(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! There's not too much to show for CPE work this week (and for the rest of this update, really); most of our bigger changes for this update have already been shown off (wire shot, melee, flare shot, etc), and most of my remaining work is still related to those things. They're all pretty huge changes, so a lot of things broke when reworking them, and many of those things still need to be fixed.

The Wire Shot in particular has a lot of things that aren't working properly right now, particularly the horizontal pull blocks and Sentry shields. I was never a huge fan of the way either of these functioned - the pull blocks take a long time to move, and the Sentry shields are TOO weak to the Wire Shot, it takes less than a second to yank them down and make them vulnerable. To solve both of these problems, I decided to have Orexius create a new animation for Alicia where she hooks something with the Wire Shot and gives it a strong tug; once this animation is implemented, the Warped Sentry's shields will take a bit longer to pull rather than being near-instant (I'll balance this by making them stay knocked down longer), and the horizontal pull blocks won't require you to stay in the pulling stance for an extended period, instead just requiring the short tug animation before they move. This functionality is still WIP though, so I can't show it off just yet.

The Melee/Flare Shot on the other hand, while it does still have its fair share of issues, has generally been much simpler to rework; it mostly needs work on the visual side, and fixing some bugs that happen when Alicia's midair melee animation is interrupted. Most of the Flare Shot's skills will remain either unchanged or slightly changed, but the Orbital Flare in particular is being reworked significantly. Again, I don't have footage for it yet, but my plan is to have melee attacks leave a floating trail of fire that burns and hurts enemies that touch it, instead of creating a floating orb that shoots out fire in a circle. This will balance it a bit more by giving it less coverage (the Orbital Flare had frankly INSANE range before), but still keeping the same general function of "stationary fire you can place down whenever/wherever you want". If the reduced range proves to be too much of a nerf, I can either increase the radius, or try tweaking the damage and duration instead; I think it should feel fine though, especially with how much more accessible the new Flare Shot will be.

The last thing I wanted to show this week is just a small gif showing the new special effect for the Crystal Dragon's sucking attack! It's not much to show off, but I wanted to include some kind of fun visual:

The enemy has no proper animation on their body yet, so please excuse the fact that they still look stiff. I still plan on tweaking the effect a bit, too, but I'm pretty happy with it so far - it's definitely a lot better than the flat red hitbox that was used before! This suck attack pulls Alicia faster than it used to, but I've also increased Alicia's general mobility while underwater by a bit, so underwater segments in general aren't quite as slow as before.

Anyway, that's it for this week! I'm not entirely sure when this update will be out, but I plan on trying to release it as early as I can in September. It should definitely be out by the 15th or so, hopefully sooner, but we're still settling into a groove in the new place. I'll be able to pick up a second monitor soon though, so hopefully streams will resume sometime during this next week or so! Keep an eye out for that!

Thank you all for supporting Crisis Point, we'll see you with another update next week!