Others Crisis Point: Extinction [v0.47] [Anon42]

[Anon42]

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Hi again, everyone! Hope you're all doing well, today's update has been a long time coming.

First off, everyone in the house has thankfully recovered from covid now. There's still a few small lingering side effects, but we're all feeling much better, and we've been able to work on getting the house in order again. We've still got some unpacking left to do, but all of the really important stuff is in working order now.


The most important news I have today: I'm so incredibly happy to finally be able to say that as of today, the team - and myself especially - has officially begun full time work on Crisis Point once again! I'm writing this update at the end of my first real day back at work, and I feel fantastic. I'm not going to say that I've "cured" my troubles - these are things that I've been struggling with since even before Crisis Point, and they'll probably be with me for life - but I'm finally in a place where my motivation and drive to work is back in full force, and I'm equipped with so much more knowledge and understanding of myself. A combination of therapy, medication, heaps of lifestyle changes, having a private office, and creating a healthier work/life balance has done wonders for me, and I feel better than I think I ever have. I'm genuinely excited to be working again, which is a feeling I haven't had in a long time, and I can't wait to share some of the things we have in store with you all!


One thing that's been on my mind recently is the frequency of updates I post here on Patreon. As you likely know, when work was normal I would post weekly development updates for CPE, to talk about what the team was working on. During the past few months, while work on the game was at a standstill, I switched over to posting every other week instead; I'm thinking about keeping that schedule, and updating every other week rather than once a week. Try as I might to trim things down, I always end up writing a lot for these updates (you can thank my ADHD for that), and they can even sometimes take a few hours to put together, especially when I also need to take screenshots/make gifs to show things off. I really value keeping you all in the loop on what we're working on, and I don't want the quality of our development updates to go down, but I'd also like to spend less of my work hours on these posts since they don't directly contribute to the game's development. I want to stress that this is something I haven't decided on for sure yet - I might give it a trial period, see how it feels, and I very much want to know how all of you would feel about it! If you prefer the more frequent updates, please don't hesitate to let me know. Patreon as a platform is all about the relationship between creators like me and our supporters, and your feedback on this is something I will take very seriously, which is why I wanted to bring it up now that development has resumed.

One last thing before I finish this post up, regarding development streams - I still want to get them going again as soon as we can, but we've been having some bad internet problems ever since we moved, so we can't start them up again just yet. We're working on trying to get it fixed, so fingers crossed it won't take long!


I know I've said thank you a million times already, but truly from the bottom of my heart, I cannot thank you all enough. There are so few jobs in the world where someone can take a hiatus like I've been taking, and still be able to afford to live during it, and no amount of words I can say will ever properly express my gratitude towards you all. You gave me the time I needed to work on myself, and that is a blessing I don't take lightly. Things are so different to how they were a year ago, and I mean that in the best way. You guys are the best community I could ever hope to have, and I'm so happy I can finally start delivering you guys the content you deserve again. Thanks for taking the time to read all of this, and we'll see you again soon with our next update!

 

[Anon42]

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Hey everyone, and welcome to the first "normal" update we've had in a long time! As you all know, our team - specifically myself, Orexius, and Puffernutter - have finally been able to get back to work, after planning a schedule for the household. The scheduling has turned out to be a godsend for all of us, and we've all managed to be pretty productive these past two weeks! I've still had a day or two where it's a struggle, but it's a far cry from how things have been this past year.

I don't want to spend too long talking about personal stuff, since we have a REAL update to get to, but it's caused a huge improvement in my mental state, as well. I was already doing way better after spending so much time working on my mental health, and getting back to work feels like the last piece of the puzzle finally falling into place. Having CPE gives me a creative outlet, and a purpose and fulfillment that is otherwise lacking in my day-to-day, and I'm more confident than ever that now was definitely the right time to get back to it. Instead of work feeling like a drain, it's invigorating again, and I haven't felt that way in a long time! I really can't thank you all enough for sticking with us this whole time. My therapist has even recommended going down to visits every other week instead of every week, because of how much I've improved, and it's all thanks to you guys giving me the time and space to work on myself!

Before I start the post proper, just a heads up - as part of the new schedule, we'll be posting updates on Sunday again, so expect to see us then instead of Saturdays like we were doing for a while. And since everybody seemed okay with me trying updates every other week, we'll be trying that out as well and seeing how it goes, so you can expect to get 2 development updates a month at minimum. Now, without further ado, on to the update!


