(The following is a copy-paste from our weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, consider supporting us!)

Hey everybody, time for another Crisis Point: Extinction development update! This was a bit of a slow week, as far as things to show off goes - most of my effort this week was spent implementing new mechanics for the Deep Soil and working on the level redesign, so there's not too much to see. I would like to go over a few things, though, so let's get started!

First off, one of the new mechanics I'm implementing - Coiled Vines. As you can see they're still using temporary art right now, but the function is very much there! By shooting a Coiled Vine in the environment, the vine will uncurl and create a sloped ramp for Alicia to run up. This required a small update to our collision engine, to make sloped "ghost platforms" (platforms you can jump up through) work properly, but overall I'm very happy with the outcome! Because of the collision updates, I should also be able to use ghost ramps in other areas of the game now too, which will allow me even more freedom when designing levels.

Anyway, the other thing to note with these Coiled Vines is that they won't be usable when you first enter the Deep Soil. The presence of Poison Alraunes will have caused certain plants to wilt, including these vines, and so Alicia will have to hunt down the Poison Alraunes infecting an area before she'll be able to use those platforms. While we're on the subject of Poison Alraunes, I want to mention that we won't have enough time this update cycle to implement new animations/attacks for them, so they'll function identically to regular Alraunes for now, just with some beefed up stats. In the future, I plan on giving them more attacks, unique H-scenes and a unique CG, as well as altered combat animations to help differentiate them further from regular Alraunes.

Next thing I wanted to show today was our progress on the Deep Soil rework. The chart above shows our progress on each room - the bright green rooms are completed (though some of them are missing tiles, which Puffernutter has been helping me with, so I expect them all to be fully retiled by the time the update comes out), while the dark green rooms haven't been designed yet. The grey areas are ones that Alicia won't even be able to access yet, so while I do have plans for them, they haven't been implemented yet and won't be for a while.

As you can see we've made some excellent progress, and I expect to be done with the Deep Soil rework by next weekend! Once that's done I can move on to our next large project, which is implementing more NPCs and cutscenes. I wouldn't be surprised if that gets pushed back to a later update yet again - finishing the whole thing I have in mind will be a biiiig undertaking, so if it does make it into this update, there will definitely be cut corners, and it'll likely end up being similar to the human encampment where I gradually add to it and flesh it out throughout development, rather than all at once.

Last quick thing I wanted to mention in this update is that I plan on adding some more features to the $30 tier, in the form of a downloadable lossless .FLAC version of Crisis Point's OST! This'll be the only place the soundtrack is available in lossless format, so if you're a fan of the soundtrack and you like your audio high-quality, you won't want to miss it. I plan on implementing that part of the tier as soon as it's ready, so keep an eye out.

Anyway, that's about all I have for ya this week! I'm sorry I didn't actually get around to doing any streams like I wanted to - anxiety got the better of me I'm afraid - but I still fully intend to start streaming again! Now that things have settled back to normal around my place, I want to get back into a regular streaming schedule sooner rather than later. Streams will likely start at around 1 pm EST, though I don't have dates planned yet - I'll get back to you guys on that as soon as I have 'em, but for now if you're interested in viewing them, you can follow me at https://picarto.tv/Anon42 to get notifications when I stream. Thank you all for reading, and for continuing to support the development of Crisis Point: Extinction!