Hi everyone, apologies for not posting an update in a while. This is Puffernutter, Anon's wife. I am the one usually posting the Patreon updates on forums. However, my anxiety has been at an all-time high which led to depressive episodes. I'm starting new medications so hopefully that will improve. One of my big stressors has also been alleviated (my mom was diagnosed with cancer about 10 months ago and the lab results she got back last week show that she is now in remission). So I should be able to stay on top of updating forums from now on. Thank you for your patience with us!

(The following update posts are (mostly) a copy-paste from these updates posts on Patreon: Biweekly Update 6-11-2023, Biweekly Update 7-2-2023, Biweekly Update 7-23-2023, Biweekly Update 8-7-23, and Biweekly Update 8-27-2023. 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!)

Biweekly Update - 6-11-2023 (Personal stuff, high-res pixel art, and starting development on v0.47)

Hey everyone. So, without beating around the bush, the last few weeks didn't go quite like I hoped they would - we only ended up streaming once, and I've still been struggling to get myself back to full working capacity. I'm not going to try and BS you with this post to make it seem better than it is - things are slow right now, and I'm trying my best to get over this funk, but life keeps finding new and exciting ways to make that difficult.

I won't be talking about this beyond what I'm writing now right now, because it's a very serious and personal thing that I'm not comfortable being open about, but one of my close friends recently admitted to being suicidal. They're okay for now, but I probably don't even need to explain how the situation has been affecting me. I hate to have to ask you all for even more patience, when you've already been so patient with me and the CPE team, but it's all I can really ask for right now while we try to navigate this.

With all that being said, I don't want to make it sound like we're not getting *anything* done, because that's also not true. Our musician is back at it, working on some of the new music tracks we need for the story rewrite, and I've still been picking away at the game's scripts to alter them for the new story. In particular, I finally figured out an answer to one of the remaining uncertainties about Alicia's backstory, so I'm really happy about that, it'll help a lot with writing certain cutscenes.

Aside from me, Orexius has been working really hard, both on cutscene animations, and on something new we're experimenting with.

Pixelated cutscene illustrations! This is obviously still extremely WIP, so parts of it are either unfinished or just need some more work. As part of the story rework, there will be a lot of new and/or altered cutscenes, and we wanted to experiment with illustrations to help add more life to them. Aside from CGs (which only Alicia is present in), there aren't any moments in the game where you get to see the characters in higher resolution, so we don't have much chance to show them in detail. Illustrations will help get around that problem, and I'm hoping they'll allow everyone to get even more attached to the cast. Orex previously had very little experience with higher-resolution art, but he's been really improving lately, and being able to have someone on the team handle illustrations instead of outsourcing makes it a lot more feasible for us to have them.

And here's another, more NSFW piece - this one is just for fun and practice, not actually going to be ingame, so enjoy it here:

One last thing before this post is over, just want to update everyone on what our near-future plans are. It's been a bit since the last playable update came out, and I don't want there to be another year between major updates, so after deliberating on it for a while, the team has made the decision to start work on v0.47 now. We're at a pretty lucky point in the game's story right now - without any spoilers, the events that come next aren't really changing at all from the rewrite, so we can make a bit more content now without worrying about needing to replace it later when the story changes.

Our development priorities won't change too much in the short term, I'll still be working on the level design tool, but now the focus will be to get it to a usable enough state to start making new levels ASAP. I figure it'll be easier to develop it that way, anyway - make it usable but basic, then steadily upgrade it with new features as I figure out what I want from the tool. It's still going to take us a while to get v0.47 out - there's a new biome included (and possibly a new boss fight), so there's a lot that needs to be done to make it happen.