For starters, let's talk about my work, which was decidedly the least glamorous part. Because of the inconsistent way I was working on the game for a while, there's a lot of things I was working on that I just never finished. My first priority now that we're back to it is going back and finishing all of those things; it's been kinda awkward, figuring out exactly where I was with all of it (melee attacking any enemies caused the game to crash, as one example of how borked things were), but I've been making good progress. The main thing I'm focused on right now is the upgrade to 960x540 resolution, up from the 640x480 the game used previously. I don't remember if I've ever shown off the difference in screen size, so here's a quick comparison shot:




Please forgive the graphical issues and floating debug numbers, it's very much still a work-in-progress! Believe me when I say that this area used to have way more visual bugs than there are now. Playing the game with this new resolution is honestly a revelation, exploration and combat both feel so much better. The biggest negative is that the game's areas were designed around that 640x480 resolution; after some deliberation, I've decided to keep the 640x480 area designs where possible so I don't have to go updating every single level in the entire game, and if an area is too small to fill up the new screen resolution, it'll just be centered on the screen with black bars on either side.

I'm really hoping we'll be able to include this resolution upgrade in the next playable update, and I'm making good progress - I've fixed over half of the issues I have written down so far, but there are still a lot of things that need to be done. Pretty much every area's background was designed for 640x480, so all of them need to be fixed (and the code for them was terribly inefficient, so updating them has taken longer than you might expect), but the most daunting thing is probably updating the UI. I've never been completely happy with CPE's UI/UX, and now that we have so much more space to work with, we plan to revisit and redesign some of it rather than just updating graphics for the new resolution.

Aside from that I've been doing some code refactoring for how the game handles hitboxes - a boring task, but it'll make future development easier - and I'm still tinkering with the game's story. I especially want to edit down some of the early cutscenes to be a bit shorter and get players into gameplay quicker, doubly so now that we have systems for optional dialogue, so I can move some of the less necessary exposition into optional conversations. I still really want to get work done on our level editor as well, but unfortunately it's going to take a bit of a backseat right now, since I need to focus on finishing all this half-done stuff so the game's not completely broken anymore for our next release. (And just as a reminder, the level editor isn't something I'm releasing publicly - as fun as it would be, the way it works requires direct access to project files, so unfortunately it wouldn't be usable by anyone outside of the team.)


Next up is Puffernutter's work, and this is the most exciting thing in my opinion! Puffernutter (my wife, for those of you not in the know) has been working on the game's background art for a while, but she usually doesn't have a lot of free time thanks to her freelancing work, so she hasn't been able to work on CPE too much. Now that we have our schedules laid out, though, things have been a lot more consistent, and we have some really exciting things to show for it! Feast your eyes:







These are all nowhere near final asset quality, to be clear. All of these were drawn in a single work day, essentially acting as concept art, and it's not even a guarantee that we'll be using all of them - but there's still a lot to talk about here!

One of my biggest problems with Crisis Point has always been our background art. None of it is explicitly bad, it's just often very boring, and areas blend together no matter how much I try to include unique level geometry. It's a mixture of the lack of unique areas and setpieces, and way too much focus on individual asset quality rather than scene composition as a whole. In my opinion, every single one of these pieces of concept art looks better than any of the ingame scenes, even though they're much less polished, just because they're so much more interesting to look at as a whole. There's a couple major things here that contribute to that, and I'll talk about each of them.

Firstly, the perspective in CPE currently is a perfect side-on camera view, meaning that the player can't see the floor or ceiling of any areas. That can help with creating clearly defined collision boundaries, which is good for gameplay, but it also removes entire surfaces from view and makes it a lot harder to make interesting tilesets. So, we're going to be updating every tileset in the game, at least a little bit; even in the areas where we're relatively happy with the background art (like the Summit), we're going to update tiles to add some perspective to the floors, like you can see in all the concept art above. We'll be doing our best to ensure that level collision is still easy to understand of course, but since we're only adding perspective to the floors, I don't expect to have much difficulty.

