Crisis Point: Extinction - Lewd Metroidvania (2019 Public Demo now available!)

[Anon_42]

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

 

Hey everyone! Someday I will succeed in posting the weekly update on Saturday, like it's supposed to be, but today is not that day :' )
 

I struggled to get stuff done more this week compared to the last few, so there's not too much to talk about. I think the change in ADHD medication last week might not be working as well as I hoped; I plan on giving it one more week to see if I just need more time to adjust, but if it still feels worse by next weekend I plan on scheduling another appointment to alter things again. I think I mentioned the details last week, but I switched from 1 extended release pill in the morning and 1 short release pill in the afternoon, to just taking two of the short release pills, one in the morning one in the afternoon. Now that I've been on that for about a week, I get the feeling that it wasn't that the short-term medication is more effective, and more that the long-term pill from the morning was still active when I took the afternoon short-term pill, and the combination of the two of them was what made it feel more effective. If that's the case, it's very possible that just upping the dosage would be a good solution, but I have no intention of trying that without approval from my doctor first, so we'll see what happens.
 

In any case, between that and the fact that we also had both Puffernutter and Orexius's birthdays this week (send 'em some love!), it led to me getting less done than I'd hoped - but not nothing. I spent most of this week implementing some of the animations Orexius has been working on, as well as tinkering more with special effects and shaders. I redid the little dust clouds that Alicia leaves when she jumps, lands, or dashes across the ground - I don't have footage prepared to show it off, and it's a bit of a subtle change, but I like the new effect a lot more. We also gave Alicia a different ledge grab animation for when the ledge she grabs is too short to give her a foothold, so she'll grab on with both hands now instead. I also optimized various parts of the game's code; I'm still refamiliarizing myself with my codebase, since I hadn't worked on it in 4 months, and now has seemed like a great time to optimize and tweak things to be easier to work with. It's not exciting work, but it makes all my future work easier, so it's well worth it.
 

Like I mentioned last week, we're revisiting the visuals of older areas and analyzing them thoroughly to see where we can improve them, but we also spent some time this week working on the art design for a future piece of content as well. Too much of CPE's art design has been handled nonchalantly, since it all started back when the team consisted of just me (and I'm no art designer), so we're trying to be more thorough with stuff we create now. I know, in hindsight it seems like an obvious thing to do, but hey, mistakes now means we make better stuff in the future, and you can't learn from mistakes without making them in the first place ?
 

So that's the major stuff I worked on last week, but I do believe I promised a .gif dump in the title, didn't I? Here's a handful (but not all) of the animations Orexius has been working on, both character animations and effects:

 

Even though I've been struggling with work, Orex has been a busy bee, with a good mix of new and reworked animations to fill the game out. As you can see he's taken to special effects animation very well, and we're finally giving NPCs some actions to do at camp so they're not just standing around idly whenever you come back.
 

Well, that's about all I have for this week. Thanks for reading everybody, and for continuing to be patient with me - it would be great if getting back to work meant I was at 100% right away, but that definitely hasn't been the case, and I really appreciate you all letting me take my return at a healthy pace. We'll see you again in next week's update!

[Anon_42]

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

Hey everybody. This week for the most part continued the trend of last week, in that work was.. difficult for me. I'll get into the details here, but in general I wasn't able to get much done for most of the week, with the exception of Friday.

 

After struggling so much during the rest of the week, I realized on Friday that I still had some of the previous ADHD medication that my doctor prescribed me. I detailed the medications in last week's update so I won't go into it again, but I decided to try the old prescription again to see if it helped. Lo and behold, my productivity came right back and I was able to sit down for several hours and get stuff done! So, I think it's pretty safe to say that the newer prescription isn't working well, and I'll be trying to schedule another visit with them to talk about changing it again.
 

