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ThatWeirdGuyWithaWeirdHat

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I'll consider the possibility of replacing that upgrade with something more utility-based, but it won't be making it travel like a missile - the short range burst style of the Force Shot is very much intentional to its design, and I believe giving it more travel range while keeping its current power would make it absurdly OP, especially once you have 12 shots in a row from full ammo + overcharges. At that point the only limiting factor would be ammo, and that's not particularly hard to recharge, so it would just be the best weapon in the game bar none
That's where you balance it out by halving the explosion radius and making it absurdly expensive
 
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Anon42

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(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our If you like what you see, )

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

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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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

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

Inspector_Whatsup

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Damn, I really like the brief windup on the aerial melee animation! That heavy swing makes it look really crunchy!

I'm not quite as sold on the Wire Shot, but it's only getting started, so I'm sure you'll make good use of it. I'm mainly worried about how you'll manage targeting priorities. For example, if the Wire Shot only targets those anchoring points, is there any option for combat? And if there are multiple points in range, will it target the closest one? Or the closest one in the direction you're facing? I doubt you'll end up designing areas that could even cause such an issue to arise, but I'm wondering regardless.

Whatever the case, I hope you and Orexius are doing well in the new house! Keep being awesome!
 
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Anon42

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Damn, I really like the brief windup on the aerial melee animation! That heavy swing makes it look really crunchy!

I'm not quite as sold on the Wire Shot, but it's only getting started, so I'm sure you'll make good use of it. I'm mainly worried about how you'll manage targeting priorities. For example, if the Wire Shot only targets those anchoring points, is there any option for combat? And if there are multiple points in range, will it target the closest one? Or the closest one in the direction you're facing? I doubt you'll end up designing areas that could even cause such an issue to arise, but I'm wondering regardless.

Whatever the case, I hope you and Orexius are doing well in the new house! Keep being awesome!
Thanks man, glad you like the new melee! We're settling in pretty well so far!

As far as Wire Shot targeting priorities go, you're correct in that I plan on designing areas around how the targeting works. As long as areas aren't designed in such a way where targets can regularly conflict with each other, my hope is that it should work pretty well! I might update the auto-targeting further if needed, but currently the game already has a fairly robust auto-targeting system, with a few kinds of target types that are each handled differently - all of them have an identical distance limit (both a maximum and minimum distance, so EXTREMELY close targets won't be selected), but there are other factors that the game checks depending on the type. The ones in the gif in today's post pay attention to Alicia's horizontal facing direction, so if she's not facing them they'll never be targeted; the ones in my first post about the new wire shot mechanics ignore her horizontal facing direction, but pay attention to her vertical position, so if she's above them they'll never be targetable, but she can be facing away and they'll still target. Then, for targets like the Warped Sentry's shield or the pillars on the ground that you pull, those ones again pay attention to Alicia's horizontal facing direction, but Alicia also has to be grounded before they'll be included in the list of possible targets. Once all that is said and done, the game then calculates which of the remaining targets is the closest one and uses that as the final target. So far in my playtesting I haven't had a single issue with the game picking a target I didn't want, but it's certainly something I can try to improve on if it ends up being a problem for others!
 
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Anon42

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(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our If you like what you see, )

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

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

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


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

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


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

Thank you all for supporting Crisis Point, we'll see you with another update next week!
 
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Anon42

Anon42

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(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our If you like what you see, )

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



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


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



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

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


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


You can follow us there to get notifications when we stream! I also announce streams at my twitter:

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

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

Inspector_Whatsup

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@Anon42 Reworking the Orbital Flare into a melee skill is a good way to spread out the options across the moveset. But I'm not sure the hitbox should linger that long. Maybe as a skill upgrade, sure, but I'd honestly suggest a more proactive option: burn stacks. By hitting enemies with fire attacks, a burn meter will increase above them, and once full, they'll ignite, dealing continuous burn damage. and doing so while they burn increases the burn damage, meaning continuous offense would be rewarded. Dunno if that'd require more work than it's worth, or if that idea veers off too far into the aggressive. But a persistent hitbox sounds like a whole lot of cheese to me.
The Wire Shot animation is pretty cool, and I could imagine later enemies needing a bit of button mashing or an even longer animation to get their defenses torn down.

Anyway, good to hear you easing back into your schedule! Keep up the good work!
 
