ACT Patreon Active [Anon42] Crisis Point: Extinction

[Anon42]

I have to say that even though the original animation is a little "lacking" I prefer that one over the new one.
It resembles a more realistic underwater explosion in my eyes. would look amazing if you can combine both into one.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean. What part of the old animation do you prefer over the new one?

 

[TouchFluffyTail]

I'm not entirely sure what you mean. What part of the old animation do you prefer over the new one?

There is more similarity to this over "flying confetti" not to make it seem offensive.

 

[GranTurboAutismo]

The radial shockwave and the distortion created by it I'd say is a key part of the animation. Though I think that effect is separate from the animation itself so it shouldnt be a problem to just trigger it on explosion

 

[Anon42]

The radial shockwave and the distortion created by it I'd say is a key part of the animation. Though I think that effect is separate from the animation itself so it shouldnt be a problem to just trigger it on explosion

This is correct. The distortion effect is a hard-coded effect, not a sprite animation, and since it's a distortion of the background, it needs a background to even be visible in the first place. Even if it was in the gif of the new effect you wouldn't be able to see it because it would be distorting a flat color, which would.. still just look like a flat color.

 

[Anon42]

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Hey everyone, sorry I missed the update yesterday. To be honest, I didn't even realize it was Saturday, my mental clock is super off right now. Gonna be more or less another personal update this week, though I do have an update to that explosion animation from last week! We got some feedback and Orexius decided to tweak it some more, and now it looks even cooler than before. I'll have that later in the post, so feel free to skip there if you don't want to read personal stuff.

I've been doing a little work on personal projects like I mentioned last update, and the good news is I haven't forgotten how to program lmao, so that's reassuring. Right now my biggest struggle is just, getting myself to start working in the first place. There are so many days where I'll wake up feeling ready to work, get ready for the day and head down to my computer, sit at my desk, and then just kinda.. freeze up. My motivation slips away completely as soon as I can actually put thoughts into action, and it's immeasurably frustrating.

I have an appointment with my medicine doctor this week, so I'll be discussing my thoughts on the medicine I'm on now with her; I think I've talked about it before, but basically it feels like it's definitely helping with my depression, but it hasn't done anything for the anxiety/ADD - which isn't surprising, since depression is the only one of my symptoms it's clinically approved to treat. It often helps patients with the other two things, but not always. It certainly hasn't been a magical "happy pill" or anything like that, but it's kind of amazing how much of a difference it makes day-to-day. Before, when something bad happened on any given day, it would typically ruin my entire day. I couldn't pick myself out of that emotional slump until I slept and basically had a hard reset. Now that I'm taking medication though, of course I still have bad days sometimes, and I still get sad sometimes, but it doesn't seem to consume me in the way that it used to. I'll take an hour to myself, sometimes more sometimes less, and then I'll be okay again. Basically, I feel like this medication has just allowed my brain to remain at a "neutral" state in a way that I just plain wasn't able to do before.

So, once my appointment comes, my core goal is to talk to her about ADD medication options. I know that the "getting started" problem is a common one with ADD, and it's been one of my main struggling points with developing CPE as a whole, not just in these last few months. It's kinda weird, as an adult I basically "forgot" I was diagnosed with ADD as a kid, because I haven't been treated for it in any way for the past ~15 years. I didn't literally forget, but I never considered it at all when thinking about all of the things I've struggled with over the years. Instead, I just convinced myself that I wasn't trying hard enough, which is.. just about the most unhealthy mindset possible, especially for neurodivergent minds. This appointment is very early in the week, so I might have something to report by the next update, with any luck - some ADD medications start working immediately, so it will depend on what she puts me on.


Anyway, that's enough personal stuff for this week. Orexius has been working on more xray animations, as well as updating all of the Underwater Mine animations (not just the explosion). He's also working on an alternate Ledge Grab animation, for ledges where Alicia doesn't have a foothold, since the current animation looks a little silly in those cases. The only animation I'm showing off this week is the updated explosion, though:

The effect from last week is still there, with a few minor tweaks, but there's another layer on top that should make the effect read much more as an "underwater" explosion specifically.