Spoilers for a late-game ability in v0.46 in the next paragraph, so skip over it if you haven't gotten there yet and don't want spoilers: I'm also going to be experimenting with a completely changed version of the Hoverjets powerup. Currently, the Hoverjets have two functions: holding Jump in midair to slow your descent, and extending a grounded dash indefinitely. I have no issues with the first part, but I've realized that I really don't like the way the "infinite grounded dash" function affects movement; it's such an accessible, powerful, and fast form of movement that the moment you unlock it, horizontal travel is "solved" for the rest of the game. I'm thinking about this mostly from a speedrunning perspective, and it feels like movement in the second half of the game will be really boring to watch, and also not that exciting to play. An ability like the Hoverjets extended ground dash makes more sense for near the end of the game, I think. I have an idea for a completely new ability that also fits the Hoverjets name, so I'm going to be experimenting with that ingame, and I'll share more about it when I have more concrete info. Some of the lategame level design will need to be altered, of course, so if the Hoverjets rework goes well, the new version of it + altered level design will also be in v0.47.

Alright, I think that's about it for me today. Again, thank you all SO much for being so understanding even though things are slow right now. We're doing our best, and with the focus on v0.47, I fully expect to have some good stuff to show off in the next few weeks. I still fully intend on getting back into streaming, even if it's not as usual as often right now, so keep an eye out for those. Thanks for reading everyone - hope to see you at the streams, and if not, we'll see you again in the next update.

"Biweekly" Update - 7-2-2023 (Reworked (upgrade name redacted) preview, lots more background art incoming!)

Hey everyone. So, the past few weeks may not have been quite as productive as I'd like, but despite not really doing any streams, things have been steadily improving! I managed to get some good work done on the (upgrade name redacted) rework I mentioned recently, and I also have some great news for the near-future of CPE that we'll get into in a bit. First off, the ability rework!

Spoiler for a late-game ability in v0.46 ahead, so skip the next few paragraphs and gifs if you don't want to see that! Like I mentioned in the last update, I've been considering reworking the Hoverjets ability that you acquire late in the game. The old Hoverjets has two functions: first, holding Jump in midair allows Alicia to fall much slower. Second, doing a grounded dash and continuing to hold the Dash key will allow you to dash indefinitely, until you stop holding it or get hit. The main goal in reworking it was to keep the same general utility, but make it more interesting than "hold a button to dash forever". Now, keep in mind this is VERY EARLY FOOTAGE; all of this is subject to change, and none of the proper animations are in place. The current animations are just repurposed from other parts of the game, so focus more on the way it functions rather than the way it looks for now:

The new Hoverjets has two major functions. First, while Alicia is in midair, she can press and hold Jump to start charging up the Hoverjets. While she's charging up, her falling speed is DRAMATICALLY reduced, but her horizontal speed remains unchanged, allowing her to hover over wide gaps with ease. However, Alicia can only stay in this charged state for a short period of time, and if you stay in it too long, the charge will be canceled and Alicia will start falling again at full speed. This works fairly similarly to the original Hoverjets midair function, with the two main differences being that it reduces your falling speed even more than before, but now has a limited duration.

Of course, if that's all there was, this would be a pretty lame rework, but that's only the first half of the new Hoverjets. The more interesting half is this:

After charging up in midair, if you hold any movement direction and press the Dash key, Alicia will use that built-up energy to rocket in whichever direction you're holding; it may not be super easy to tell from the gif above, but you have full control over the direction you burst in - you can even go downward. This can only be done once per jump, though certain actions (like walljumping, or bouncing off an enemy with the Weighted Boots slam attack) will refresh your ability to use it, allowing skilled players to chain some truly ridiculous platforming tricks together. I've played around with it for a while, and I love how it changes the way you move around the world; I'm STOKED to see how y'all can use this to break the game wide open :p

Spoilers end here!

So aside from that upgrade rework, I have one really huge life update that will heavily affect CPE.. but for once, this time it's in a good way! As you probably know, Puffernutter (my wife) has worked with us on Crisis Point on and off. She's been in charge of improving our background art - if you remember some of the really nice concept stuff we've shown off in the past, she was responsible for those. If you've been wondering why none of those nice backgrounds have made it into the game yet, it's because she just hasn't had the free time for it. Her main job has been freelance graphic design, and her clients usually keep her very busy, so she unfortunately doesn't often have time to work on CPE.

However, due to burnout from working for big corporations (as well as issues getting them to pay her on time), she finally made the decision to cut ties with her primary client this past week, leaving her with a LOT more free time, a large amount of which is now going to be dedicated exclusively to Crisis Point! She's not going COMPLETELY full time with us; our income on Patreon isn't quite enough to cover all of our bills comfortably, so she's planning on pursuing other work at the same time, but it's going to be a night and day difference compared to before. I'm also hoping that getting to work with her more often will help me stay motivated, too, so with any luck this will be a hugely positive change for everyone on the CPE team!