I don't think I'll be going back to the exact same prescription as before, since I do still think it could be more effective/last longer than it does; I'm pretty sure it comes down to dosage quantity, because the two pills are the same type of medicine, just one is an extended release and one is a quick release, so it seems likely the combination of the two is what was making me feel the effects. I'm not sure if we'll try higher doses of the short-term pill, a higher dosage extended release, or what, but I'll work with my doctor to figure out what the next step will be.

 

Back to the game itself; thanks to Friday's burst of productivity, I managed to refactor the game's H-scene code again. As you all probably know, in v0.44 I reworked CPE's H-scene code to make it easier to work with, but unfortunately my implementation wasn't very well thought out, and it also led to a handful of crashing issues. I had already come up with a better way to refactor that code again, and I finished doing that on Friday. There's still a bit of testing left to do, but the system is much better now, and it shouldn't be nearly as crash prone! Normally things like code refactoring are really tedious and I struggle to keep my focus to get them done in a reasonable time, but ADHD medication really makes a world of difference.
 

Aside from that it was business as usual; I started implementing some of Orexius's H-scene xray animations, and Orex continued working on character and special effects animations. Since we're already messing with a bunch of old H-scene stuff, he's working on updating the regular Slime H-scene, since it's pretty outdated by now; I plan to have him go over almost all of the other older H-scenes as well, to give my old animations a new coat of paint and bring them up to the game's newer quality standards. They'll keep the same poses of course, just with improved artwork more in line with the game's recent H-scenes, but it's a low priority so don't expect to see a lot of them in the near future.

 

Well, that's about all I have for you this week. I don't really have anything visual to show off, sorry about that, but I'm glad I was able to get SOMETHING done last minute this week! The more I try different medications and prescriptions, the closer I get to finding the right mix of things to help me with my ADHD. Even though the last few months have been the worst of it, I've struggled since the beginning of development with all of the quirks of ADHD and what it does to my brain, and considering what happened this week, I think figuring out the medication will be the point where things really get back on track. It's absolutely wild how much of a difference it makes. Anyway, thanks so much for reading everyone, and for continuing to stick around and support us! It might still be a few weeks before things really pick up, but I'll continue updating you as much as possible, both on the game's progress and on my own progress. We'll see you again in next week's update!

[Anon_42]

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

Hey everyone! This week in CPE development, I decided to take a pause from the other things I was working on, and tinker with a few things that I've been curious about for a while. The first I have a visual for, and the second is still something I'm figuring out, but seems promising.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_MM3FMwGis
 

First off, the video above! I've mentioned before that I'm trying to learn shaders, which is a laborious process - shaders are written in a different programming language than the game itself, so there's already a layer of difficulty in learning them. That's not a big deal since most programming fundamentals carry over regardless of the language used, but then the more difficult part is just that shaders are so much more complex and obtuse than anything I've coded for the main game. A lot of game creation engines will have visual shader creators, like Unity's Shader Graph, but my engine has none of that, so every shader has to be written by hand.
 

All that is a long way to say that even though it's a difficult process, I'm making progress! The video above is a showcase of that, because this week I managed to design and implement a fiery dissolve effect shader, which is now being used on the vines you burn away using the Flare Strike. The video shows the old effect on the left, and the new effect on the right, so you can really get a picture for how much better it looks. I'm thrilled with it; this is the kind of effect I've always wanted to be able to create, and I can apply a lot of the things I learned in making the effect to other parts of CPE as well! In general I'm spending a lot of my time right now trying to learn new techniques, and find ways to improve my development pipelines, especially the tedious parts, to try and prevent the burnout I was feeling for such a long time - which brings me neatly to the next thing.
 