Second is that we want to start creating a lot more bespoke assets for individual rooms, rather than everything being shared on a tileset - for example, having a specific rock formation that only shows up one time, in a single room. Not only does that help with keeping the game interesting to explore and look at, but it also helps create landmarks in your memory, so you can more easily remember areas you've been to previously. That can be especially helpful for Metroidvanias, when you get a new powerup and need to figure out where to use it. There's a few points in CPE where it's easy to get lost, and I'm hoping more unique assets will help with those moments by making every part of the game more memorable.

Lastly, kinda related to the above, is that we're going to be kinda splitting each area of the game into sub-areas - we already do this to a small extent, like with the building interiors and outdoors areas in the Summit, but we plan to take it much farther. Each of the concept images above were made for the Caves, as an example; rather than one consistent tileset used across an entire biome, there will be multiple sections that each share a similar feel, but ultimately have a lot of visual uniqueness to them. This is all pretty obvious stuff, and most Metroidvanias before us have handled it much better than we have so far. It's something I always wished we could do, but we just never had the time to create enough assets to make it happen. The very nature of a Metroidvania is exploration, though, and if a world isn't interesting to explore, the whole thing kinda falls apart, so I'm excited to finally be able to make improvements on that front!

That's all for the background art for now, but I can't wait to be able to show more off in the future, CPE's about to get a lot nicer to look at!


Last thing to talk about today is Orexius's work. He's been working on a few animations, like a unique animation for sliding down steep slopes (right now we're just reusing another one of Alicia's animations for that), but the one I'm sure you guys would be most interested in is the updated Slime H-scene. It was one of the first H-scenes made for the game, done by me before Orexius was even around, and much like the other early H-scenes, it just doesn't match up with the quality of the game now.


For comparison, this is the old animation, so you can see how much it's been improved:


He's done a great job on it if you ask me, the improvement is dramatic!


Alright, that's it for us this update! We're still having internet problems, so unfortunately I can't start up streams again yet, but hopefully we'll be able to get that figured out soon. Thanks for reading, and I hope you're as excited for more CPE content as I am to finally be delivering it! We'll see you again in another two weeks!

 

[haizan guzan]

Backgrounds and the new animation look great! Glad to see you guys working at it again

 

[qorl55]

Wow the animation looks amazing - the pixels look incredible

 

[gemini20xx]

The backgrounds kind of remind me of Another World and Flashback, even for works in progress they're nostalgically beautiful.

 

[Artix0]

Last thing to talk about today is Orexius's work. He's been working on a few animations, like a unique animation for sliding down steep slopes (right now we're just reusing another one of Alicia's animations for that), but the one I'm sure you guys would be most interested in is the updated Slime H-scene. It was one of the first H-scenes made for the game, done by me before Orexius was even around, and much like the other early H-scenes, it just doesn't match up with the quality of the game now.

View attachment 1958352
For comparison, this is the old animation, so you can see how much it's been improved:

View attachment 1958353
He's done a great job on it if you ask me, the improvement is dramatic!


Alright, that's it for us this update! We're still having internet problems, so unfortunately I can't start up streams again yet, but hopefully we'll be able to get that figured out soon. Thanks for reading, and I hope you're as excited for more CPE content as I am to finally be delivering it! We'll see you again in another two weeks!

This may just be me, but whilst I love the fluidity and detail of the new slime animation, I far prefer Alicia's head in the original.
- The one-eye-closed face delivers far more emotion and looks hotter to me (but obvs this is subjective, it'd be interesting to see what others think!) - I don't know if Orexius was planning to use that expression for the cum part of the animation? Or is the one-eye-closed expression just completely gone now?
- Much smaller nitpick but I think her ponytail looks nicer in the original, you get a great view of the bobble and the way it sways with their movement, now you can't quite tell it's a ponytail without already knowing Alicia's character design (which of course any player would know, hence it's a really small nitpick lol! But the new animation does sacrifice some of the ponytail's cuteness)

I'd also just like to say that your wife's background work is phenomenal. That those concepts were all created in a single day, whilst delivering such vibrancy, atmospheric depth and sense of perspective, is inspiring - I love them all so much!

 

[Dahotshot]

Fantastic updates Anon42! The new backgrounds and animations look stunning.

