ACT Patreon Active [Anon42] Crisis Point: Extinction

[GranTurboAutismo]

Oh boy Little Mac is here!

 

[Anon42]

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Hey everyone! This is gonna be a pretty short weekly update; there's a lot going on from our team members right now, but not a lot ready to show off just yet.

Orex is finishing up the last few Torguis animations (I also finished implementing them this week), Puffernutter is starting on a rework for the Catacombs tileset, and Red is continuing his work on redoing the Alraune's animations.

https://soundcloud.com/anon-42-498945869%2Fcrisis-point-extinction-ost-track-preview
I've also got our musician working on more music for CPE - they've been working on some missing music variations for the existing areas, as well as another track which you can listen to a preview for up above! Personally it's become my favorite track in the game, and I hope you like it too.

The main thing I wanted to say this week, though, is that my productivity has been incredibly behind lately, which I'm sure you've noticed by now. First of all, I'm extremely sorry for this. Things have been really tough for me lately, but that's no excuse for falling so far behind on my responsibilities to Crisis Point. With the rest of our team kicking ass, we've thankfully still had good work being done, but I can't let myself keep falling behind like this, so I'm going to be starting up development streams for Crisis Point again, starting tomorrow, to try and get some kind of regular schedule going again. I'm going to aim for starting at 2 pm EST, and going until at least 6 pm EST, Monday-Friday, for now. This schedule might be adjusted as I get back into the swing of things and figure out what works best for me, and I'll keep you updated if it does change.
Because it's going to be a regular schedule, I'm going to try NOT doing update posts on Patreon for every stream I start - if you want to be notified when a steam starts, you can either Follow me on Picarto (

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) which will notify you whenever a stream begins, join our Discord where I will notify people about streams (

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), or Follow me on Twitter where I'll put out a tweet whenever I'm about to start streaming (

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). Or, of course, you can just show up at the scheduled times, since presumably I should be streaming then.

Alright, that's all I've got for this week. Thank you for your patience as I work through the things I've been struggling with lately. I won't let it keep me down, not when there's work to be done and so many exciting things in CPE's future. Hope to see you all at the streams!

 

[Anon42]

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Hey everyone! Before I get started on the meat of the post, I just wanted to put out a reminder that we're doing regular dev streams again! We're streaming every day Monday-Friday, starting at 2 pm EST. Mostly it's just me, but sometimes Red and Orexius join in, and Puffernutter is going to be streaming development work with me too in the future. You can follow me on Picarto itself (

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) to get notifications when I start streaming, but our schedule is consistent, unless I can't stream on that day for some reason, so you can also just come by at 2 pm Mon-Fri if you want to watch!

With that out of the way, here's this week's update!

I worked on a few things this week, including a new powerup that will probably be coming NEXT update in v0.38, a new mechanic I'm calling ramp sliding, and creating a bunch of new rooms to explore. First off, let's look at the new mechanic, ramp sliding.

(The lighting quality has been lowered for the sake of gif filesize; don't worry, the in-game lighting hasn't changed)

Particularly keen-eyed observers may have noticed that CPE only uses slight ramps in its level design. We used to have some steeper, 45 degree slopes, but they were only used in a handful of places, and I gradually replaced them and phased them out of level design completely. The reason for this is that I planned on turning steep ramps into an obstacle instead of just a regular part of the level design, by making Alicia slide down them automatically, as you can see in the gif above. Naturally, there will be an upgrade later on that gives you the ability to go up these slopes, but currently they're a one way trip.

The other thing I wanted to show today is the level design progress I've made so far. The gif above cycles between the map from v0.36, and the current map from v0.37, with all the new rooms I've added. As you can see there's a decent number of them, and there will certainly be more by the time the update is done. I spent time this week fully planning out the rest of the game's critical path, which is the essential areas the player will explore to find the upgrades that allow them to progress until the end of the game, so I have a much better idea of what to do with the level design going forward. We're a lot closer to introducing the 5th area than I expected, too - if all goes well I hope to introduce it in v0.38! There's a lot of work before I can make that happen though, so I don't want to get your hopes up too high.

Alright, that's all from me this week. Don't forget to stop by the streams, if that kind of thing interests you - and if you prefer to watch the VOD after, you can do that at my picarto too! My last handful of streams are automatically saved there. Progress is going great, streams are a huge boost for me mentally so I'm really happy I finally got over that anxiety. Thank you all so very much for your support, and I can't wait to show you what we've got in store in the future!

 

[ThatWeirdGuyWithaWeirdHat]

Yoink!

 

[Zepheral]

That castlevania level type map.