One of the most time-consuming parts of making Crisis Point is level creation. At the moment, every room in CPE requires every single asset to be placed by hand. CPE is made up of 32x32 pixel tiles, and the screen size is 640x480, which is the smallest size a room in the game can be - that's a size of 20x15 tiles, or 300 total tile spaces, in the smallest possible room. Not every tile will be filled of course, many of them need to be blank space for gameplay, but often there are multiple layers of detail required in a room, and most rooms are bigger than 640x480! On top of that, my engine's default level creation tool.. kinda sucks. It works fine for smaller and simpler things, but large rooms cause it to lag, and it lacks some features that would be tremendously helpful. The end result is that creating and fully detailing a room often takes several hours, and there are hundreds of rooms in the game already, and hundreds more to come. It's honestly a really boring process and I should've done something about it a long time ago, but I never got around to looking at other options.
 

This week though, I decided to look into the idea of creating a level design tool of my own, or at least finding some way to make the process easier. With CPE already being so far in development, and my plans to switch engines for my next game, creating a fully-featured level designer doesn't seem like a prudent option at this stage - however, I don't necessarily need a fully-featured design tool. I decided to take a look at how my engine stores the data for levels, and as it turns out, they're basically just json files with a custom file extension - they're written in plain text that can absolutely be read, edited by hand, and auto-generated using the tools available to me. I still have some testing to do to know for sure if this route is going to work out, but my early testing seems extremely promising that I'll be able to, at the very least, create an auto-tiling tool that places tiles for me, and exports them into a format that my engine can load natively. This would quite literally save over an hour per room designed, and since I'd be able to load them into the project files like any room created using the IDE itself, it wouldn't cause any changes to the game on the user end! Generating tiles at runtime could cause extra loading time, for example, but this method wouldn't have any effect on the game once exported.
 

Needless to say, if this works out it will take a bit of time to develop the tool, but the time (and tedium) saved by doing it would be immeasurable. I'm super excited about the idea, and I'll be looking into it more thoroughly next week, so I should have a good idea of how feasible it is by the next update!

 

So that's most of what I spent my time on this week. I did a few other things, like implementing a pink vignette on the screen when Alicia's libido gets high, but those were the big things. Like before, I'm trying to not push myself too much with work for the time being, so I'm only putting in a few hours a day, but I'm generally feeling more and more capable of getting stuff done as time goes on! Unfortunately my medicine doctor's schedule is backed up, so I won't be able to see them about changing my prescription again until mid-November, but I have enough of my old prescription left to last me most of that time, so everything should be fine.
 

On Orexius's end, he worked on a bunch of smaller things this week; finishing up some of the new ledge grab/vault animations, some BE alts for the new animations being added, a crouched version of Alicia's "taking damage" animation, updating the Tentacle H-scene, and so on. Not super exciting stuff, but all important!
 

And that's pretty much it for this week. Thank you guys for reading, and I hope you like the new effect as much as I do - I look forward to implementing some more stuff using my new shader knowledge in the near future. We'll see you again next week!

[Anon_42]

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

 

Hey everyone, sorry for the late update - Saturday ended up being super busy with chores and errands, so I wasn't able to get to writing the update post until today.

 

There's not too much to talk about this week, but not because we didn't make progress! I spent the entire week working on one specific thing - a custom level editor, like I talked about last update. I did some testing early in the week, and determined that as far as I can tell, the method I came up with to export levels from my own editor works perfectly! I was able to make a simple level and pull it into the main CPE project file, then load it, enter it, and leave it with no issues. The room was mostly just made up of collision blocks (no tiles or anything yet), but I was also able to implement a room transition, just to make sure more complex things work as well.

 

There is a bit of manual file editing I have to do to make it work, so before you start wondering, no, this will not be a publicly released editor. It would unfortunately be impossible for anyone without access to the project files to be able to import levels using this method, but because the levels are imported directly into my project files, it also means there won't be any kind of impact on the game's performance or loading times.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KK6gMxY5-fs

 

Needless to say, I'm thrilled! I spent the entire week working on the editor itself, which you can see an example of in the video above. It's proving to be a pretty tricky process, especially being able to zoom and drag the room around, but I'm already excited to start using it. It may look pretty simple at the moment, but I'm doing quite a bit of optimization in the early stages to make sure the editor will perform well even when working on huge levels. Right now, I've optimized the way the editor is handled so that it doesn't really matter how many things I place in the level, it won't really have a performance impact. I wanted to get the basics working properly here before working on filling in assets, which is why the menus I open in the video are all empty.