Just a question about the gameplay - are there any plans to add things like a lust meter (whereby it gets harder to control the more the protagonist is violated), pregnancy mechanics and/or even a special move where instead to enemies violating us, we do the reverse (like that CG where Alicia is dominating that blue alien) to reduce the aforementioned lust meter?

Otherwise, fantastic work, and can't wait to see your next update!

 

[Anon42]

This may just be me, but whilst I love the fluidity and detail of the new slime animation, I far prefer Alicia's head in the original.
- The one-eye-closed face delivers far more emotion and looks hotter to me (but obvs this is subjective, it'd be interesting to see what others think!) - I don't know if Orexius was planning to use that expression for the cum part of the animation? Or is the one-eye-closed expression just completely gone now?
- Much smaller nitpick but I think her ponytail looks nicer in the original, you get a great view of the bobble and the way it sways with their movement, now you can't quite tell it's a ponytail without already knowing Alicia's character design (which of course any player would know, hence it's a really small nitpick lol! But the new animation does sacrifice some of the ponytail's cuteness)

I'd also just like to say that your wife's background work is phenomenal. That those concepts were all created in a single day, whilst delivering such vibrancy, atmospheric depth and sense of perspective, is inspiring - I love them all so much!

That's fair, though like you said it's definitely subjective. I don't think we'll be using it for the whole animation, but I'll see if he can sneak it in during the climax, as a nod to the original if nothing else. As far as the ponytail goes, I get where you're coming from, and we'll probably tinker with it a bit more because I'm not fully satisfied with it either, but I had some issues with the original, mostly with the position of it, which was a mistake on my part. I appreciate the feedback, though!

Fantastic updates Anon42! The new backgrounds and animations look stunning.

Just a question about the gameplay - are there any plans to add things like a lust meter (whereby it gets harder to control the more the protagonist is violated), pregnancy mechanics and/or even a special move where instead to enemies violating us, we do the reverse (like that CG where Alicia is dominating that blue alien) to reduce the aforementioned lust meter?

Otherwise, fantastic work, and can't wait to see your next update!

Thanks! We do basically have a lust meter already, though there aren't many things in the game that affect it currently. I want to add some more of those eventually, but it's not really intended to be a core mechanic of the game or anything, it's basically there to make H-scenes happen naturally through gameplay occasionally. We won't be doing pregnancy or reverse H-scenes, though. No kinkshaming intended, but pregnancy content is not something I'm interested in creating (and it doesn't really make sense within the game's lore), and there is no nonconsensual content in the game to begin with. We do have a few H-scenes with Alicia taking a more dominant position, but it's true there aren't many, so we definitely plan to do more of them!

 

[Anon42]

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Hey everyone, welcome to this week's development update! Fair warning, there won't be as many visuals this week, but we still have some exciting stuff to show off! Puffernutter has been focusing on polishing assets to a game-ready level rather than pumping out fast concepts like last update, Orexius is still finishing up the slime H-scene and working on a rough animation for a new gameplay feature I'm surprised we haven't added yet, and for my part, I had a bit of an odd pair of work weeks, but the result is really exciting. I'll save the details for the post itself though, so without further ado, let's get into it!

First off, let's look at Puffernutter's work.





These are the two environments she was focusing on, and both of them are near-final asset quality now. There's still parts of each scene that aren't quite complete, especially in the first one, but you can see a clear difference if you compare them to the backgrounds we talked about last update!

In general, while working on these new environments, we have one major goal in mind: to bring the individual asset quality down a bit, while bringing the quality of the scene as a whole way up. That may sound counterproductive, but I think the images speak for themselves, if you compare it to the way CPE looks right now. In the past, we've put a lot of effort into making 1 tileset and then polishing it as much as possible - individual assets in the tileset look great, but it takes a HUGE amount of time to bring them up to that level, and once you put it all together in a scene, most of the work we put into them just gets lost. That's been a huge struggle for us, learning what point is "good enough" vs where it's worth putting the extra effort; you can theoretically spend an infinite amount of time polishing a single thing, but at a certain point you're essentially wasting time that could be spent somewhere else, and time is probably the most valuable asset when making a game.