Alright, that's all I have for this week. Hopefully you're not tired of hearing me say thank you yet, because - seriously - thank you all so much for sticking with us. I know CPE development is in a bad place right now, but it means the world to me that you guys are giving me the time I need to deal with all this. I feel like I'm finally on track to get back into development soon, especially if ADD medication works out. There's a LOT to do once I get back to it, so don't expect another playable update to come out very soon even if I do get going right away, but if all goes well then CPE development should be a lot more consistent once I finally am back behind the wheel. Here's hoping we have something good to share next week!

 

[Anon42]

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Hey guys, sorry I missed Saturday again - I swear my mental clock is stuck a full day off right now and I keep not realizing what day of the week it is. This will be an entirely personal update, pretty much; I don't really have anything to share on the development side of things. Orexius has been working on more xray animations, and I'm still trying to get my mojo back, so this will just be an update on me and my health.

So to start off, I had my appointment with my medication doc this week. My main concern was, of course, getting ADD medication, and after going through all my options, we ended up settling on one of the few non-stimulant medications available. While she was doing my checkup, she noticed I have a very high resting heart rate, around ~115, when the average adult should be between 60-100. I asked her if it was because of how out of shape I am, and she said that just being out of shape shouldn't be enough to make my resting heart rate that high, so there's probably some underlying cause there in addition to my poor health. She wants me to get an EKG, but she wasn't sure what the cost of that was, so she said she would find out how much it would cost me and let me know at our next appointment. I do plan on getting insurance once I start seeing a therapist, so I can find an insurance plan that works with both my doctor and my therapist, so worst case scenario I can wait until after I have that to get the EKG if it's too expensive out of pocket. In the meantime, because of the high heart rate, she's not comfortable putting me on any stimulant medications; combining a stimulant with the antidepressant I'm on can sometimes make people jittery, and she said it could be potentially dangerous before we know what's going on with my heart rate. Thus, the non-stimulant.

The unfortunate part is that the stimulants are the ones that tend to work immediately. The medication I started on, being a non-stimulant, is like the antidepressant in that it takes a while to start working - pretty much the exact same timeframe, too, 4-8 weeks for the full effects. I won't know for a few weeks if it's helping with my ADD or not, and until we figure out what's going on with my heart, I won't be able to try any of the stimulant varieties. I've been on this new pill for most of this week, and the good news is I'm not getting horrible side effects like I did with the antidepressant. I got really nauseous one afternoon, but that's about it, and laying down for a while thankfully shook it off.


The one piece of good news I can relay about Crisis Point is that, while I haven't been actively working on the game in-engine, I have been spending a lot more time thinking about/mentally planning the game lately. I can tell my mental state is getting considerably better, both because of the antidepressant and because I've been trying out some new hobbies lately to try and refresh myself. This was a REALLY busy and stressful week for me, but I find myself able to handle stress better than I used to, so I'm still feeling pretty okay despite that. I wish I had gotten myself to work on CPE this week, but my motivation feels like it's coming back slowly but surely, and I'm confident that whether or not this ADD medication works, the coming weeks will have me back at my work desk - maybe not at full speed yet, but I'm positive that I'm going to feel up to making progress again soon.

Seriously, everyone, thank you so much for putting up with this hiatus for such a long time. Even though we still have some content coming in from Orex, I'm the main workforce behind CPE, and I'm sure having the game stall for so long is just as frustrating for you as it is for me. I say this every week, but I really can't thank you all enough for allowing me to put myself above the game for a while. I've been pushing my mental health aside for years so I could focus on the game, and I'm sure that's part of how it got to a boiling point like this. I may not be fully back in action yet, but with my mental health steadily climbing back up again, I'm just grateful that my unhealthy mental habits didn't push me so far that there was no coming back. As far as I'm concerned, I've gotta have the best fans in the world, and I can't wait to get back to delivering you guys the content you all deserve.

 

[Anon42]

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Hey everyone, sorry there was no update last week! I wasn't intending to skip it, it just sorta happened - you ever have that problem where you mean to respond to a message from someone, but you forget, and then hours later it feels weirdly late and awkward to respond, so you wait more, and ultimately end up not responding at all? It's that sorta thing. I really need to work on that lol, another thing to bring up with the eventual therapist.

So the new medication, the non-stimulant ADD pill, hasn't really made much of a difference for me unfortunately - I haven't felt any side effects really, but also no real benefits. Some basic googling tells me that non-stimulant medications tend to be much less effective at treating ADD, so I'm not too surprised by it, it just means I need to get that EKG done so we can figure out if taking a stimulant would be safe for me.