 

The default level editor in my IDE is missing so many features I want from it, and it lags to hell when rooms get big or complicated, so seeing my editor running at ~9,000 FPS even when filled to the brim with objects is exciting. I'll be able to implement any features I want into this thing, so once it's finished, designing levels for Crisis Point will be so much easier and faster. It's also just been a lot of fun to work on, honestly! It's a nice change of pace to program something like this.

 

 

I'll likely be continuing to mostly work on the level editor over the next week, but I'll be doing some work on implementing more of Orex's animations as well. He has a lot of smaller animations that he's been working on and updating, like the Warped Soldier's combat animations, that just need to be implemented by me now.

 

This update may be a smaller one, but the work I'm doing now is a gateway towards the game being finished faster, AND it'll let me do some more exciting stuff with the levels in the game! Stuff like more interesting lighting, and more parallax objects, which would've been far too cumbersome to implement in the default level editor. I can't wait to see what I can cook up with it. In the meantime, thank you so much for reading, and for continuing to be so patient with us! I wish we were closer to releasing an update to the game, since you all have had to wait so long, but since I'm still getting in the swing of working, we haven't quite figured out the right medication for me, and I'm trying not to overwork myself, it's still a little slow going. I did manage to have an 8 hour work day this week though, working on the level editor, and I felt fine afterwards! Hopefully I'll be able to start doing longer work days more often, so things can really get back on track, and I'll be able to see my medicine doctor again mid-November to try changing up my medication again. Things are looking really good lately, but I still have to ask for your patience just a little longer before I'm back at full power.

 

And that's about it for this week! Thank you so much for reading, and for continuing to support us. We'll see you again in next week's update!

[Anon_42]

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

Hey everyone, just a text update today. This was a slightly weird week for me; I had a few days where I felt off and was struggling to get work done, and I think I had my first experience with a "concerta crash" - right around the time my medication started wearing off for the day I just lost all of my energy, and spent the rest of the evening feeling bummed for no discernible reason. I did some googling the day after, and it sounds like it's a fairly normal side effect of the ADHD medication. Since it's a stimulant, when it wears off it can end up making you feel pretty terrible. It's only happened the one time so far, so hopefully it won't be a regular occurence, but there are ways to counter it and I plan on talking to my doctor about it when I see her again mid-November.

 

With all that being said, even though the week was kinda off, it's far from all bad news! I didn't get as much done as I hoped, but I got some good work done on the level editor; programming menus is kind of a hassle, but I managed to get a foundation for the menus that I can use for most of them, allowing me to populate a list of unlimited size with objects for placement in the level editor, scroll through that menu, select what object to place, and put it in the level.
 

I also finished early work on the exporting process, so now when I'm done with a level I can easily save it and drop it straight into Crisis Point, and it will come out the exact same as it does in the editor. I also managed to finish implementing both room size and grid options, and fixing any of the minor bugs that have popped up. Basically, this week was more foundational stuff, and I should be able to pretty easily add in new assets to the level editor from here on. Tilesets will require a unique menu, since they're functionally different from objects, but the work I've done will be applicable to all objects in the game; collisions, enemies, triggers, and so on. It's still got a ways to go, especially to implement some of the features I want like auto-tiling, but the core feature set is looking great.

Aside from my work, Orex has finished updating all of the Warped Soldier's gameplay animations, and he's been doing some more experimentation with 3D models and rendering. He found some pixel rendering techniques online, and was able to get some surprisingly good looking assets out of it! With the golem animations from before, he simply traced over renders with pixels, which takes quite a bit of time - but the new rendering techniques he found allow him to export 3d animations directly to the ingame pixelated resolution, with basic shading and everything. They're a bit rough around the edges, naturally, but they work extremely well as a base to build animations off of, and save him a lot of time - especially with animations that have complex 3D motions. I'll try to post some examples of animations using that technique next week, but I can assure you that you can't even tell it was made using 3D models for help, once the full detail is applied.

