Weekly Update! 4-7-19 (Caves re-tiled, bugtesting, recolors) (Patreon)

Hey everybody, time for another CP:E weekly development update! Things are starting to look up this week. I'm feeling pretty stressed out right now due to taxes and being a bit behind on development of the game, but I'm succeeding in using that stress to fuel better habits this time around, so no need to worry about me. The best thing for me in these situations is to get productive.

First off this week is the gif up above. I MIGHT have talked about this before, so forgive me if I have, the gif up above is actually somewhat old. The Warped Soldier is one of the first enemies introduced in the game; as such, his damage numbers are extremely low. Once Alicia has an HP upgrade or two, he's incapable of dealing enough damage to be relevant at all. I could have enemy damage scale based on how much HP you have, but that's the lamest possible way to do it. One of the funnest parts of a Metroidvania, imo, is to be able to go back to earlier areas in the lategame and absolutely dominate them with your new upgrades, so in order to keep that spirit alive, I've decided to introduce enemy recolors into Crisis Point - in later/deeper areas of the game, you'll run into recolored versions of enemies that will have bolstered stats (mostly damage, not so much health). I'm still undecided on if I want to give them entirely new moves in addition to higher stats, it'll depend on if I feel like they need 'em. But this will allow me a relatively low-effort way to continue using early-game enemies in my encounter design, without those enemies being trivial to deal with. The colors will be reflected in H-scene animations, naturally (though the poses and animations will NOT be different for recolors, just the colors), but the CGs will always be based on their first color variation.

Anyway, aside from that, this week I focused on bug testing and retiling the Caves areas, as I mentioned I'd be doing last week. The good news is that retiling the Caves is nearly done! While it was more effort than initially expected, UNLIKE the Summit retiling, I was still able to leave a lot of the old tiles I already placed unchanged, which sped up the process immensely. Right now, I'm just waiting on the finished Caves tileset before I can finish polishing up every room, but the majority of rooms are good to go. As for bugtesting, it's always a joy. Somehow, this week, my audio seems to have started bugging out, and the music files are now looping after ~30 seconds or so despite me not having touched any of the code related to audio in months. It's always something :' )

Alright, that's enough outta me for this week. I'm still going to try my best to have this update done by mid-April, though it's likely it'll get pushed to late-April, and some things won't make it in, like the Deep Soil rework and the NPC I teased recently. I'm going to go ahead and stop focusing on a few things like those, and instead focus on finishing everything else we had planned for this update and bringing them all up to snuff. Lots of writing in my future, that's for sure. I'll see you all in the next update!