(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, you can try a free demo of the game on our itch.io by clicking here! If you enjoy the game, please consider supporting us on Patreon! We couldn't make this game without our supporters!)

Hey everyone! This week in CPE development, I decided to take a pause from the other things I was working on, and tinker with a few things that I've been curious about for a while. The first I have a visual for, and the second is still something I'm figuring out, but seems promising.

First off, the video up at the top! I've mentioned before that I'm trying to learn shaders, which is a laborious process - shaders are written in a different programming language than the game itself, so there's already a layer of difficulty in learning them. That's not a big deal since most programming fundamentals carry over regardless of the language used, but then the more difficult part is just that shaders are so much more complex and obtuse than anything I've coded for the main game. A lot of game creation engines will have visual shader creators, like Unity's Shader Graph, but my engine has none of that, so every shader has to be written by hand.

All that is a long way to say that even though it's a difficult process, I'm making progress! The video above is a showcase of that, because this week I managed to design and implement a fiery dissolve effect shader, which is now being used on the vines you burn away using the Flare Strike. The video shows the old effect on the left, and the new effect on the right, so you can really get a picture for how much better it looks. I'm thrilled with it; this is the kind of effect I've always wanted to be able to create, and I can apply a lot of the things I learned in making the effect to other parts of CPE as well! In general I'm spending a lot of my time right now trying to learn new techniques, and find ways to improve my development pipelines, especially the tedious parts, to try and prevent the burnout I was feeling for such a long time - which brings me neatly to the next thing.

One of the most time-consuming parts of making Crisis Point is level creation. At the moment, every room in CPE requires every single asset to be placed by hand. CPE is made up of 32x32 pixel tiles, and the screen size is 640x480, which is the smallest size a room in the game can be - that's a size of 20x15 tiles, or 300 total tile spaces, in the smallest possible room. Not every tile will be filled of course, many of them need to be blank space for gameplay, but often there are multiple layers of detail required in a room, and most rooms are bigger than 640x480! On top of that, my engine's default level creation tool.. kinda sucks. It works fine for smaller and simpler things, but large rooms cause it to lag, and it lacks some features that would be tremendously helpful. The end result is that creating and fully detailing a room often takes several hours, and there are hundreds of rooms in the game already, and hundreds more to come. It's honestly a really boring process and I should've done something about it a long time ago, but I never got around to looking at other options.

This week though, I decided to look into the idea of creating a level design tool of my own, or at least finding some way to make the process easier. With CPE already being so far in development, and my plans to switch engines for my next game, creating a fully-featured level designer doesn't seem like a prudent option at this stage - however, I don't necessarily need a fully-featured design tool. I decided to take a look at how my engine stores the data for levels, and as it turns out, they're basically just json files with a custom file extension - they're written in plain text that can absolutely be read, edited by hand, and auto-generated using the tools available to me. I still have some testing to do to know for sure if this route is going to work out, but my early testing seems extremely promising that I'll be able to, at the very least, create an auto-tiling tool that places tiles for me, and exports them into a format that my engine can load natively. This would quite literally save over an hour per room designed, and since I'd be able to load them into the project files like any room created using the IDE itself, it wouldn't cause any changes to the game on the user end! Generating tiles at runtime could cause extra loading time, for example, but this method wouldn't have any effect on the game once exported.

Needless to say, if this works out it will take a bit of time to develop the tool, but the time (and tedium) saved by doing it would be immeasurable. I'm super excited about the idea, and I'll be looking into it more thoroughly next week, so I should have a good idea of how feasible it is by the next update!

So that's most of what I spent my time on this week. I did a few other things, like implementing a pink vignette on the screen when Alicia's libido gets high, but those were the big things. Like before, I'm trying to not push myself too much with work for the time being, so I'm only putting in a few hours a day, but I'm generally feeling more and more capable of getting stuff done as time goes on! Unfortunately my medicine doctor's schedule is backed up, so I won't be able to see them about changing my prescription again until mid-November, but I have enough of my old prescription left to last me most of that time, so everything should be fine.

On Orexius's end, he worked on a bunch of smaller things this week; finishing up some of the new ledge grab/vault animations, some BE alts for the new animations being added, a crouched version of Alicia's "taking damage" animation, updating the Tentacle H-scene, and so on. Not super exciting stuff, but all important!

And that's pretty much it for this week. Thank you guys for reading, and I hope you like the new effect as much as I do - I look forward to implementing some more stuff using my new shader knowledge in the near future. We'll see you again next week!