomed in

Anyway, that's about all I have this week. Sorry again for the mediocre weekly update; I'm really hoping next week's will be different, and I'm going to set myself some distinct work goals to try and make sure it happens. I can't thank you all enough for sticking with me even when this stuff happens; I hate letting you all down, but the stability you guys give us even in the tougher times means more than I can describe. So, thank you all so much, and I'll see you back here next week with a much better update.

 

[Anon42]

(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, please consider supporting us!)

Hey everyone. This'll be a pretty short update, but not for any bad reasons. Some good news this week, first; I managed to get most of the work I wanted done (not quite all of it, but it's a big step up from the previous few weeks), and I have a doctor's visit scheduled for early-mid June. I was hoping to have a visit sooner than that, but it was the soonest they could schedule me, and at least it's finally happening.

There's still not too much to post about this week; I spent my time implementing the various animations Orexius has been working on the past few weeks, doing some more writing, and planning out the new area Puffernutter is making tiles for. So, there's not really anything to show from my work, but it IS getting done slowly.

Orexius has been continuing work on the Edovex BE H-scene, and I have some previews of that for you today; first of all, the Duo H-scene loop:

Additionally, if you remember from last week, I mentioned we were doing something special with the animation.. so here's a still image preview of that!

The bad news (and you probably already realized this considering the last few weekly updates) is that the next version of CPE will almost definitely not be out on schedule. I don't know how much it will be delayed, but I've been feeling burnout of various degrees for.. a long time now, and now that I'm finally doing something about my mental health issues, I'm very hopeful that I'll come out of this better than ever. I've rarely been able to reach the level of productivity that I know I'm capable of, and I was never sure if it was the depression or the ADD (most likely a mixture of both), but with any luck I'll be able to figure it out and finally do something about it with the help of the doctors, instead of just trying to power through my mental issues like I've always done.


Alright, that's it for this weekly update. Sorry there wasn't too much to see, but the week did go overall well despite that! Sometimes we just don't have too much to show off visually, such is the nature of game development. Thank you all so much for supporting us; we'll see you again next week!