(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, consider supporting us!)

Hey everyone! Before I get started on the meat of the post, I just wanted to put out a reminder that we're doing regular dev streams again! We're streaming every day Monday-Friday, starting at 2 pm EST. Mostly it's just me, but sometimes Red and Orexius join in, and Puffernutter is going to be streaming development work with me too in the future. You can follow me on Picarto itself (https://picarto.tv/Anon42) to get notifications when I start streaming, but our schedule is consistent, unless I can't stream on that day for some reason, so you can also just come by at 2 pm Mon-Fri if you want to watch! With that out of the way, here's this week's update!

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

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

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

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

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