Weekly Update - 11-8-2020 (Fillin' out those rooms, general life nonsense) (Patreon)

Hey everyone, gonna be another small update here. As most of you are likely aware, this week was the US presidential election, and.. well, it was a stressful week to say the least. On top of that, it was also my birthday earlier this week, so between those two events there was quite a lot of time taken off. Sorry! Regardless, we still got some good work done this week.

I spent my time this week on level designs, as well as tinkering with some ideas for new background elements. Puffernutter has been unable to work on the game for some time now so our background assets are starting to fall behind, and I'm trying to do some work on them myself, to.. mixed results. There's quite a lot of additional background asset work I want to do in CPE if we only had the time and budget, but we're making the best with what we can do for the time being.

Anyway, with level designs I did some work in the Caves and the Summit this week; one of my major goals this update cycle is to fill out a bunch of the small side rooms that have been blocked off by those "not available in this demo" barriers for ages. That said, there will obviously be some of those barriers left in v0.42, as some of those rooms are blocked off because they're entrances to future areas where new powerups will be gained; since CPE is a Metroidvania, I plan to have you go back and forth between the major biomes throughout the game, rather than finishing every biome the first time you get there.

Aside from my work, Orexius finished up the Lucas/Verreda BJ animation this week. It took a lot longer than expected because of the sheer amount of unique frames in the animation; it's by far the largest animation file he's done for the game, and it'll give some nice life to the cutscene, so I'm excited to implement it! Now that he's done with that, he's giving Verreda and Lucas each a much-needed walk cycle animation, and then he'll be moving on to Boss 3's animations. Hopefully those will go a lot quicker, since animating individuals is quite a lot easier than animating two people interacting.

Red has pretty much finished the Kertalus CG now and is just doing a few final tweaks at my behest, so that CG will be in this update for sure.

And that's about it for this week! Sorry to anyone who was hoping for more streams this week (we only did one Monday) - Wednesday was my birthday, which I had completely forgotten about on Monday when I promised a Wednesday stream (oops), and by the time Friday came around I was feeling so burnt out by the election that I just wasn't feeling up to it and worked off stream instead. There will definitely be full streams this next week (Mon/Wed/Fri), since both the birthday and (mostly) the election are over now, and I plan to continue throwing together as many level designs as I can!

Anyway, hope you all stayed safe this week. Thanks for reading everybody; hope to see you at the streams, but if not, we'll see you in the next weekly update!