Weekly Update - 10-25-2020 (General update) (Patreon)

Hey everyone, not much of an update this week I'm afraid to say. The basic list of what we did is the same as last week; I spent my time working mostly on boss 3 and Orex is still finishing up those Verreda+Lucas animations.

One of Boss 3's attacks that wasn't implemented last week didn't end up working out; originally, she was going to grapple to the ceiling and swing back and forth, while aiming her ricocheting sniper in a fixed direction before firing it. It didn't feel right after I finished it this week, though; her swinging motion felt a bit awkward and would've taken some heavy animation work to fix, and the act of dealing with the attack didn't feel very connected to the player's actions, so I had to tinker around with it a bunch and figure something new out. The new attack works much better, thankfully; instead of swinging back and forth from the ceiling, the boss now quickly grapples up to a point on either the walls OR ceiling and plants herself there while taking aim directly at the player; shortly before firing, she stops following the player, giving you just enough time to move out of the laser sight that signals her bullet's trajectory. The fact that the boss stands still and aims at you now, rather than moving while aiming in a fixed direction, makes it feel more like the bullet's ricochet path is under your control, while also making sure you can't just get lucky by finding a safe spot, since they're always aiming directly at you until just before the trigger is pulled.

Between that and a bunch of bugfixing, all of boss 3's new attacks are fully implemented now (just without proper visuals), so the fight is completely functional and seemingly bug free. Well, there is one idea I had that hasn't been implemented yet, but I'm still debating whether I actually want to add it or not. There's a little bit of tweaking I want to do, to make some of her attacks more threatening, but all in all I think it's a tremendous improvement to the original fight. I might try and record a video of the new fight to show off later in this update, though I'd like to have at least some of her finalized art before I go doing that, so we'll see.

That's about all I have to talk about this week though. I've been in a bit of a funk (one of many from this year, thanks 2020), so I've been taking it a little easier than usual and spending time with friends to try and drag myself out of it. I'm very sorry that I've let it affect CPE development; luckily we still have about a full month in v0.42's development schedule, so it's not like we're late yet. I'll be trying to stream regularly this week (probably at the usually scheduled days and times) in the hopes that it'll help me pick up the pace and get things back on track. Thank you very much for understanding, though; I hate disappointing people, so I don't expect this to be a major setback in v0.42 or require a delay or anything.