 

Hopefully this next week will be less strange for me (fingers crossed, since it's also my birthday week), so I can get more stuff done. I'm really enjoying working on this editor, at least when my brain's behaving. I'm trying to make some changes in my house and work schedule to accommodate my ADHD, as well; one of the negatives of having so many people living in one house is that things can get pretty loud/active here sometimes, and since my "office" is in the main room of the house, it can unfortunately be really distracting, especially with my ADHD. I spent some money this week on setting up a nice upstairs office in our bedroom, so I have a quiet place to work when I need it. We still need a few things before it's usable, but they're in the mail and should arrive this week. Fingers crossed it'll help me out!

And that's about it for this week. Coming to terms with my mental health is a difficult process, but I'm realizing I need to start making changes in life aside from just taking medication to accomodate my mind and work with it, instead of against it. In addition to the office upstairs, I started doing intermittent fasting again (which has previously worked great for me, both in terms of weight loss and generally feeling way better), and our household has started going on almost-daily walks, to try and work on our physical health and hopefully get my heart rate under control. I've said it a million times already, but seriously, thank you all so much for giving me the time and opportunity to work on all of this! I'm so grateful to all of you for sticking with us.

As one last thing before I go: I can't promise anything yet (especially with the weirdness of the past week), but I'm seriously considering trying to stream again soon - maybe not on a schedule, but just a stream or two here and there - so keep an eye out for that if you're interested. We'll see you again next week with another update!

Edited October 31, 2021 by Anon_42

[Anon_42]

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

Hey everyone. Sorry for not posting an update last week, I've been struggling to be honest. With all of my health issues coming to light thanks to my medical appointments, I've been trying to make a lot of life changes to improve things, and it's been kind of overwhelming to have so many things change so suddenly. I've never been good with change, I'm very much a creature of habit, and these last few weeks have been rough. It's all stuff that will be great for me in the long run - going on daily walks, eating out less, cutting sugar from my diet, changing our office setup to accommodate my ADHD brain, and more - it's just difficult to get used to all the changes at once. Work is still progressing, especially from Orexius who has been getting a lot done lately, but my half is going slower than I'd like.

 

For the time being, I'm putting a pause on the level editor, and focusing on trying to get the most important stuff done so I can put out a new update for you guys asap. We've kept you all waiting so long already, I don't want to push it back any longer if I don't have to. To that end, I've been working on some bugfixing, and implementing the Golem enemy's animations that I posted ages ago; he's proving to be more complex to implement than most enemies, thanks to his floating movement patterns, attack variety, and hands/body being disconnected in many animations, but I think that'll make him pretty interesting as an encounter once all is said and done.

 

Orexius has been doing a lot of work in a lot of different places: he's currently in the process of updating all of the special effects for Alicia's blaster, and the various upgrade chips you can collect for it. I'll post a few of them here - keep in mind these are just direct exports of the animations, not actually ingame, so they'll look a little different.

 

As you can see, the bullets themselves are getting more animation, but they're also getting unique muzzle flashes, and unique impact and dissipate animations, depending on whether the bullet hits something or reaches its maximum range without hitting anything. 

 

He's getting real good at special effects animation lately, as you all saw with the underwater mine explosion, so having him go back and update a lot of our old effects is exciting. He's been getting so many animations done lately that I'm just playing catch-up at this point, trying to implement them all ?

 

Aside from effects animation, he also started working on the Poison Alraune BE H-scene; it's not animated yet, but he's finished the base sprite and pose. Here's a preview of that, and with the amount of "more futa" requests I get, I imagine it'll be at least a few people's new favorite!