I haven't really done any work yet, but there has been one.. let's call it interesting.. development, that doesn't really pertain to CPE itself but will be relevant for my future games. It won't really change anything on your end as players, but the engine that I work with recently announced they're shifting their pricing model, and instead of being one-time purchases, they're going subscription-only. Personally, I can't stand subscription-only business models for programs, especially not ones you have to use for your job, so basically I'm ditching it and moving to a new engine lmao. CPE will be finished in the current engine, so it's not going to affect that - they're honoring all previous permanent licenses, so nothing is changing for me in the immediate future - but when they inevitably release a new version of the engine it'll be subscription-only, and I ain't dealing with that. I've been tinkering with Godot a bit the past week, and it's super promising, so I'm strongly leaning towards changing over to Godot for future games. It's completely free and open source, so there's no risk of them pulling shit like this in the future.

Anyway, aside from the engine stuff and the medicine not really helping, things have been going pretty well thankfully. I've been trying to cook a little more and eat a little healthier (key word: a little), and once Puffernutter's ankle heals (she got a pretty bad twisted ankle about a week ago), we plan on starting up exercise again. I still feel bad about not getting anything done for CPE, but it's felt good to focus on real life for a bit, now that my mental state has evened out a lot more.

CPE hasn't been completely idle, though; Orexius has been powering through more and more xray animations, and we now have xrays for the tentacles, warped sentries, scientists, and poison alraune. Red has officially finished up the Azulisk CG, too. I still haven't sent scripts off to our VAs yet, so I plan on doing the little remaining script work I have over this next week, so I can send it to them and give them time to record. I meant to do that several weeks ago, but yeah, things weren't going so great several weeks ago. I have a friend visiting from out of town this week, so I'll be spending some time with them, but they're not going to be here 24/7 so I'll definitely have time to do a bit of writing.

I also have two doctors' appointments this week, one of which is a followup with my medication doctor, so I'll be able to find out if I can afford that EKG or not. Even if I can't afford it now, I'll be able to in the near future - I finally picked out a therapist and sent them an appointment request this week, though it was only a few days ago so I haven't heard back yet. Knowing that I'll be seeing a therapist weekly, I intend on getting on insurance as soon as the enrollment period opens. Irritatingly, one of the enrollment periods just closed like.. a week ago, so it'll be a while before I can sign up for that, but in the worst case scenario I'll be able to afford the EKG once I get that going. Because of the nature of insurance and deductibles and shit, I plan on going crazy with medical care in 2022, and trying to get all sorts of my issues figured out. I haven't really talked about any of it, but I have loads of minor physical problems in addition to the mental ones; it's all stuff I've learned to live with, but it would be lovely if I could sort it out, so that'll be a big goal for next year.


Alright, I've rambled just about enough for two weeks worth of personal updates, huh? Sorry again about missing last week, I'll try not to let that happen again in the future. Thank you all so much for continuing to read these updates, even when they're not really about the game! Sometimes it's easy to forget how many people are following my work, since comments are usually pretty quiet when things are going well, so I really appreciate all the comments and well wishes you guys have been sending me regularly. It makes this whole thing feel like it matters a lot more, and has me looking forward to the day when I can not only get back to work, but can do that work better than I ever could in the past when I was struggling with all this. See you all again in next week's update!

 

[Anon42]

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Hey all, gonna be another entirely personal update this week. My week was a lot busier than I realized it would be, between the two separate appointments (and the anxiety that came with them) and my visiting friend, who I thankfully got to spend a lot more time with than I expected. They were visiting from the other side of the USA, and they're in college right now so it's not a trip they can make often, so I'm really glad we got to hang out so much, and we had a great time. I didn't have the time for the CPE scripts I was planning to work on, but the good news is most of the script writing for this update has been completed for a while, so there's not too much left to do once I have the time for them.

