(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! We got a packed update this week, and I won't waste time with preamble. Make sure you stick around until the end, there's some big news to announce!

First off, this week we started working on the above-water Subaquatic Caverns background art. As you can see most of it is still flat color stuff right now; we're still tweaking colors and the final versions will be much more detailed, but I'm sure you'll agree it's already much more interesting to look at than the flat background of v0.39.

Next up, here's a quick shot of another mechanic coming in v0.40. Much like the underwater currents, these geysers will push Alicia in the direction they're facing if she steps into them while they're active; unlike the currents, these are on a timer, and it's possible that riding their waves won't always be advantageous.

That's all the visual stuff for this week, but I also want to touch on one big thing from v0.39, and that's the performance of the Subaquatic Caverns. The new area is mostly fine, but there's one extremely large room in the middle of the area, far bigger than any other room in Crisis Point, and the performance in that room is.. not the best. Decently powerful computers aren't struggling with it, but weaker machines have been getting some lag. For starters, I want to apologize for letting the update ship with that issue; a large amount of my work this week has been spent optimizing that area, and the results have been pretty good so far. On my machine, I've been able to roughly double the framerate, so hopefully the results will be similar on weaker hardware.

I still have some ideas for further optimizations, so I expect it to be even better by the time v0.40 comes out. If you've had performance issues in v0.39, please get in touch with me - I'd like to know what kind of hardware is having issues, and how bad the performance issues really are.

Alright, with all that out of the way, time for the most exciting part of this update!

As you may have noticed, our Patreon has been blowing up lately. We were stuck around the $4000s mark for the better part of 4 years, but recently our development has picked up speed considerably, and we're nearing $7000 now. I made a post two months ago acknowledging the increase in funding, but explaining that because of the state of the world and COVID-19, we would be temporarily holding off on hiring Orexius full-time. Well.. things have changed since then. Due to a combination of real life events, and the continued growth of our funding, we decided to switch gears a little sooner. Orexius recently handed in his resignation letter at his dayjob, and as of June 1st, he will be officially starting work on Crisis Point: Extinction full time!

This info does come with one caveat, though; one of the "real life events" I mentioned that changed our plans is that I'm going to be moving aaaaall the way across the country in July, and Orexius will be coming with me, so we can continue to work together in person. Even though he's going full time very soon, I don't expect our development pace to pick up much yet, because we're going to be extremely busy with the move. There's a lot to take care of, and with the extra travel complications due to COVID, it's going to be a really busy and stressful time for us. I want to inform you all of this now, before it starts affecting our output, so you can know what to expect; v0.40 and v0.41 may end up being a bit smaller than we'd like them to be due to the timing and overlap, but once we're done with the move, we'll be all set up with two full time team members and shit should start getting crazy real quick!

Alright, that's it for me for today. Thank you all for reading, and I hope you're as excited for the future of CPE as I am! See ya next week!