 

And that's about all I have for game updates. As far as personal updates go, I had a follow-up doctor's appointment a few days ago, and we decided to try raising the dosage on the ADHD medication I'm taking. I'm pretty sure I've mentioned it before, but the medication I'm on right now does seem to work, buuuut only sometimes. Some days I can feel it working and it really helps with productivity, and other days I feel nothing, so with any luck a higher dosage will do the trick. I have another follow-up with her in a month, and I also talked over my options with her during our appointment; if just raising the dosage doesn't help, I have a few other things I can try, like taking the pills in a different order, or taking more than one of the short-term pill at a time. The medicine I'm on is a controlled substance, so I went over all of those things thoroughly with her, to get her approval on what I should and shouldn't do with them. I want to make sure I don't have to wait another full month to try something new if this doesn't work right away, but I'm not about to start messing around with pills without doctor approval, so this seems like a happy medium.

 

 

To wrap up, I have high hopes for this coming week; there's loads of stuff for me to implement from Orexius and hopefully the higher dosage of ADHD medication will help me do it. Our upstairs office setup is nearly done, all that's really missing now is a dedicated computer; my laptop will be fine for some types of work, but it struggles to handle the size of CPE's main project file. Still, I should be able to start doing a good amount of work there, and it's a much quieter and more isolated space that should help avoid the ADHD distraction pitfalls of living with a lot of people.

 

Anyway, that's it for this week. I was hoping I would've been back at full capacity by now, but mental (and physical) health are no joke, especially after years of pushing through the difficulties instead of dealing with them in a healthy way. Thank you for reading, and doubly so for sticking with us even though the path back to full-time work has been a difficult one! It means so much that you've all continued to be so supportive and understanding even after all this. With any luck, we'll see you next week with a better update - and with any luck, I'll also be able to stop prefacing everything with "with any luck" soon!

[Anon_42]

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

[sophiextime]

I tried the demo and really enjoyed it till i got to the 2 worm things that both attack you through the walls and just imposible to kill. so i gave up. shame, was enjoying this.

[jpackinwood]

2 hours ago, sophiextime said:

I tried the demo and really enjoyed it till i got to the 2 worm things that both attack you through the walls and just imposible to kill. so i gave up. shame, was enjoying this.

They're a bit challenging your first time. Best way to beat them is to play patiently, memorize their patterns (they only have a few patterns, and each one is telegraphed beforehand if you watch the ground/walls), and you can shoot/farm the flying rocks for health drops if you make mistakes.

[Anon_42]

On 12/1/2021 at 2:46 PM, sophiextime said:

I tried the demo and really enjoyed it till i got to the 2 worm things that both attack you through the walls and just imposible to kill. so i gave up. shame, was enjoying this.

Sorry you had trouble with that boss, they're meant to be an early-game test of your ability to aim accurately, so they only take damage when you hit their head. Like jpackinwood said in his response, the best way to handle them is to be patient; they always telegraph their attacks by spitting out a stream of small rocks at the position and angle they're going to jump, so if you can prioritize getting out of their line of attack, all you need to deal with is the rocks they spit out, which you can shoot for health recovery. Make sure you picked up the Skill Point (the glowing yellow diamond) on the way to the boss, too, and spend it on the first skill Alicia has access to; it doubles the effectiveness of health recovery pickups, and makes them automatically pull towards you if you're not at full HP.




 

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

 

 

Hey everyone! Sorry for this update being so late; I had a stomach bug over the weekend, and on Monday when I was planning on making the post, I had a pair of appointments at the clinic that went longer than expected and chewed up my whole day.