So, healthcare update time. I haven't heard back from that therapist yet, so I'll be contacting them again soon to hopefully get that going. Until then, my behavioral doc is seeing me monthly to basically fill the place of a therapist temporarily, so I'm not navigating this completely alone. It's going well and she's helping me take some steps towards getting out of my comfort zone, but I won't talk about that side of things more than that; it's a little too personal, and also pretty boring. For the medication side of things, though, I was thankfully able to get the EKG as hoped - it was much cheaper than I feared it might be, and the results came back good. I do have a high heartrate as we already knew, but the EKG didn't show anything unusual or concerning beyond that. With that result, my medication doc cleared me for stimulant usage, and I started taking them just this morning. So far I don't feel too different, but I do feel a bit more alert than usual - I talked to Orexius about it as well, since he started taking stimulants several months ago, and he also didn't feel very different when he got on them, aside from the benefits when he's actually working. I think I already feel a bit of a difference there, too; normally I put off writing weekly updates for a while, but I was able to get into it much more easily today, so that bodes well.

Since I only just started with the stimulants today, I don't know if there's any noticeable side effects yet, or how effective they will be, but I should have more to report on that next week. Plus, even if this kind isn't the right one for me, now that I'm cleared for stimulants we have a lot of other medications we can try, so it's only a matter of time until we find one that feels right!

Aaaand that's pretty much all there is to report. Now it feels like we're really getting things moving, and I'm really excited to see how I'm feeling by the end of the year. I'm going to wait a few days before I try diving into work again, so I can get used to the new medication and see how it makes me feel outside of the context of work, but at some point during this next week I'm going to give a "normal workday" a try, and then we'll go from there. Thank you all so much, again, for your incredible patience during this - it's safe to say that all of you are directly responsible for me being able to take this time to work on my mental health, not only because of the financial side of things, but also just because you've been so accepting and supportive of me taking this break from development. I can't imagine what it would've been like if I was dealing with this and a standard 9:5 dayjob, and I am eternally grateful to each and every one of you for the opportunity you've given me. You guys are the real MVPs here. We'll see you again in next week's update, and it's one I'm very hopeful for!

 

[Anon42]

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Hey everybody! It finally happened this week. I was able to wake up in the morning feeling ready to go, make my way down to my desk, and actually successfully work for the first time in months! As you can probably tell, I'm feeling pretty pumped. I wanted to give myself some time to adjust to the medication, so I didn't work for the first half of the week; it was on Thursday that it happened, and so far, every day since then I've also been able to work. I think I might have pushed myself a bit too far yesterday, I was pretty tired by the end of my workday and I felt like I was going to delay the weekly update to Sunday since I wasn't feeling up to recording footage at the time - but when I woke up today I felt much better, so here we are! I'm going to try and limit how much time I spend working for a while, so I don't push myself too far and end up going backwards, but it really does feel incredible to be creative again.

With that, I don't have too much else to talk about on the personal side this week, so let's get to the update!

First off, the video up above. How often has it happened while you're playing Crisis Point that you try to jump up to a ledge, but just barely don't make it, so you have to wait for Alicia to fall down far enough for you to ledge grab, then you can finally jump up? Well, it happened to me one too many times for my taste, so we're fixing it!

Once Alicia gets the Kilogrip upgrade, in addition to being able to normally ledge grab, she'll also get the ability to quickly parkour-vault up onto ledges she just barely didn't make it to. Since you need the Kilogrip first, you won't be able to do this right out of the gate - and it doesn't enable you to reach any ledges you couldn't already reach by ledge grabbing - but it improves the flow of platforming considerably! The animation doesn't lock you into it either; there's a short period at the start where you can't shoot, but that's the only restriction. You can cancel out of the animation at any time by pushing away from the ledge, and once you're up on the ledge you can start shooting again. There's still some work to do on the ability - as you can see the art isn't complete, for one, and there's also quite a number of bugs still - but the main functionality is done, and the issues will get ironed out before long.


The other thing I worked on this week is another ability I've been considering for the Iron Boots. Previously, the Iron Boots only let you sink in water and that was it - now, they have a second ability: an air slam attack!

This one is still VERY WIP right now, there will be special effects and whatnot. Functionally, the air slam serves as a way to descend quickly (which also helps you control your movement underwater better), and it also allows you to bounce off enemies while dealing melee damage if you slam into them! The latter functionality hasn't been implemented yet, which is why it doesn't show up in the video. I'm hoping to use this to make early underwater exploration more enjoyable, as well as implement some fun enemy-based platforming challenges.