So that's all of the major stuff. Orex has still been plugging away at the animations needed for the new cutscenes (there's a lot), and he'll be starting on animations for the aforementioned upgrade rework soon, but that's about all we have to show off/talk about for today.

CPE development has been slow lately, and I'm really sorry for that, but with Puffernutter taking on a much more active role in the game, I think we're about to see a really big change in CPE's development speed, and I'm super excited to see what comes next. Thank you all so much for sticking around, and continuing to be excited for Crisis Point! Hopefully we'll see you at the streams (I swear we'll do them regularly again eventually), but if not, we'll see you again in the next development update!

"Biweekly" Update - 7-23-2023 (Tilesets and depression)

Hey everyone. So, in the interest of full transparency here, I don't have much CPE stuff to talk about in this update, so it's going to be mostly personal stuff. That's not to say we don't have ANY CPE work to talk about, though, and we'll get into that after the personal stuff.

My depression has been flaring up pretty badly the past few months, and I've been really struggling to pick myself up out of it. The doctor that handles my medications apparently had too much work on her plate, so she stopped seeing me a while ago, and I haven't found a replacement doctor yet, so my medication situation.. isn't great. I'm still able to get most of my prescriptions thankfully, but my ADHD medication requires seeing a doctor in person to keep the prescription going, so I've been off that for a while now - and unfortunately, I think my antidepressant isn't really doing the trick anymore, and it hasn't been for a while. I really want to try out some new kinds, or even just a higher dosage of my current one, but I need to find a new doctor to make that happen, which.. is much harder to do when you're depressed. I'm sure any of you who have ever dealt with depression know exactly how this cyclical song and dance goes. The GOOD news, though, is that the process is in motion now; last time I saw my therapist, I talked to him about all of this, and how I've been struggling to even get help with the medication issues. He told me their office also has medication management staff on hand, so he's writing me a referral to one of those people and I'll be able to start handling medications at the same place I have therapy. With any luck, I'll have a new medicine doctor very soon, and I can get back on ADHD medication and start trying out new antidepressants to get my mental health under control again.

I know I've mentioned before that my therapist thinks I might have OCD too, and if that is true, then new medication should help a lot - right now my antidepressant is Wellbutrin, which we started with because it often helps people with depression and ADHD, but it has no impact at all on OCD, so if OCD is a thing I'm dealing with then it's currently totally unmedicated. Could certainly explain a lot.

In any case, I'm really sorry that my mental health issues keep impacting CPE so heavily. This has been a life-long issue for me, and I wish I could just work through it, but.. well, that's not how mental health works. Still, I promise that I'm doing my best to figure it out, even if my best isn't very good sometimes. I can't overstate how grateful I am that you've all stuck by us - and especially me - even when this keeps happening. I feel terrible about it every time, but I'm trying to let that guilt go and just focus on making things better for tomorrow, so I can repay all of the patience and kindness you've all shown me.

Not everything is doom and gloom, though. CPE work is still getting done, just not nearly as fast as I'd like. These past few weeks I continued working on the level designing tool - specifically, I started on one of the biggest reasons I wanted to make the tool in the first place, which is an auto-tiling system. It's been a while since I streamed any level design work, but if you've ever seen me working on one of those, you might know that tiling a single level with GMS's built-in level editor can take literal HOURS. It's always been a huge pain point for me, especially in the context of making a Metroidvania, which naturally requires a lot of areas to explore. I did some research on auto-tiling algorithms and decided to utilize bitmasking; I won't go in-depth on the technical side of things, but it's essentially a way of auto-generating numbers for specific tiles based on how it should connect to nearby tiles, while ensuring there's never any overlap. It also happens to be the system Godot uses for auto-tiling, and since I plan on moving to Godot after Crisis Point is finished, it makes a lot of sense to learn how to use them now. Anyway, the auto-tiling implementation is near finished, now it's mostly just a matter of updating our tilesets to have all of the tiles required for bitmasking; it's a total of 255 tiles, which is a lot, but thankfully the vast majority of those tiles are just combinations of existing tiles, so it won't be too hard to do - and once it's done, designing levels will be SO much quicker it's not even funny.

