Weekly Update! 1-13-19 (Bugfixes, menu improvements, approaching release) (Patreon)

Hey everyone! Welcome again to another CP:E weekly development update, where I ramble on for a while before returning to my work hovel for another week. This week's update isn't particularly large - not because we didn't make much progress, but just because most of this update's major features have already been finished weeks ago, so right now I'm mostly doing cleanup and polish. Because of the sheer size of this update, that part is taking longer than usual, but I can safely say now that we're getting close to being able to put this update out! Right now I'm mostly waiting on assets from other members of the team, like sprite animations and the finalized Tentacle CG, which are both proceeding well. I fully expect to be able to keep our timeframe of releasing somewhere between January 15th-22nd right now. Enough about the future though, let's take a look into the past.. the past week, specifically. This isn't gonna be some major post where I reflect on development or anything, that can wait until the game's actually finished.

Again, not a lot of MAJOR things happened this week since most of that was done already, but I did boatloads of playtesting and fixed a lot of major glitches, both ones that were added during development of THIS update and some that have been in the game for quite some time now. Hopefully this update will be more stable than usual out of the gate.. but I promise nothing in that regard.

Aside from metric bunches of testing and bugfixing, I also managed to implement an improvement to the status menu, where you swap your blaster chips, check your upgrades, put in skill points, etc.

Higher quality here: https://gfycat.com/pertinentmintydoe  

As you can see, instead of using an extra button to swap between the 3 sections of the menu, you simply scroll through the menus as if it were all one big menu. You still need an extra button to swap submenus (such as between the 2 blaster sets and the 3 skill types), but hopefully this will alleviate a lot of people's issues with the menus being cumbersome to navigate, as this functions a lot more like.. well, every other game out there.

So aside from bugfixes and improving menu navigation, I've been working on a lot of little bits of polish - from messing with audio volume, to adding sounds to things that needed them. Oh! I also finally finished retiling all areas of the Summit, so the old tileset is officially gonezo at long last. Feels good to finally have that finished.. and now I can start working on retiling the Deep Soil instead, joyous day! (kill me)

After this update comes out, like I've mentioned before, I'll be putting all of my efforts towards a public demo and an HTML5 port of said public demo. To recap my plans there, I plan on taking up to a full month off of regular CP:E development (other team members will continue creating assets) to work on those demos - if they end up taking LONGER than a month, though, then I'll stop focusing on them and resume regular development while working on those demos on the side, so that development of the game doesn't fall too far behind. So long story short, this is it. This is most likely the final weekly update before The Great Rework™ officially comes to a close, and primary development of Crisis Point: Extinction resumes at long last. There's still a LOT of reworking to be done, don't get me wrong - the Deep Soil hasn't really been touched much, Alicia's Breast Expansion debuff still needs to be reworked, and I still have some changes I want to make in the Summit - but that's just the nature of game development, and instead of focusing on just reworking things, we'll be maintaining a healthier balance of reworks and new content going forward. I dunno about you guys, but I'm beyond excited about what the future of Crisis Point has to offer, and thanks to all of you and your support, we're finally gonna get there. Let's fucking do this.
-A42