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

Howdy ho, it's time once again for that weekly CPE development update! This week we've actually got a few gifs to show off, so let's get into it!

First off, the gif you see up above, which is the replacement for the Orbital Flare skill for the Flare Shot. The Orbital Flare, before the melee change, created a stationary orb of fire that basically acted as a spinning two-way flamethrower; it did a surprising amount of damage, and covered a LOT of screen space with very little effort. Now that the Flare Shot has been reworked into a melee upgrade, it'll be far more easily accessible than before, so I needed to tone it down a little without drastically changing its identity as an easy-to-place damage field; this is what we decided on! When you do any kind of melee attack, a fiery trail is left behind by the swing that stays on screen for about 5 seconds. During that time, it'll ignite and deal damage to anything that touches it. It has much smaller range than the Orbital Flare did, but that downside is offset by how much easier it is to utilize now, plus whenever you lay it down you could also be hitting with a melee attack. I'm still working on the visuals, I plan to improve them a bit more, and I'm still deciding how I want to balance it (whether by limiting how many can be on screen, or by adding a cooldown), but I'm pretty happy with it so far!

Next up is the Wire Shot yank animation I mentioned last week.

(Don't mind the flat-colored wire, Alicia losing her jacket in the last few frames, or any other small oddities - the animation is still WIP)

So this is how using the Wire Shot on a Warped Sentry looks now. Before, you would just use the Wire Shot, and the moment it touched her shield she would get immediately pulled down. It looked pretty silly, honestly, and was overpowered at shutting down that enemy type far too quickly. Now you have to wait for this animation to play, but to balance it the Sentry stays down quite a bit longer than she used to. This animation will also be used when pulling horizontal blocks, but that functionality is still WIP, so no gif for now. Do keep in mind, also, that the Wire Shot is on its own dedicated button now too, so it's more accessible in the heat of combat even though the animation takes longer now!

Those are the two gifs I have for ya today. Aside from that, though, we were also able to finally hold a devstream on Friday! We managed to get another monitor set up this week, so I'm finally able to stream again, and streams will be happening regularly like before. For the time being, we'll be sticking to Monday/Wednesday/Friday streams like we used to, but starting at 5 pm EST. This schedule might change as we get back into the streaming groove, but that's the plan for now! It's great to finally be back to streaming, and I hope to see both familiar and new faces show up to hang out with us while we work! For those of you interested in the streams but not already following us, you can find our Picarto pages at:
https://picarto.tv/Anon42
https://picarto.tv/TheOrexius
You can follow us there to get notifications when we stream! I also announce streams at my twitter: https://twitter.com/Anon42_CPE

Alright, that'll be it for me today! I'm not sure how much longer v0.41 is going to take, I'm further behind than I expected to be thanks to the move. I'm hoping the productivity boost from streams will help catch us up, but it is possible v0.41 won't make my original "by the 15th" expectation. If you need to unpledge (whether it's because of a delay or because of financial issues or anything else), rest assured that if you were pledged at $10+ at ANY POINT during v0.41's development, you will get it once it comes out - don't feel the need to stay pledged to get your rewards, because you'll get them either way! That said, I appreciate the hell out of everyone continuing to support, despite the awkward development cycle for this update. The move really threw things off, but we're basically back to normal now and Orexius is kicking ass with new animations, so expect exciting things ahead!

Thanks for reading, we'll see you in next week's updates (and hopefully at the streams too)!