Aside from me, Orex is continuing work on cutscene animations, and we also have an update on Puffernutter's work situation. The company she was working with contacted her again to try and convince her to come back, and after contemplating it for a while, she decided to say yes - but with some MAJOR changes to their work contract. For starters, they're going to be using a retainer instead of per-project payments, which means she'll be getting a consistent amount of income on a consistent schedule, which will totally fix the payment issues that made her quit in the first place. Additionally, the retainer is only for 30 hours a month, which severely limits the amount of time she needs to spend on them, and should help her avoid the burnout she's been dealing with. It's less than a week of full-time work, which leaves her with WAY more free time than before, which can go towards other things - like Crisis Point! So even though she's decided to work with them again, all of the things I talked about in the last update are still true, and you can expect to see a lot more CPE work coming from Puffernutter in future updates.

I think that about does it for this update. Again, I'm sorry I don't have a better one, but at the very least I'll keep everyone up to date on how things are going with me - and I can promise that I'm doing the best I can to get my mental health under control again. I know my posting schedule has been really inconsistent lately too, with mostly updates every 3 weeks instead of every 2 weeks, and I'll be making a concerted effort to stop doing that, even when I don't have much to write about - you all deserve that, at the very least.

Thank you all for reading, and for continuing to support us, even through all of my depression and inconsistency. It means the world to us, and especially to me personally. We'll see you again in the next biweekly update.

Biweekly Update - 8-7-2023 (Building momentum; streams and medication)

Hey everyone, time for another biweekly update! Sorry this post is a day late, buuuut it's better than a week at least, right?

So, things obviously haven't been going well with development the past few months, due to all the reasons I talked about in the last update. I can't say these last two weeks were a dramatic improvement, but they ARE getting better! We held our first dev stream in a while on Saturday, and it went pretty well. I continued working on the bitmask auto-tiling I talked about recently (it's now being properly implemented into the level editor itself, rather than just a test project), and I also worked on the ability to undo/redo in the editor, which.. works properly *sometimes*! It just has a lot more issues to work out before it's usable. Still, it was good progress for a rusty dev stream, and I'm feeling good about it.

Since I finally got the ball rolling again on streams, I plan on keeping that momentum and doing a lot more over the next two weeks. We'll probably aim for 4 streams a week right now, though the timing will be inconsistent - I'm trying to move my sleeping schedule around, which is always a difficult process for me because of my insomnia. In the meantime, we'll be streaming at whatever time works for both me and Orex, but eventually I'd like to start holding our streams MUCH earlier in the day, something like 9AM Alaska time. If you're intested in watching us stream dev work, but that timing doesn't work for you, then please let me know in the comments! The streams are really helpful for me when it comes to working consistently, but they don't work as well if nobody is around to hang out, so I want to make sure the timing will work for everybody.

Aside from work-related stuff, I'm also working on trying to get my health under control again, both mental and physical. I haven't mentioned it in a while, but I'm still dieting right now, and I've lost a good 35 pounds so far! It's slow but steady progress, and I think it's the largest amount I've ever lost while actively trying to diet, which feels great. I still have another ~100 pounds to go to reach my target weight, but the dietitian we're working with has us make smaller goals to help stay motivated during the process, and it definitely helps a lot. Food has always had a lot of control over me, and to be honest it absolutely still does, but it's nice to feel like I'm regaining some of that control. I also finally stopped beating around the bush with exercise, and I pulled out our old rowing machine. I've been having some knee problems the past few months that are thankfully mild enough to not really impede my mobility, but it's painful enough that I have to be careful with it, so hopefully some low-impact exercise like this will help fix me up, while also improving my mental health bit by bit.

There's also my medications, which I'm going to have a wait a while longer for, but the ball is rolling on that front too. I have a medication doctor picked out, and appointments scheduled with them. They're on vacation right now, so I won't have anything to share about it for the next biweekly update, but once they return I'll be able to get back on ADHD medication and start trying other antidepressants. With any luck, it won't be long before I can get my mental health back under control, at least a little bit. Incremental progress is a lot better than no progress at all.