This is something I've really started to learn while paying attention to other games, especially ones made by studios way bigger than us with way more money. If you're looking for it, you can find tons of places where they "cut corners" as it were, but it's done intelligently and with purpose. The end result is that the cut corners are placed in areas where you don't even see them, and it doesn't take away from the final product at all, letting them focus on the areas that DO need that polish. I realize it may come across as lazy at a surface level, that was my view on the matter until more recently, but after spending so much time on CPE's background assets, only to have Puffernutter come in and (in just two weeks) throw together environments that look WAY better than anything we have, it really made the point hit home for me.

One last note about the second image specifically - you may notice a ladder placed in the center of the scene, and that's because we're going to be adding ladders to the game! That's the other animation Orex has been working on, and I'm surprised we haven't done it already honestly. The level design in the early parts of the game was tricky to work with because of how few tools Alicia has for vertical ascension, which lead to me making the levels pretty claustrophobic. Now that we're updating the background art, we're going to do another pass over the level designs themselves as well, and ladders will be super helpful for making verticality easier to work with. Plus, it just makes sense that the humans would've set up ladders to help them get around.



Now, let's get into what I worked on. After putting together the last update post, I wanted to create a small tool for Puffernutter to basically import a background she's working on, and then add the CPE lighting engine on top of it, so she could tune the colors for what they would actually look like ingame. I decided the obvious solution would be to add it to the level editor, since it would be helpful for testing the lighting while designing levels as well. So I got to work late Sunday, and by late Tuesday I had made.. exactly 0 progress. Not because I wasn't trying, mind you, but because I could not for the life of me get the lighting engine to work in another project. I copied everything over directly from CPE, but it's been so long since I messed with the lighting engine that I just didn't even understand it anymore, thanks to the complete lack of notation. I was a total amateur when I started CPE and I'm still paying for those mistakes all these years later, haha.

So, after basically wasting an entire work week, I reconsidered the angle I was attacking it from. CPE's lighting engine isn't terrible, but it is more obtuse than it needs to be, and lacks some features that I would love to have but wasn't skilled enough to pull off back then, like proper colored lighting. I've learned a lot over the years though, and I had some ideas. After thinking things out over the weekend, I started experimenting last Sunday - and in contrast to the slow failure of the previous week, I had gotten enough done by the end of that very first day to know that all of my ideas and theories worked exactly as I hoped.

Long story short, Crisis Point's lighting engine is in the process of being completely overhauled right now. It's nowhere near done being implemented yet - the lighting itself is done and works perfectly, since it was easy to set up a new lighting system in a new project, but actually ripping out CPE's old lighting and replacing it is a far bigger task, especially when I don't even remember how the damn thing is put together. That being said, I did take the time to put together an example:






(Note that this example was not put together in CPE itself, since I'm still working on implementing the new lighting; I took a screenshot of this spot with and without lighting, and threw the screenshot into the project I was testing the new lighting in. This is pretty close to how it will look ingame, but there might be some differences - the new system plays off of the environment better, so more complex scenes with walls and such will benefit even more than this, and it also works really well with different-colored lights in a single scene, so you can expect an even bigger difference as we add more lighting pieces into the environment!)

As you can see, the difference is staggering. In addition to the tint of the darkness itself, each colored light source also tints the area around it, unlike before where it was just a simple overlay sprite. There's still a lot of tweaking we can do, like I think the fires do need a little more going on now that they don't have the overlay sprite anymore, but that's something we can work on.

To dive into this a little bit more, CPE's lighting was previously split into two parts. The first was the most important part; in each area, the game screen was drawn twice, first normally and then a separate version above that, with the colors tinted and darkened based on how dark the area was. Then, the "lights" essentially just cut away from that second darker image, which made the normally-lit version behind it visible through the areas where there was light. The second part was technically "colored lighting", but it's hardly even worth talking about - all I did was overlay a partially-transparent colored orb over things that I wanted colored, which is the most half-assed way to handle that, on top of doubling the required draw calls.

Now, this new system doesn't require the layering of the old system, and the colored lighting is a baked-in part of the lighting itself, so it doesn't require any additional draw calls or anything. It looks better, is simpler to implement and understand, AND it's more efficient! We have so much more freedom over the colors and shape now, because all of the lights are tied to gradient maps, which allows us an infinite amount of customization - for example, the orange light in the screenshot up above is using this gradient map:



The center of the light is mapped to the right side, while the outer edges are on the left side, and it uses that to tint the image. Pure white means it just draws the color normally, so the very center of the light where it's at its brightest is untinted, just like you would see in a real light. If we want the full light to be tinted, we can easily just give it a different gradient map without any pure white on it, and I can even add animation to the lights by changing the shape of the gradient, and shifting the vertical position the light pulls from over time. The options are quite literally infinite, and we'll be tinkering with it a lot to make the lighting look as good as we can!





