Anon42
patreon
Weekly Update! 9-30-18 (Difficulties, Menus, Auto Shot, Cutscene Animations)
🕑 Added 2018-09-30 18:27:13 +0000 UTC Hey everybody! Today is Sunday, which means it's time for another weekly CPE development update! This week was the real start of v.32's development, since I got sick after v.31 came out and had to take a while longer to recover, but the good news is we came out of the gate swinging. Let's take a look at everything we got done this week.
First up is the new Blaster Chip type I've been working on, the Auto Shot! This weapon fires a bolt of electricity forward that automatically targets the nearest enemy in a ~90 degree cone. As you can imagine, this makes aiming quite a bit easier, though it comes at the tradeoff of doing reduced damage. The weapon is nowhere near complete, I'm still working on the visuals and it doesn't actually damage enemies yet, but hopefully this'll get you excited to check it out once the update is out! If you want to see the gif in higher quality, you can check it out here: https://gfycat.com/LastKeenDalmatian
Next up, something small but important. If you'll take a look at the main menu here, you may notice that the Options menu is now available from the main menu as well! While this may not seem like a big deal, it gives players a better chance to mess with their settings and see their controls before actually starting the game, which leads to a smoother first-time experience. I would have done this sooner, but I had to retool a bit of our UI code to make it work first. Another small thing I did this week was adding proper sound effects to the rest of the UI, something I had started but never quite finished, which is why only some menus had sounds. We're still missing a few sounds for the UI, but our UI guy should have 'em done by the time this update comes out.
Last, something a lot of people have been asking for - difficulty options! As I've been redesigning Crisis Point and making it an overall more challenging game (boss fights especially), I've gotten some complaints about the difficulty - some people don't have access to a gamepad as well, and with how complex our control scheme is, the keyboard controls don't come naturally to most, which makes it even more difficult to deal with. Difficulty selection has been something I've wanted to add for a while now, and this week I managed to get it mostly finished up, all it needs now is more testing and tweaking.
To go into a bit more detail on our difficulty options, the main two things that are scaled based on difficulty is enemy damage, enemy reaction times/speed, and player healing. We DO NOT scale enemy HP or player damage based on difficulty, as I believe that making enemies take longer to kill on higher difficulties is often a poor design choice. Instead, enemies will have more or less downtime between attacks on Easy and Hard respectively, and will do less or more damage with their attacks (roughly 60% and 150%). Additionally, all healing effects are doubled in Easy mode, and on Hard mode, having sex with enemies does not heal you. This allows me to keep a similar game experience on all difficulties, with the main design change being that mistakes become less or more punishing depending on your difficulty. I may make additional tweaks in the future, but as of right now that's the extent of what our difficulties do.
Aside from my work, Orexius has been working on more cutscene-specific animations, mostly for the cutscenes from last update. Once he's finished with that, he'll be working on some small animations for each enemy's stagger state, so they won't just be red hitboxes anymore when you stagger them, such as with the Force Shot or a melee attack. LustFire has also started working on the remaining CG reworks, you can see him pop into our stream every once in a while to stream with us, where he switches between working on Crisis Point and working on his own game.
Alright, that's it for this week's update, thanks for reading! As usual, we plan on streaming on Tuesday and Thursday at around 1 pm EST, unless something comes up, so if you have any interest in watching us work, see if you can make it! See you next update!
-A42
