ACT Patreon Active [Anon42] Crisis Point: Extinction

[Anon42]

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

 

[J300mer]

Your spritework in general is pretty impressive, to be honest.

 

[Anon42]

Your spritework in general is pretty impressive, to be honest.

Thanks, though most of the spritework in the game isn't mine anymore, it's done by our animator, Orexius! I'll send your compliments along to him, glad you like his work

 

[Anon42]

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https://soundcloud.com/anon-42-498945869%2Fcrisis-point-extinction-human-hq-2
Hey everyone! Sorry for this update being so late; I had a stomach bug over the weekend, and on Monday when I was planning on making the post, I had a pair of appointments at the clinic that went longer than expected and chewed up my whole day.

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

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



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

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

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

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

 

[Anon42]

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

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

v0.45 MAJOR CHANGES AND FEATURES

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

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

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



v0.46 GOALS AND PLANS

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



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



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

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

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

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

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



v0.45 MINOR CHANGES AND BUG FIXES

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

 

[Anon42]

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



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

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

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

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


So in general, the therapy has been great so far. I've only had 2 appointments, so it hasn't been long enough to be 100% sure, but so far I'm very happy with my choice of therapist. He seems like the right person to help me out and I'm ridiculously grateful that I didn't have to run through a dozen people before finding someone that clicks.
Aside from therapy, I also had my neuropsych evaluation a few days ago. I won't hear back results for about ~2 months based on what they said, but it'll be nice to have a more thorough examination of my brain.

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

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

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


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

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

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

 

[Anon42]

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

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

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

Before

After

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

 

[Inspector_Whatsup]

Well, first off, congratulations on getting engaged! A toast to your joint future!

I'm very relieved to read about your improvements, as well. Mental health is a fickle thing, and very vulnerable nowadays, so I'm happy that you're getting better!

Now, the resolution shift is interesting. Maybe it's something I just have a lot of nostalgia for, but somehow, 4:3 fits metroidvanias better than 16:9. I find UI elements and the general FoV easier to keep in check when it's not as wide. Maybe I just need the right setup to appreciate it, though. Either way, I don't think it'll hurt the game in any way. In fact, this may give you a bit of space to consider redesigning or adding to the UI a little bit - or even allowing some customization in terms of where UI elements are placed on the screen, but that's taking it way too far right now.
The big thing I'm interested in, is how enemy behaviour will change with this expanded view. The FoV of a 2D game is generally considered to be the range of sight for the protagonist, as well as the approximate aggro range for most enemies, after all. Will you fit this to the active window size, or will you keep it as it is, allowing for a certain "deadzone" on the screen where enemies are visible, but unaware?

 

[Anon42]

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

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


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


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

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


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

 

[ThatWeirdGuyWithaWeirdHat]

you can thank my ADHD for that

Good god do I know that feeling. The feeling where you want it to be short and sweet, but either end up rambling and getting into tangents without realizing or going back and seeing that you didn't elaborate on a brought-up point at all and having to reword a segment.

 

[Anon42]

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We couldn't make this game without our supporters!)

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

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

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


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



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

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

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


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







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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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


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

 

[Slam Sector]

This game has been in development for a long time, but I haven't seen many other early-access indie games improve THIS much over long development times. Porno or otherwise.

 

[Anon42]

This game has been in development for a long time, but I haven't seen many other early-access indie games improve THIS much over long development times. Porno or otherwise.

Thank you, that really means a lot! I'm frustrated at how long the game has taken me, probably moreso than anyone else honestly, but it's hard to deny that it's been worth the effort. We all started on the project pretty inexperienced, and we've improved so much over the years that it felt like we'd be doing the game and our supporters a disservice by not updating the old stuff. The game would be a weird mix of inconsistent quality by the end of it, and after investing so much time in it, I want to make sure the end result has been worth the wait.

I'm definitely looking forward to our future work though - we'll always be learning and improving, but the difference shouldn't be nearly as dramatic in our next game

 

[IAmAKi]

I'm definitely looking forward to our future work though - we'll always be learning and improving, but the difference shouldn't be nearly as dramatic in our next game

What is your next game gonna be anyhow?

 

[Anon42]

What is your next game gonna be anyhow?

That's a secret for now We decided what it will be quite a while ago, and I can at least tell you it isn't anything related to Crisis Point. In general, we don't plan to make a sequel to CPE, and our next game is going to be pretty different - the team definitely needs a change of pace after working on this project for so long.

 

[TouchFluffyTail]

Raid: Shadow Legends 2!


Hopefully next game goes smoother for you.

 

[Anon42]

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


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






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

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

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

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


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

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

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





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

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

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

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



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




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

 

[Anon42]

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

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




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

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


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

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

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



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



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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

 

[Jesus]

Just wanted to say, the new background/environment designs are crazy good. Any plans to change the preexisting ones?

 

[Captainstarfish]

The crazy warping effect on the bottom right was just me playing around with the effect and seeing what I can do with it - it's using the exact same shader and concepts as the heat distortion, just with a rotation effect applied to it. The shader allows for distortion in any direction, so I can do just about anything I can think of with it.

Nice swastika bro, I dig it.