Alright, that's pretty much all I have for today. I hope you guys are as excited about this new lighting as I am; between the new resolution, the new lighting engine, and Puffernutter's new background work, Crisis Point is about to get one hell of a makeover, and I can't wait to share more of it with you all! See you again in the next update!

 

[ThatWeirdGuyWithaWeirdHat]

Speaking of the lighting, is there a way you can make the torches you can light in the catacombs permanently lit?

 

[sirherpofderpshire]

Mmmmmm...
I'm a slut for good pixel art AND for good lighting

And don't even get me started on efficiency... OHH

 

[marshal999]

I have seen enough games to know this one is not gonna see more than 2 or 3 more updates.

 

[antonidas]

I have seen enough games to know this one is not gonna see more than 2 or 3 more updates.

Uh what? It already has more than that.

 

[dw9000]

I have seen enough games to know this one is not gonna see more than 2 or 3 more updates.

Discord updates almost weekly, don't see why you think only 2 or 3 updates... also game has been in development for several years now.

 

[TakosMilGrau]

I have seen enough games to know this one is not gonna see more than 2 or 3 more updates.

Eyo, stupid, this game is in development for years now lmao
There was a hiatus for some time recently, but Anon is already back at it full time.

 

[lordlundar]

I have seen enough games to know this one is not gonna see more than 2 or 3 more updates.

So I'm curious. That lobotomy you had, did it hurt or did you enjoy it?

 

[DeathSerpent1]

So I'm curious. That lobotomy you had, did it hurt or did you enjoy it?

lol everybody on this mans head

 

[f9account]

I have seen enough games to know this one is not gonna see more than 2 or 3 more updates.

Based on what other games?

 

[DeathSerpent1]

hover jets make me wanna go "NYOOM" when i use them 10/10

 

[Anon42]

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Hello everyone, and welcome to another CPE development update! There's not gonna be a whole lot of stuff with this one; Orexius had some minor nose surgery (don't worry, it wasn't for anything serious) that knocked him out for a week, so he had less time to get stuff done than usual, Puffernutter has had a lot of freelance work keeping her from working on the game, and for my part, I did get some good work done, but it was mostly spent on doing more shader experiments! That said, we do have two new WIP backgrounds to show off from Puffernutter, and I've solidified my shader knowledge a bit more with a few new effects I'll be adding to the game!

To start off, here's two of the backgrounds Puffernutter has been working on, this time for the Deep Soil:




The Deep Soil has always been a bit of a sore spot for me. It's by far the most organic area in CPE by design, and because of that it has suffered the most from our limited background art. My original idea for the area was to have massive vines shooting up from the ground to seemingly infinite heights, spearing through large clumps of dirt to create a twisting organic maze, where you spend half the time navigating the vines themselves and the other half along the dirt that they hold suspended in the air. The original art for the area captured.. baaaasically none of that. It's a testament to my inexperience; I wasn't able to get across what I wanted to our background artist at the time, and the entire area suffered as a result.

Those of you that have been around for a while might also remember that the Deep Soil is the only area in the game to undergo a complete redesign from the ground up; its original iteration was confusing to navigate with too many small rooms, so in general it's always been one of the areas that I was least satisfied with. All that to say, Puffernutter's early concept work for redesigning the area makes me SO EXCITED! She's doing a wonderful job of capturing what I always wanted the area to look like, and while we're mostly focusing on the Caves and Summit for right now (to get the early parts of the game polished up as much as possible), I can't wait til we can focus our efforts on the Deep Soil.


Next up, my work. Before I get into the shader stuff I worked on, a quick update on the lighting engine upgrade. I've managed to cut out the old lighting system and implement the new one at a basic level, so the hardest part is done. The main things left now are fixing some of the visual bugs that happen with different video settings, and more importantly, to re-add lighting functionality to all of the different light sources in the game now. That part will take the longest, since there are so many of them, and since the new lighting has more features it'll be more effort than just a simple conversion. Regardless, I'm happy with how it's going, and I fully expect it to be included in the next playable update!