And that's all for this week! It feels almost strange to be able to write a normal weekly update for once, but strange in a good way. Feels like things are finally getting somewhat back to normal. I still have a long way to go to be "healthy" - I don't think I've been mentally or physically healthy since well before starting Crisis Point, honestly - but this is a really big step forward, and I owe it all to you guys. Combining my already-bad mental health with the stress and burnout of working on the same project for such a long time brought me to a really bad place, and the only reason I'm here now, able to start recovering and trying to reach a happier place in life, is entirely because of you all. Thank you guys so, so much. I owe you more than I'll ever be able to repay, but I'll do my best to repay it by making Crisis Point the best game it can be! We'll see you next week with another update!

 

[Anon42]

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Hey everyone, I don't have too much to talk about this week. Like I talked about in last week's update, I'm trying to limit the amount of time I spend doing work for now - the last thing we want when I'm finally making progress is to push it too far and end up going backwards.

This week, I pretty much just continued working on the same things from last week, the ledge vaulting and slam attack. They might have looked fairly complete in last week's update (aside from the WIP animations), but there were lots of bugs and missing functionality, which is what I worked on this week. The slam in particular had some annoying issues when trying to bounce off of slimes that were on the ground, so it took a good bit of tinkering to get it all working properly. It's nearly finished now, I just need to make it actually deal damage to enemies, and do some more testing to make sure everything is working as intended.

Aside from work this week, I had another doctor's appointment, this time a followup with my general doctor. We mostly talked about my high heart rate (and I scheduled another visit for some other health issues I want to talk about), but there's not too much to talk about there. I've been measuring my heart rate at home, so I can confirm that it does reach the ~110-120 range that they measured, even when I'm at home, but my heart rate was actually a little lower this time than the last few visits which is good. Still too high, but it wasn't at the 120 they've been measuring the last few times. My appointment anxiety is getting better, too; it's still there, but I'm starting to be able to deal with it better and not get quite as worked up. Anyway, she's going to give me a referral to cardiology so I can get more thorough testing, probably using a holter monitor, and then we can figure out where to go from there.

I'm going to continue taking it slow with work - I'm paying a lot of attention to my brain when I'm working, and any time it starts feeling stressed or overwhelmed I stop - but it feels really good to actually be able to work semi-regularly again. My mental break happened pretty much immediately after the last CPE update came out, so unfortunately the next one is still a ways off - I'm basically starting at the very beginning of the update development process, and I'm not going to be working as much as I was before. I just want to be upfront about that so you guys know it'll be a while, even though I'm able to work again now. I'm also thinking about streams, but I'm not sure if I'm going to be doing them again any time soon - I think I want to wait until I can consistently work for several hours straight without stress, so I'm not just streaming for an hour or two then stopping. I'll keep you updated on that in the weeks to come, maybe something will change.


And that's about all I have to talk about today. Thank you so much for reading, and for being such incredible supporters! I don't know where I'd be without you guys; most people don't get the luxury of being able to essentially take a 4 month break from work for mental health reasons, and the fact that I was able to do that is just.. still mindblowing. You guys are absolutely amazing to me, and I will never forget that. Anyway, see you again in next week's update!

 

[ThatWeirdGuyWithaWeirdHat]

So is the newest level and any new enemies/animations still actually being developed, or you all in on extra movement and mechanics atm?

 

[Anon42]

So is the newest level and any new enemies/animations still actually being developed, or you all in on extra movement and mechanics atm?

Mostly just focused on movement and mechanics, but Orexius is still working on those xray animations. For me, I've only just started working again, and I'm limiting the amount of time I spend doing it for now so I don't undo all the mental health progress I've made. I'm better off focusing on one or two things at a time right now, so those things actually make good progress, rather than spreading myself thin trying to do a bunch of things at once. The new area and any new enemies that come with it will come later in the development of this update

 

[Anon42]

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Hey guys, sorry I didn't post a weekly update on time! Now that I'm back to work, and trying to not do too much, I'm still trying to figure out exactly how to work around my mental health. I worked for probably 7 hours on Friday, because I felt fine the entire time - but after I was done, it hit me real hard how much of a mental toll that took, and I had to step away for a few days. Sorry about that; I'm all good now, but I'm still learning that I need to be careful with how much I work, even when I feel fine in the moment, so that sort of thing doesn't happen again. I'm going to be changing up my work schedule a bit, but update days will remain Saturday for the time being, so that won't impact much on your end.

