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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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