Now for the shader experiments, I have 3 things I managed to figure out: an outline shader, a (very) simple bloom shader, and a distortion shader. I won't bother showing off the outline shader, that one's self-explanatory, but it will allow me to try out a few effects I've been interested in. The bloom shader is a bit hit-and-miss; if you're worried that I'm about to introduce a ton of bloom to the game, don't worry, I know it's a rather polarizing effect, so if I do use one I intend to do so in moderation. That said, there are a few places I think it would be beneficial!

I decided to start by implementing it specifically on light sources, and this was the very earliest version of the effect:



As you can see, it's uh.. it's a bit much, haha. The one exception is the laser fence on the right, which I actually think the effect looks really nice on! Here's a comparison of the fence with and without the shader:


We could just bake that visual into the fence by hand, it's not complex at all, but using a shader means I can do some fun stuff with it like giving it some procedural animation. So at the very least, for simple things like this, the shader works pretty well. I tinkered with it A LOT to see if I could make it play nicer with the lights and torch, but I haven't found a solution yet that I'm satisfied with, so I won't talk about those any further for now. I have some ideas to make it look nicer, so I'll definitely be messing with it more, and you can rest assured that it won't look anywhere near that jarring if it makes it into the game!

Lastly, and the most exciting for me, is a distortion shader, essentially allowing me to warp images in real time, like so:



(Apologies for the quality not being great, gifs aren't a great format! It looks a bit nicer ingame but the gif gets the idea across just fine)

The first use in this gif is the heat distortion on the torch in front of Alicia, which is something I fully intend on adding to the game proper, I'm super happy with how it came out. The crazy warping effect on the bottom right was just me playing around with the effect and seeing what I can do with it - it's using the exact same shader and concepts as the heat distortion, just with a rotation effect applied to it. The shader allows for distortion in any direction, so I can do just about anything I can think of with it.

I'm not 100% satisfied with it yet - you can't tell from the gif, but when multiple distortions overlap with each other, they don't merge in the way I would like them to, and instead one distortion seems to take priority at random - but I had already spent multiple days of work to get it to this point, so I put that aside for future Anon to deal with. Who knows, overlapping distortions might not ever be an issue anyway, so if I spent even longer on it now that might just end up being wasted work.


And that's all I have to talk about for this week! Sorry again it's not as big of an update, but 2/3rds of the team was unable to work for most of it, and I've definitely been bit by the shader bug now that I'm starting to understand them lmao. I intend to bring my focus back to the game itself, so we can try and push out a playable update before too long, but it's still going to be a bit before we have one ready for release.

On that subject, I do have one question I'd like to pose to you all: most of our work recently has been on upgrading old systems and art, and not really on "new" content. We try to maintain a balance between the two, but we're in a bit of an odd place right now; the playable builds are rapidly approaching some important story moments, but we're actively updating and retooling some parts of the story right now. Even though nothing major will be changing, creating more story content right now is iffy, as it may need to be changed or altered soon after. Because of the lack of new content, I've been very hesitant to try and push out a playable update, but at this rate it's going in the same direction as the previous playable update, where I put it off repeatedly because "it's not big enough to justify the time everyone waited", and I don't want that to happen again. So with all of that considered, are you guys okay with updates that contain no/limited new content, and are instead focused on reworking and polishing things, for a bit? Once we finish ironing out the remaining story beats, I fully intend to get back to more balanced updates, it's just awkward right now - so please leave a comment to let me know how you feel about that so we can plan accordingly!

And as a reminder for our patrons, if you've pledged at the tier for a demo at any point since the last update came out (so, for the entirety of 2022), you WILL be getting the next playable update even if you unpledge. If you're not okay with waiting a bit longer, I completely understand, and you can safely unpledge for the time being without sacrificing the rewards you pledged for.

In the meantime, thank you so much to all of you who stick around! I know new sexual content is what a lot of folks are here for, so I really appreciate that you guys are understanding and let me focus on other parts of the game as well. I'm still feeling great about being able to work consistently again, and with all this new knowledge and experience, we're well on our way to making CPE a better game than it's ever been before. Thanks for reading, and we'll see you again in the next update!