Biweekly Update - 8-27-2023 (Blaster effects, new environment WIP, level editor simplification) (Patreon)

Hey everyone, and welcome to another CPE biweekly update! Sorry this one is late; I lost a small chunk of time these past few weeks trying to transition my sleeping schedule, so I can stop being a night owl. I've mostly settled into the new schedule, but thanks to my sleep issues, it led to a solid few days where I was too tired to do much. That being said, this post isn't about excuses, because we have some good stuff to show off this week!

To start with, this is what I spent a good chunk of my time on: a new shader-based effect for Alicia's blaster.

Shaders are difficult to wrap my head around (especially in GMS where you have to write the code from scratch, unlike most modern engines that have a visual shader editor), so it may not seem like much, but it took me a while to program this. I managed to figure out a few important shader things this week, which I used to create an effect to make Alicia's blaster disappear when she stops shooting, rather than having her keep it in her hand. This has a few major benefits: for one, we no longer have to worry about where Alicia's gun is during non-shooting animations (such as a ledge grab), which simplifies Orex's work a bit. The other benefit is going to be a lot more fun, though: because of this change, the only animations in the game that have Alicia's gun in them are her arm's shooting animations, which are on a separate layer from her body, so we can reuse the arm animations across many of Alicia's body animations (like running or jumping). Because the total amount of arm animations is so small, it's now feasible for us to give Alicia's gun a bit more flair, in the form of new gun designs!

We don't have any visuals to show off yet, and nothing is set in stone, but my current idea is to have each bullet chip affect the shape or color of the blaster; Trigger chips will change the shape, while Shot chips will change the color. This whole system honestly shouldn't be very hard to implement, so you can expect to see it in v0.47! I'll show off some more shots of this in future updates, once we've had time to design the new blaster shapes and color schemes.

Aside from that, we also have a small preview for you of an upcoming environment:

This is early concept art from Puffernutter of an area that's going to appear in v0.47. I can't say too much about it without veering into heavy spoiler territory, but it certainly is unlike anything we've seen in the game so far, isn't it?

Lastly, I also decided this past week that I'm going to simplify my plans for the level editor. Designing a full level design tool is taking longer than I'd like, especially for something that's internal only, just for this project, and not planned for public release, so I'm trimming a large part of the planned features and instead making it into a tileset tool. I'll still design the collision geometry, place enemies, and so on using GMS's built-in tools, but the tileset work (by far the longest part of the level design process) will be handled using the editor, with features like auto-tiling that GMS doesn't have. I should be able to finish the editor a lot quicker with the reduction in scope, and it'll take care of by far the biggest timesink I have when making levels for CPE.

And that's it for this week. It's not a ton, but for once I'm glad to finally have some good work to show! I'm not up to my full speed yet, but I've been trying really hard to get my shit together this past month, and it's nice to have something to show for it. We're finally back to streaming regularly (with a goal of 3-4 streams a week), which has helped a lot with keeping me on track, and I just started seeing my new medicine doctor, so I'll be able to get back on ADHD medication within the next few weeks. Things are finally starting to look up for me and the CPE team, and I can't thank you guys enough for sticking with us through thick and thin.

We have a lot more fun stuff in the works, and I can't wait to share more of it with you. Make sure to keep an eye out for streams, if you like the idea of watching us work; in the meantime, thanks for reading, and we'll see you again in the next biweekly update!