(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, sorry for the late update - Saturday ended up being super busy with chores and errands, so I wasn't able to get to writing the update post until today.

There's not too much to talk about this week, but not because we didn't make progress! I spent the entire week working on one specific thing - a custom level editor, like I talked about last update. I did some testing early in the week, and determined that as far as I can tell, the method I came up with to export levels from my own editor works perfectly! I was able to make a simple level and pull it into the main CPE project file, then load it, enter it, and leave it with no issues. The room was mostly just made up of collision blocks (no tiles or anything yet), but I was also able to implement a room transition, just to make sure more complex things work as well.

There is a bit of manual file editing I have to do to make it work, so before you start wondering, no, this will not be a publicly released editor. It would unfortunately be impossible for anyone without access to the project files to be able to import levels using this method, but because the levels are imported directly into my project files, it also means there won't be any kind of impact on the game's performance or loading times.

Needless to say, I'm thrilled! I spent the entire week working on the editor itself, which you can see an example of in the video above. It's proving to be a pretty tricky process, especially being able to zoom and drag the room around, but I'm already excited to start using it. It may look pretty simple at the moment, but I'm doing quite a bit of optimization in the early stages to make sure the editor will perform well even when working on huge levels. Right now, I've optimized the way the editor is handled so that it doesn't really matter how many things I place in the level, it won't really have a performance impact. I wanted to get the basics working properly here before working on filling in assets, which is why the menus I open in the video are all empty.

The default level editor in my IDE is missing so many features I want from it, and it lags to hell when rooms get big or complicated, so seeing my editor running at ~9,000 FPS even when filled to the brim with objects is exciting. I'll be able to implement any features I want into this thing, so once it's finished, designing levels for Crisis Point will be so much easier and faster. It's also just been a lot of fun to work on, honestly! It's a nice change of pace to program something like this.

I'll likely be continuing to mostly work on the level editor over the next week, but I'll be doing some work on implementing more of Orex's animations as well. He has a lot of smaller animations that he's been working on and updating, like the Warped Soldier's combat animations, that just need to be implemented by me now.

This update may be a smaller one, but the work I'm doing now is a gateway towards the game being finished faster, AND it'll let me do some more exciting stuff with the levels in the game! Stuff like more interesting lighting, and more parallax objects, which would've been far too cumbersome to implement in the default level editor. I can't wait to see what I can cook up with it. In the meantime, thank you so much for reading, and for continuing to be so patient with us! I wish we were closer to releasing an update to the game, since you all have had to wait so long, but since I'm still getting in the swing of working, we haven't quite figured out the right medication for me, and I'm trying not to overwork myself, it's still a little slow going. I did manage to have an 8 hour work day this week though, working on the level editor, and I felt fine afterwards! Hopefully I'll be able to start doing longer work days more often, so things can really get back on track, and I'll be able to see my medicine doctor again mid-November to try changing up my medication again. Things are looking really good lately, but I still have to ask for your patience just a little longer before I'm back at full power.

And that's about it for this week! Thank you so much for reading, and for continuing to support us. We'll see you again in next week's update!