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Anon42

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@Anon42 Reworking the Orbital Flare into a melee skill is a good way to spread out the options across the moveset. But I'm not sure the hitbox should linger that long. Maybe as a skill upgrade, sure, but I'd honestly suggest a more proactive option: burn stacks. By hitting enemies with fire attacks, a burn meter will increase above them, and once full, they'll ignite, dealing continuous burn damage. and doing so while they burn increases the burn damage, meaning continuous offense would be rewarded. Dunno if that'd require more work than it's worth, or if that idea veers off too far into the aggressive. But a persistent hitbox sounds like a whole lot of cheese to me.
The Wire Shot animation is pretty cool, and I could imagine later enemies needing a bit of button mashing or an even longer animation to get their defenses torn down.

Anyway, good to hear you easing back into your schedule! Keep up the good work!
I'm definitely still tweaking numbers, so I'm not sure they'll end up staying for 5 seconds. Enemies do already have a built-in burn meter, though! Different enemies have different resistances to fire, but you've been able to ignite enemies for DoT since the Flare Shot was implemented.

Right now, the balance on that ability is that it lingers for a while, but doesn't do much damage on its own, with more of the damage coming from the fire DoT (and the ability to make burning enemies take more damage from other sources). I'm considering giving it a cooldown as well, to make your timing and positioning of the effect more important. All of that is stuff I'll need to tweak after feedback, though, so I appreciate you dropping your thoughts!
 
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Anon42

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(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our If you like what you see, )

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

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

OLD:


NEW:


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

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


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

Thanks for reading, everybody, and I hope you're looking forward to v0.41! I currently expect to release it sometime this week, or early next week, if everything goes according to plan.
 
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Anon42

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(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our If you like what you see, )

(NSFW trailer available here: )

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

SeraphStarliege
Katsune Teku
HURTZ
NobodyXV
Benjamin Arnold
Fortunekuger


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



v0.41 MINOR CHANGES AND BUGFIXES

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

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

Alciya

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okay maybe someone can assist here... i've been searching high and low for the Electro Shot, and i -cannot- find it... i'll take hints, screenshots, flat out directions... HALP T_T
 
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Anon42

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okay maybe someone can assist here... i've been searching high and low for the Electro Shot, and i -cannot- find it... i'll take hints, screenshots, flat out directions... HALP T_T
Let's start with a hint, then: it's one of the earliest blaster upgrades you can get! (specifically, you can get it even before the Wire Shot)
 
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Anon42

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(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our If you like what you see, )

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



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

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

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


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


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

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

Inspector_Whatsup

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Now I wonder just how far you could take platforming challenges. Disintegrating platforms and persistent obstacles are already present to test reflexes, so the foundation isn't an overhaul, and the Hook Shot provides some good mobility as well.
That said, maybe you should make these platforming challenges more of an extra, kinda like the VR Training Missions in Metal Gear Solid, or Celeste's B-Side Tapes. Not because I see an issue with putting platforming challenges in the game, but merely because I see a clash in the concept of non-lethal obstacles in a hostile environment. Finding "training files" in remote places which you can use to access challenges back at the base would be my first thought.
 
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Anon42

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Now I wonder just how far you could take platforming challenges. Disintegrating platforms and persistent obstacles are already present to test reflexes, so the foundation isn't an overhaul, and the Hook Shot provides some good mobility as well.
That said, maybe you should make these platforming challenges more of an extra, kinda like the VR Training Missions in Metal Gear Solid, or Celeste's B-Side Tapes. Not because I see an issue with putting platforming challenges in the game, but merely because I see a clash in the concept of non-lethal obstacles in a hostile environment. Finding "training files" in remote places which you can use to access challenges back at the base would be my first thought.
You bring up a valid concern! I do have some ideas for how challenge rooms using these can be integrated into the game's lore, so hopefully that will be satisfactory, however it ends up implemented. It's always a struggle to decide how overt I want to be regarding things like that; I like it when explanations and lore requires some thinking on the player's part, rather than everything being directly stated, but if you go too far in that direction it can just seem lazy and not well thought out. I still have some thinking to do regarding how transparent I want to be with certain lore tidbits..
 
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Anon42

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


(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our If you like what you see, )


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

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


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


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

Alright, that's it for this week! Thanks for reading, and we'll see you in the next one!
 
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(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our If you like what you see, )

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


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

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

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


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

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

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


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