(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 everybody! This week's update is a bit smaller, we only have one real visual to show ya, since I've been working on mostly non-visual stuff this week, like writing the Azulisk CG scene. That being said, let's get into it!

First off is the one visual from this week, showing off new functionality for the Warped Scientist's red vial. As you likely know already, the Warped Scientist has 3 vial colors - red (damage), blue (BE status effect), and white (immobilizing status effect).

For recolored, higher-tier Scientists, I decided to handle the damage and status effect vials differently; for the red damage vial, as you can see in the gif above, it now creates a lingering flame effect that will cause damage to Alicia if she runs into it. The flame doesn't last forever, but it means that you'll have to be more aware of your positioning when fighting Warped Scientists.

I don't have a gif for blue and white vials, but instead of changing the effect of the vial itself for those ones, I decided to make the scientist throw 3 vials in quick succession. When he does this, all 3 vials will be of the same type as the first one, so you won't need to keep track of what types he's throwing and you can focus on avoiding them. I decided to go that route with the scientist because I realized the biggest issue with enemies in Crisis Point is that it's too easy to simply dodge one attack, then kill them before they pose much of a threat, due to their cooldown period between attacks. These enemy recolor AI changes will hopefully lead to enemies either having more difficult to avoid attacks, or having longer "attack phases", meaning the player has to dodge properly for a longer period before getting the opportunity to kill. It'll be exciting to see how all of this changes the later parts of the game, in any case!

Aside from that, Orexius finished up the Duo Slime BE H-scene (it's much like the non-BE scene, with a second slime jumping on Alicia's face), and also started working on some general cutscene animations, like this one:

Up until now, the majority of Crisis Point's cutscene animations have been bespoke animations made for a specific moment in a specific cutscene (i.e. Rodriguez putting his hands up when Alicia draws her gun during their first meeting). These animations are great, but the characters in cutscenes don't do a lot of animating outside of those rare bespoke animations, so the goal is to give each character a small library of reusable animations unique to them and fitting to their character (i.e. Alicia crossing her arms, Birch flipping through his book), and then adding those to existing cutscenes whenever they feel fitting, to give each character some more life and movement without every animation needing to be unique.

Last thing I wanted to mention for this week is a small one, but I implemented right analog stick aiming for gamepads this week! This system does NOT change the way aiming in Crisis Point works - you're still limited to 8-directional aiming, and when running you still can't aim behind you or anything. All of the existing limitations are still in place, but I figured some players would be more comfortable, for example, using the right stick to aim and R1 to shoot. If it makes even 1 person more comfortable playing the game then I'm glad to have added it!

Oh, one more final note about streams - sorry to anyone who's waiting for Picarto streams again, I decided not to do any this week because Picarto had some website changes and they were causing issues for a number of people, so I figured it would be better to wait it out a bit. We did a few Discord streams instead, and hopefully Picarto has smoothed out the issues well enough now for me to start streaming there again this week.

And that's it for this week! Sorry it's not as exciting as the last two weeks; Orex can only work on H-scenes so much before other animations need to be done :p Thank you so much for supporting and reading! The rest of the update will be a personal one, so feel free to stop reading here if you want, and we'll see you next week!

As far as personal stuff goes this week, it was pretty alright! Exercise was still a bit of a bust (but not completely, I did exercise a few times which is better than last week!), and more importantly the house talked about why exercise has fallen off for all of us. We've realized that it's because our exercise room is on the smaller side and can only really comfortably hold one person, so exercise has become a "wait your turn" thing rather than a group event like it used to be when it was in our living room. The lack of community and encouragement between the three of us, for lack of a better term, resulted in a lot less pressure to keep it up, and we all gradually fell off the wagon. We're not entirely sure what we're going to do about it yet, but now that we know what the problem is we can work on fixing it! I'm happy to report we're also continuing to do well in regards to eating better and cooking more, so all in all I'd call it a pretty great week in terms of personal health and improvement.

And with that, the update is done! Thank you so much for reading everybody; I hope everything is going great for all of you, too! We'll see you in the next update!