(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our bi-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, welcome to another development update! This one is, again, going to be a bit light on content. The TL;DR is that we're still pretty much working on the same stuff as last week, so there isn't too much to talk about, but nonetheless, let's go over what we've been working on!

Puffernutter has had limited CPE time due to her freelance gigs, but in the time she can spend on CPE, she's working on updating the Caves tileset still. We had a discussion about tiles this week, and we've decided to NOT try and rush them for v0.46. With how comprehensive the visual overhaul we're working on is, and with how much content the game has that we need to update, we'll be working on this for many many updates, and we don't want to rush it out before it's ready. We'll continue to keep you all updated on the art rework, and we don't plan to hold all of it back until the whole game is redone or anything - but at the very least, we want my custom level editor before we start implementing the new tilesets, since it will make the job far easier.

Orexius finished up the Duo Slime H-scene animation, and has started on the BE Vines animation rework, as well as continuing work on various gameplay animations.

For my part, I've still been plugging away at the lighting engine update. I swear every week I write about how I ran into more issues but fixed them, and this week is no different! It's likely I'll find even more bugs that need fixing, but as of right now pretty much every bug I've found has been squashed and I'm just continuing to update all the lights to work with the new system. Since I've been doing that for a while now, I wanted to post a comparison of one of the lights that I put extra work into, so you can see a bit more of what goes into it:

So stuff like this is the reason the lighting rework is taking a while! With the Power Orb collectible, I decided to give it two layers of lights: one is a stationary red glow, for the item's core, and the other is a rotating yellow light for the ring that circles it. It shrinks and grows and rotates with the ring, and generally just looks a lot cooler than it did before. The same lighting has been applied to the Guard Orb as well, naturally.

So basically, I'm not just tweaking some numbers, and updating lights like this can take an hour or two each depending on complexity. There are a fair amount of lights that ARE simple to transition over, but since I'm already in there messing with the code, I've been taking extra time to update and improve any light sources that seem like they should have additional work put into them - even small things, like previously every light was based on a circle, but we've been adding new lighting shapes for things like the diamond-shaped Skill Point collectible.

That's all I really have to talk about this week, but I did want to leave you guys with at least a small teaser for something I have cooking in the background. We've talked a lot recently about all of the visual overhauls we're doing to Crisis Point - animations being redone, lighting overhauled, revamped UI, the screen size update - and as we've been working on these things, and seeing how the game is evolving, we started to wonder if there were any gameplay elements that felt outdated and would be worth revisiting. After all, we reworked the Wire Shot before, and the new version of it feels SO much better to use - who's to say we can't do the same with other parts of the game? Maybe even some of the game's core mechanics could be improved.. reworked to suit a more modern experience, rather than mimicking games from 20 years ago? That's all I'll say for now, but I think you guys will be pretty excited to see where we're going next!

A final word before the post ends. Crisis Point development is in a very weird spot right now; we haven't put out an update in so long because of my mental health issues, and we have SO many things being reworked and improved that are all really exciting and will make the game so much better.. but all of them are "complete overhaul" types of things that just can't be released half-finished. Because of that, it really doesn't lend itself well to putting out playable updates - anything we release here on Patreon needs to be thoroughly polished, since you never know which version will be a person's first experience with the game, and a bad experience can ruin our chances of finding an audience. So, what we're going to do right now is we're going to start really focusing on getting a playable update out for you guys ASAP, but just please be aware that it won't be as substantial as I would like, despite the loooong development cycle. It won't really contain new content (like I've talked about before), but will be mostly focused around the lighting and screen size updates, with maybe a few other things squeezed in. At this point, expectations for what v0.46 will be like are higher than we're ever going to be able to pull off without killing ourselves with crunch, and I refuse to do that to myself or the rest of the team - but the pressure is still there, so I just want to get something out there.

Anyway, sorry to kind of end the post off on a bit of a bummer. Playable update releases for CPE might continue to be weird like this as we work on all this foundational stuff, and I'm sorry if we fail to put out updates on a regular schedule, but we'll keep you updated with our progress every step of the way. Once all these foundations are created, the rest of the game will be SO much easier to build. All I can ask for until that point is your patience and understanding, and to give the biggest thanks to all of you who stick around with us! Thanks for reading, I'll see you again in the next biweekly update!