And that's all I have to talk about this week. Before I wrap up, I'm going to make the statement right now: this will be the last disappointing biweekly update. We ARE going to stream regularly these next two weeks, and I WILL have more to talk about in the next update because of it. I'm tired of feeling guilty and hating myself for not being able to get my work done, and this is the end of it, I refuse to keep spiraling down this cycle of depression and self-hatred.

Thanks for reading, everyone. You've been so patient and understanding with me, it's time to get shit done so I can at least *start* trying to make it up to all of you. If you're interested in checking out the streams, you can follow me on https://picarto.tv/Anon42 - hope to see you there, and if not, we'll see you again at the next biweekly update!

Biweekly Update - 8-27-2023 (Blaster effects, new environment WIP, level editor simplification)

Hey everyone, and welcome to another CPE biweekly update! Sorry this one is late; I lost a small chunk of time these past few weeks trying to transition my sleeping schedule, so I can stop being a night owl. I've mostly settled into the new schedule, but thanks to my sleep issues, it led to a solid few days where I was too tired to do much. That being said, this post isn't about excuses, because we have some good stuff to show off this week!

To start with, this is what I spent a good chunk of my time on: a new shader-based effect for Alicia's blaster.

Shaders are difficult to wrap my head around (especially in GMS where you have to write the code from scratch, unlike most modern engines that have a visual shader editor), so it may not seem like much, but it took me a while to program this. I managed to figure out a few important shader things this week, which I used to create an effect to make Alicia's blaster disappear when she stops shooting, rather than having her keep it in her hand. This has a few major benefits: for one, we no longer have to worry about where Alicia's gun is during non-shooting animations (such as a ledge grab), which simplifies Orex's work a bit. The other benefit is going to be a lot more fun, though: because of this change, the only animations in the game that have Alicia's gun in them are her arm's shooting animations, which are on a separate layer from her body, so we can reuse the arm animations across many of Alicia's body animations (like running or jumping). Because the total amount of arm animations is so small, it's now feasible for us to give Alicia's gun a bit more flair, in the form of new gun designs!

We don't have any visuals to show off yet, and nothing is set in stone, but my current idea is to have each bullet chip affect the shape or color of the blaster; Trigger chips will change the shape, while Shot chips will change the color. This whole system honestly shouldn't be very hard to implement, so you can expect to see it in v0.47! I'll show off some more shots of this in future updates, once we've had time to design the new blaster shapes and color schemes.

Aside from that, we also have a small preview for you of an upcoming environment:

This is early concept art from Puffernutter of an area that's going to appear in v0.47. I can't say too much about it without veering into heavy spoiler territory, but it certainly is unlike anything we've seen in the game so far, isn't it?

Lastly, I also decided this past week that I'm going to simplify my plans for the level editor. Designing a full level design tool is taking longer than I'd like, especially for something that's internal only, just for this project, and not planned for public release, so I'm trimming a large part of the planned features and instead making it into a tileset tool. I'll still design the collision geometry, place enemies, and so on using GMS's built-in tools, but the tileset work (by far the longest part of the level design process) will be handled using the editor, with features like auto-tiling that GMS doesn't have. I should be able to finish the editor a lot quicker with the reduction in scope, and it'll take care of by far the biggest timesink I have when making levels for CPE.

And that's it for this week. It's not a ton, but for once I'm glad to finally have some good work to show! I'm not up to my full speed yet, but I've been trying really hard to get my shit together this past month, and it's nice to have something to show for it. We're finally back to streaming regularly (with a goal of 3-4 streams a week), which has helped a lot with keeping me on track, and I just started seeing my new medicine doctor, so I'll be able to get back on ADHD medication within the next few weeks. Things are finally starting to look up for me and the CPE team, and I can't thank you guys enough for sticking with us through thick and thin.

We have a lot more fun stuff in the works, and I can't wait to share more of it with you. Make sure to keep an eye out for streams, if you like the idea of watching us work; in the meantime, thanks for reading, and we'll see you again in the next biweekly update!