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

[sophiextime]

Thank you for your replies and i am going to persevere and do my best. this game has a lot of fun potential and i am excited and patient to see its development. I hope you keep going with this and never let things get you down enough to quit. I know in time this can and will be a fine finished game. thank you again and i will be trying the demo again and watching this thread

 

[jpackinwood]

2 hours ago, sophiextime said:

Thank you for your replies and i am going to persevere and do my best. this game has a lot of fun potential and i am excited and patient to see its development. I hope you keep going with this and never let things get you down enough to quit. I know in time this can and will be a fine finished game. thank you again and i will be trying the demo again and watching this thread

 

Don't want to clutter this thread up too much (better when it's mostly just updates on the game), but I think you'll be impressed if you stick it out. I played it for the lewd content, but within an hour or so I realized I was having as much fun with the movement techniques and traversal as I do in any well made metroidvania style game.

 

It's one of the few lewd games out there that would be worth playing even without any sexual content. Most of these games are just a bunch of text attached to some prerendered sex images or videos, and they barely qualify as a game. This isn't just a good sex game, but it's a good game, and I really look forward to what's next for it.

Edited December 16, 2021 by jpackinwood
spelling

[Anon_42]

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

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-B39UX4vOk

https://www.redgifs.com/watch/shoddyskyblueizuthrush
 

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

v0.45 MAJOR CHANGES AND FEATURES

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

v0.46 GOALS AND PLANS

 

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

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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



v0.45 MINOR CHANGES AND BUG FIXES

 

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

[Anon_42]

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

 

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

So in general, the therapy has been great so far. I've only had 2 appointments, so it hasn't been long enough to be 100% sure, but so far I'm very happy with my choice of therapist. He seems like the right person to help me out and I'm ridiculously grateful that I didn't have to run through a dozen people before finding someone that clicks.

Aside from therapy, I also had my neuropsych evaluation a few days ago. I won't hear back results for about ~2 months based on what they said, but it'll be nice to have a more thorough examination of my brain.

 

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

 

For Alicia's idle, here's a comparison screenshot:

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

 

 

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

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

 

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

[Anon_42]

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Before

After

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

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

 

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

[Anon_42]

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

 

 

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

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

[Anon_42]

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

[Anon_42]

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

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

[Anon_42]

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

[Anon_42]

---

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

Edited September 13, 2022 by Anon_42

[Anon_42]

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

[Anon_42]

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

Crisis Point: Extinction v0.46 plans

 

-New 360-degree aiming system, along with full gameplay mouse support

-Completely overhauled lighting engine, along with other small special effects improvements

-Increased screen resolution, bringing the game to a more modern 16:9 aspect ratio

-Updated UI with improved functionality

-A handful of updated H-scene animations, such as the Slime and BE Vines animations

-The usual bug fixes and such (and probably some new bugs to go along with the new features, if we're being honest)

 

So that's everything we plan to add in v0.46. We won't be adding any "new" content, like I've mentioned before; our team's goal right now is to lay all of this groundwork, so that once we do start working on new content again, we'll have all the tools we need to really crank it out. To that end, once v0.46 is complete, I'm going to fully shift my focus towards finishing our level editor, since that needs to be done before we can work on updating the game's level design and artwork.

 

 

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

[Anon_42]

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

 

 

Next up, those animations Orexius has been working on. His focus right now is split between the BE vines animation, and preparing the new gameplay animations Alicia will need as part of the 360 degree aiming update. They're all still VERY WIP, but we figured it might be fun to show yall what our animations look like in the early stages, so let's start with those gameplay animations!

 

Because Crisis Point wasn't designed with movement and aiming being separate, we never needed backwards movement before, but that's not the case anymore. In order to avoid the dominant strategy becoming "run away from the enemy while shooting at them", Alicia's backwards movement will be slower than regular movement; but if you stop shooting for a brief moment, then Alicia will go into her regular running animation at full speed. I'll probably tweak this a little bit based on player feedback, so once the update comes out feel free to let me know how you feel about it, but I'm personally pretty happy with the way it feels now - it prevents strafing from being too powerful, but cancels quickly enough to not feel annoying if you're just trying to run away.

 

And lastly, the BE vines H-scene update:

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

 

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

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

 

 

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

 

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

[Anon_42]

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

 

 

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

[edood7]

Aww, Bug is adorable.