CPE Dev Log - 5-6-2024 (Birch and Soldier animation updates, save screen, damage numbers, and recolor polls) (Patreon)

Hey everyone. Getting it out of the way asap, the past week of development still wasn't good for me, and I'm sorry. Puffernutter went out of town on a family trip and I've just been feeling kinda bummed/lonely, so I've been spending time around my friends more, and didn't end up getting much done again. She's coming home later this week, so with any luck I'll be feeling better then.

In the meantime, I've been trying to at least set myself up better by fixing my sleep schedule (which has been an absolute nightmare - every day this past week I've woken up at a completely different hour, with anywhere between 4-13 hours of sleep), and I've been updating and checking up on our internal trello board, which I haven't been using for a while, so I can start taking advantage of it again to help keep my thoughts in order. On the more personal side, I finally started trying to learn a new language too, which is something I've always wanted to do - and it would be very helpful for translating the game. So even though my productivity hasn't been good on the game itself, I'm at least trying to do things to improve my mental health, expand my hobbies, and set myself up for better work going forward.

With all that said, I did swear last time that this update would be a proper dev blog, and I'm still sticking to that! Even if I don't have much work to pull from this week, I can talk about all the other things we worked on this past month, so let's get into it.

First up, damage numbers. I talked about these a bit before, and for the most part they're pretty straightforward, but I figured I would at least show off some visuals this time:

Hitting enemies (or taking damage) will cause floating damage numbers to appear, unless you have them toggled off. Damage numbers will "merge" with other nearby damage numbers, but only if they're close enough and come from the same damage type - you can see this happen in the gif a few times. This is especially helpful for some of the shot types we have that either hit rapidly, or shoot out lots of bullets like the Split Shot - the screen got cluttered real quick before I made them merge.

Different types of damage have different colors, which will be fully customizable using the HSV selection menu I implemented last month:

Technically this menu is for the crosshair color, but the menu will look identical for damage numbers.

Next, I've been working on support for multiple save slots, which is going very well. The functionality to save/load from different slots is finished, but we still need a menu for selecting which file you want to save to/load from. Since Puffernutter is our UI designer and she's out of town, we don't have a finalized design yet, but this is the concept layout I came up with:

Enjoy the programmer art Alicia :^)

In any case, I want to display enough information for you to be able to immediately tell which save is which, without making it a total mess. No idea if this will be the final layout, I'm sure Puffernutter will have some input thanks to her UI/UX design skills, but I'm pretty happy with it in concept. If you think of anything that you think should be listed on the save file screen but isn't, don't hesitate to chime in!

I mentioned it last week too, but just to reiterate, we will also have a save slot specifically for autosaves - AKA the save that happens when you walk over a telepad, but don't actually interact with it. Splitting the autosaves and manual saves up is going to allow the player to have a LOT more control over their save files, so I'm pretty thrilled to finally have this functionality working.

Next up, I want to show off some of the animation reworks Orexius has been getting up to.

First off, Birch has gone through a small design tweak to give him a little more visual flair. He also has a proper idle animation now, instead of just standing completely still - old on the left, new on the right:

All of Birch's animations have been given small updates as well, to match the new arm design, but they're pretty minor tweaks so I won't go into detail on them.

On the other hand, Orex has also been updating the Warped Soldier, both his character design and animations. He was one of the first enemies designed for CPE, and his animations and design details were EXTREMELY outdated because of that - and since he's one of the first enemies you encounter in the game, we wanted him to match the quality of the rest of the game's animations. Here's a bunch of comparisons between his old and new animations - old on the left, new on the right:

As you can see, the changes are pretty dramatic - a more intricate design with more detail, lots of extra transition animations, and a bit more flair where it was needed. He even has multiple firing direction animations now, so his 360 aiming sprites will look better, AND he finally has a use for that stun baton hanging out on his hip!

The melee strike is intended to come out EXTREMELY fast, to catch you off guard if you try to run past the soldier instead of dealing with him. It'll probably be an upgrade for tier 2 warped soldiers, to make sure the early-game soldiers keep the same level of difficulty as they have now, but we're still experimenting with that.

And that's all the visuals we have to show off today. I was going to show off the playthrough stats menu, and while it IS functional, it's pretty hideous right now tbh. I need Puffernutter's UI touch to make it look nicer, so I'll wait to show it until the next devlog.

Finally, before we finish up, here's the last week's worth of daily updates:

 Orex continuing to do great, consistent work, even while I flounder :' ) Show him some love, he's doing great work!

After this post, I'm also going to be posting the first poll to help design more Alicia recolors! I always wanted the recolors to be a community thing, but I've been having trouble deciding exactly how I wanted to handle the polls. Instead of continuing to beat around the bush indecisively, I figured we'll just start trying things and see what sticks, so make sure to check out that post if you're interested in voting on future recolors.

Aaaand that's it for this update. Sorry again to not have more to show for this week of work, but I promise I'm trying my best to figure out what works for me. At the very least, I'm pretty happy with our new update format - even if I'm not doing great on work, posting about it every day helps keep me accountable for it, which is better for everyone. And heck, I've had some weeks where I made 0 progress at all, and that hasn't happened since starting daily updates, so it HAS been preventing me from being at a complete standstill. A small improvement.. so very small.. but an improvement nonetheless. Depression and low self-esteem is a bitch, but I WILL tame her someday.

As always, thanks for reading and following the game! Keep an eye out for that recolor poll if it's something you want to be involved in, and we'll see you next week with another progress report!