 

[Anon42]

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Hey everybody! This week in CPE news, I took a step back from creating new level layouts to focus on some detail things I've been wanting to do for a long time, liiiike reworking the dynamic water, for example!

Here's a shot of how the dynamic water USED to be:

And here's a shot of what the NEW dynamic water looks like:

On top of the obvious visual and animation improvements, this new water is also a bit more optimized! Since the old water was moving constantly, it was always doing calculations - now, since the water is still when undisturbed, when the water isn't moving the code simply doesn't run, saving loads of processing time. The method I used for rendering the water has also improved, which further optimizes it. In a short test using my work PC, I went from about ~600 FPS to ~950 FPS with the game uncapped in this area. Hopefully this will improve any performance issues people have in areas with water!

Next up, with the progress of level design going faster than I expected, I realized that the long-awaited underwater sections of Crisis Point will be coming up far sooner than I expected. With that in mind, I worked on a new special effect involving - as stated in the title - bubbles! They were a lot of fun to add in, and so far have been used in two places: a passive effect on Alicia while she's underwater, and a replacement for the Flare Shot!

You can see both effects in the gif above. Naturally, the Flare Shot bubbles don't actually harm enemies. They're bubbles, after all. It also doesn't consume ammo to fire the Flare Shot underwater, though, so there's no harm in having some bubble fun.

Lastly, I don't have a gif of this one, but I finished adding full mouse support to the rest of the menus too! Now you can navigate the Status and Map screens using the mouse, though you still need the keyboard to leave map notes of course.


For streams this week, I plan on taking Wednesday off, and probably trying to stick to that schedule in general - streaming Monday/Tuesday/Thursday/Friday, usually at 2 pm EST, though there are some days where if I wake up supremely early I might start the streams earlier, since I do my best work earlier in the day.

Alright, that's all for me this week! I did other things too, like writing the Torguis CG script, but I won't be sharing details on that I can't guarantee the Torguis CG (or his H-scene) will be in this coming update though - because of the holiday season, the majority of the CPE dev team has less time to work than usual, and the scheduling kind of got away from me because of that. My apologies if they don't make it in, but we're doing our best to make it happen. Anyway, thank you all very much for your continued support! See you in next week's update!

 

[ThatWeirdGuyWithaWeirdHat]

Always thought the eternal tides in underground waters were weird. Love the change.

 

[Manly5000]

Was the original deep soil gunner girl lesbo boss removed from the game entirely, or is she in a different place now?

 

[Anon42]

Was the original deep soil gunner girl lesbo boss removed from the game entirely, or is she in a different place now?

She's in a different, temporary place right now. Eventually she'll be moved further into the game, and her fight is going to get a Boss 2-level rework to make it more interesting and engaging.

 

[Manly5000]

She's in a different, temporary place right now. Eventually she'll be moved further into the game, and her fight is going to get a Boss 2-level rework to make it more interesting and engaging.

Thanks Anon. I managed to get to her but when she defeats me the scene won't start and I can only hit K to go back to the last warp point?

 

[Anon42]

Thanks Anon. I managed to get to her but when she defeats me the scene won't start and I can only hit K to go back to the last warp point?

That's because "game over" content was removed. Now, to access her H-scene, you have to beat the fight and capture her like other enemies, then return to base camp and talk to Birch to access her scene

 

[Anon42]

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Hey everyone. So I'm just going to skip over the pretense and get straight to the bad news: Kuso has decided to leave the Crisis Point team, which leaves us without a CG artist yet again. Well, sort of.

I spoke with Red, who recently returned to the team after a long hiatus and has been helping us with animations (the reworked Alraune animations are courtesy of him), and he's agreed to try taking over the role of CG art - he's an established artist already, and a very talented one, and he'll be attempting to mimic Kuso's artstyle to keep the game's CG art as consistent as possible. In the absolute worst case scenario, if he and any of the other artists I know can't replicate it, then I'm just going to move ahead and give up on trying to keep the CGs consistent across the game - basically what I'm saying is that I do NOT plan on reworking every CG yet again with another new artist, no matter how this turns out. I'd rather just accept that some CGs will have different artstyles so that we can start producing new content again instead of just reworking things over and over, so if you're worried about that happening, then don't be.

Unfortunately because of all this, there will not be any new CGs in this update. I'm sorry for the disappointment; I had two CGs lined up to be included (one reworked, one brand new), but neither of them got done and there's simply not enough time for Red to take over the reigns before the update needs to release. At the moment, it's likely that the only porn content in this update will be an update to the Alraune blowjob H-scene, which Orexius has been working on to bring the Alraune's anatomy up to date. I was going to have Red work on the Torguis H-scene, but because of all this, I need him to shift gears to the CGs so we can figure out asap if he's able to take over Kuso's place.