Just to give you guys a quick update from what went on last week, there wasn't too much - I'm starting to get used to the ADHD meds, and it definitely feels like they're helping with my focus. The 7 hour work day last week was spent doing a big refactoring to our animation system that I've been wanting to do for ages, but stuff like refactoring and rewriting code has always been one of my biggest struggles in development. With the medication though, I had no problem staying pretty focused the entire time, so it definitely seems to do the trick! Aside from the refactoring, I also pretty much finished up the Ledge Vault and Slam abilities. There's still a tiny bit of work to be done on them, mostly bug testing, but they're 95% complete now so I should get some time to work on other stuff this week, like implementing the H-scene xray animations. I'm also planning on doing another refactoring for the H-scene system; as you all know, with last update's refactor, there were some unfortunate crashing issues introduced, and upon reexamining the whole system I realized there's a much better way to handle it that should be easier to work with and avoid crashes. I wouldn't be surprised if I made some stupid mistakes on the last refactor too, since I was heading in a bad mental direction while working on it, and didn't have the benefit of medications.

As one small aside, Orexius is basically done with the xray animations now (the only thing left is the Azulisk BE scene); he's working on more special effects now, and I plan to have him work on some less-important animations after, like Alicia idle fidgets, and stuff for the rest of the gang to do back at base camp instead of just standing around. He's still waiting on me to implement the Golem WIP animations in-engine, so he won't work on finishing the Golem animations up until after I get to that.


Like I've said before, v0.45 is still a ways off, between me just now getting back to work and needing to take things slow for now. Thank you guys so much for being so patient with this. I was admittedly worried about how it would feel when I finally got back to work, before; I have a tendency to feel real guilty about things when I feel like I've let someone down, and since it's been so long, I had the fear that I'd feel pressured to crunch hard to get the update out in a reasonable time since you've all been waiting so long. After all of your support and kindness, though, I've been able to stay rational and not wreck myself from self-inflicted pressure like I normally would, so getting back to work has been much easier and more enjoyable than I expected. All that to say, thank you again, and I can't wait to deliver you guys more real content! See you again on Saturday!

 

[Anon42]

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Hey guys, not much of an update this week (and sorry it was a day late again!) - I had multiple doctor visits this week, so a lot of my time was taken up by appointments (and appointment anxiety), and I didn't get to work too much. The work I did do was mostly on shaders and special effects stuff, mostly for the Slam attack, but I also want to do another pass over most of CPE's special effects now that Orexius has been learning how to animate effects. He's been putting out some excellent effects that I'm looking forward to showing off in future updates!

We're also going back and reviewing each area in the game, and seeing where we can improve them visually; the Deep Soil is our first target, because to be honest, the current iteration of the area is basically not at all like I envisioned it, and we want to fix that. I made a lot of mistakes early in development with not writing things down, and not giving my artists enough information to go on, so that's something I'm working on improving. Me and Puffernutter went over the Deep Soil this week and wrote down key points, what improvements we want to make, and gathered references so when she has time to work on tilesets she'll have a much clearer picture of what to aim for, and we plan on doing that for every other area in the game as well. Since I don't have to be very involved in the process, it won't slow down my work much, so don't start worrying this is going to be The Great Rework™ 2.0 or anything like that

Anyway, aside from the little work I did this week, Orexius started working on some less-necessary animations for the main cast, stuff like Rodriguez using the computer at base camp and Alicia idle fidgets (including a lewd one I think you'll all like). I'll probably show those off in a future update, once we have a handful of them done.

Sorry I don't have much more to share, but all the appointments I had really took it out of me. There's not much to talk about regarding the appointments, either; we made a minor change to my ADHD medication (trying out 2 short-term pills per day instead of 1 extended release and 1 short-term, because I wasn't really feeling much of an effect from the extended one), and the rest is going to wait until mid-November to really get anywhere, since I'm waiting to get on insurance once open enrollment starts before doing anything major. I did get blood drawn for an allergy test though, which I've never done before, so it'll be interesting to see if I've been secretly allergic to anything all these years and just never realized it!

So that's more or less what happened this week. Sorry again it's such a short post, but I'm all done with appointments for a while now, so I should get some solid work in by next update! Thank you all for reading, and for continuing to be so patient with me as I try and get things back to normal. See you again next update!

 

[Anon42]

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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!

 

[Anon42]

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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!

 

[Anon42]

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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.

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!

 

[Anon42]

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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.

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!

 

[Anon42]

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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!

 

[Anon42]

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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!