Alright.. with that huge bummer out of the way, I do have at least one little visual to show you. I spent the majority of my time this week doing bugfixes and working on tiling rooms - the Deep Soil tileset takes a really long time to work with, and normally puffernutter would be helping with it so I have more time to do other things, but she's been swamped with other freelance work and hasn't had time to help out on CPE. Anyway, the one thing I do have to show this week is some subtle animation for the large hanging vines in the Deep Soil - take a look below.

As you can see it's a very subtle animation; I don't want it to be distracting, but I've been wanting to add little animation details to Crisis Point's world for a long time, to make it seem more alive, so this is one step in that process. Not every area in the Deep Soil has them right now, just the later ones, but I'll try to get more of them included before the update goes out.

Alright, that's it for me this week. Sorry for the crappy update; I'm mostly just wrapping up development on v0.36 at this point, so the updates are naturally less exciting, but I wasn't expecting to have to drop bad news like this on top of it. Hopefully I'll be able to release the update very soon, since I'm no longer waiting on CGs before I can put it out. Thank you all very much for supporting, I hope to have some better news for you by this time next week.

 

[Triplebrc]

Good lord, I have supported this project years ago and later sat through some of the livestreams for new scenes that were created, kinda forgot about it in the meantime and now years later I find it sitting in this subforum. So you wanna tell me that even after more than 5 years of development and an accumulated support sum easily sitting in the 6 digits, this 2d pixel game still is not finished? Kinda curious when it is supposed to be finished and how big in terms of scenes and enemies it actually is by then.

 

[Anon42]

Good lord, I have supported this project years ago and later sat through some of the livestreams for new scenes that were created, kinda forgot about it in the meantime and now years later I find it sitting in this subforum. So you wanna tell me that even after more than 5 years of development and an accumulated support sum easily sitting in the 6 digits, this 2d pixel game still is not finished? Kinda curious when it is supposed to be finished and how big in terms of scenes and enemies it actually is by then.

Let's examine this shall we?

Right now, CPE is earning almost $4500 a month on Patreon. If you take this at a surface level, sure, seems like a healthy amount, $54,000 in a year. Cut that to 60% and you get a more accurate number for what I'm ACTUALLY earning; freelancing taxes are ridiculous, far higher than normal income tax. So now we're down to $32,400 a year, or $2700 a month. Average rent in the USA is roughly $1000 a month (I actually have to pay more than this for rent, but for the sake of argument I'll go with the $1k), which brings it down to $1700 a month after rent is paid. Food is probably another $300 a month, so $1400 now. Even if I spent no money at all on fun things/hobbies, the remaining $1400 a month is NOWHERE NEAR enough to hire anyone else on full time, I can only afford to commission work, which thankfully I can do a decent amount of because of Patreon support - but it's still a far cry from having even 1 more person working on the game full time. Because of this, Crisis Point is effectively a mostly-one-man game, with a healthy amount of commissioned work to cover my weak points, like art.

And you know what? All of that is without even considering that Crisis Point is earning FAR more money now than it ever has before. You can look at our Graphtreon here:

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and on this page, you can see a breakdown of my earnings over the years. Even as recently as just ONE YEAR AGO, our numbers were more like $3100 per month, not $4500 - which comes out to $1860 after taxes, ~$860 after rent, and ~$500 after food, which is barely enough to cover 2, maybe 3 pieces of high-quality commissioned work a month. Our numbers were steadily around this range from July 2016 to November 2018, which is around where it started to rise and I was really able to afford picking up development speed and quality. Before July 2016 I barely even earned enough to keep myself afloat, let alone commission anyone else.

Despite ALL THAT, we have full voice acting, high-resolution CG artwork, higher resolution pixel art than the majority of pixel art games, and to toot my own horn a little bit, I'd argue some of the most polish of any pixel art H-game out there, between environment artwork and details, animation quality, soundtrack and sound effects, and gameplay. A lot of that is subjective, of course, so feel free to disagree, but there is no doubting that Crisis Point has a lot of effort put into every single element of the game despite MUCH more limited funding than many comparable H-games. Is it taking a long time to develop? Yes. I am largely still a beginner at making games, and the scope of the game ended up being a lot larger than I knew how to handle at first. Despite that, I've never given up on it, and I don't ever plan to until the game my supporters deserve is finished and in their hands. It's up to you whether to decide it's worth supporting me through it all, but I urge you to do some research on how difficult game development is, ESPECIALLY what has largely been a solo project, before you start shitting on developers because you think they earn too much money and aren't fast enough.

 

[Triplebrc]

You are way too easily triggered, I remember these long salty rants of yours in other forums being something that I found laughable even back then, and just as before you did not really answer the crucial bits, guess I gotta be thankful the rant is not as long as some of your others I have seen. That aside, I have coding experience so I know that new content for a game, even one as simplistic as a 2d pixel game, does not just fall from the sky, but you got to see that your model is not really all that appealing if it takes you more than five years to get to where you are at the moment and there is still no end in sight despite the considerable amount of money that came your way. Either your project is too ambitious in scale if so many years of full time development don't get you anywhere near to what you yourself would call a finished product, or the work is done at an alarmingly slow pace and the full time development therefore wasted. I will not go as far as to claim that you try to pull a Redamz here, not yet at least. I mean just do the math of how much money some of these long time supporters gave you by now, for a game that, as polished and loving for small details as it may be, ultimately will be finished by them in less than 5 hours in any case, thats not good value for anyone, not even by eroge game standards.

Well I surely will not return to support the game again, my interest has basically disappeared when my support reached too high of a money amount for my taste and no end was in sight for development, but I was curious when, if ever, this game would be completed so I asked here. You did not answer that question, not even remotely, but I still wish you luck for your project, because even though I may come off as harsh calling out some obvious flaws (if you ask me) in what you are doing and I find your attitude kinda pathetic, I still supported and enjoyed your work at some point so I naturally want to see it finished. Well maybe I stumble upon it again in a few more years.

 

[Anon42]

Not sure how taking the time to explain the finances you pointed out, without any hint at all of rudeness or anger towards you, is a long salty rant, but alright. I've definitely made plenty of mistakes in my responses on forums and I get it, you'll see me how you want to see me.

As far as release dates, as much as I'd like to give an exact date, our development resources shift so much (as evidenced by the nearly 30% increase in our funding over the last year) that I cannot confidently give one. However, we just finished a game-wide overhaul of our lowest-quality assets, which were made back before I could afford commissioning work, and there's nothing standing in the way of forward momentum anymore; because of that, we've started producing new content at a lightning-fast pace this past month or two, as you can see by looking at how much better weekly updates have been. A lot of the work is documented, too, with the return of development streams. So, while I can't give an expected date, I have no doubts in my mind it's going to finish a hell of a lot quicker than it's taken to get to this point.

 

[DaBouncer]

I find it funny how they bag on this project out of all of the vast majority of shills Patreon holds. I'd more expect rage like this to be aimed at something like Aylia's Story (it should never have taken this long for just a single chapter...), or SimBro (the pricks abandoned it and pretended to update it for a year or two).

At least this still has updates being done to it on a constant rate.

 

[FrostyTheSaltman]

So let me get this straight, they're accusing Anon of being a scam artist because they didn't finish an entire game in whatever nebulous timeframe THEY wanted and then as soon as Anon tries to explain how game development isn't as simple as they clearly want it to be, they instantly start screeching about how Anon's the triggered one while crying about how they're no longer supporting someone for not just giving them a complete game right then and there.

TBH, this is been a huge issue with the community as far as I'm concerned, not just here but in general. We can't effect what SJWs or Journalists think, but if we keep acting like this when it comes to stuff like the times these projects have bumpy moments in development, we're only going to scare off people who could have been devs of pretty good hentai just as much. Rather than just crying scam every time devs hit a problem during development, maybe we should give these people more leeway than seemingly none at all. IMO, it's extremely rare for hentai games to be good in both gameplay and h-content and I feel this game, so far, is turning out to be one of those. Let's not demonize Anon and/or the others helping work on the project over how long it takes for it to be done when the development has yet to truly die out.

Being burnt out by how long the development is taking is one thing, I get that, but this kind of reaction only makes you like an entitled chode.

 

[DaBouncer]

Also, "I have coding experience" =/= knowing what's to be expected. They are two hugely different beasts, coding is only one part of the process. Before that you need to have the theoretical mechanics and game theory identified, then there's also art management, story progression, team management, public relations coordination, and then as Anon pointed out, financial management.

I'd wager game development is at least thrice as hard as simply coding something, and that's undercutting it by an unreasonable amount.

 

[ThatWeirdGuyWithaWeirdHat]

So you wanna tell me that even after more than 5 years of development and an accumulated support sum easily sitting in the 6 digits, this 2d pixel game still is not finished?

Quality takes time, my dude. Especially when it's mainly a one man show. You think the original Metroid and Castlevania games were made by 5 or 6 people? No it was huge teams of 20+ people on game design alone.