Weekly Update! 12-16-18 (Ship and parallax, tiles, blaster volume)

Hey everybody, time for another weekly Crisis Point: Extinction development update! Before I start, let me just get your hopes down by saying this was kind of a slow week overall. The sheer size of this update has had me working a lot harder than usual, and I just didn't end up getting as much done this week, and most of the work I have left for this update isn't particularly exciting. Apologies for that, but we still made progress, so let's get to it!

First off, as you can see above, we have a gif showcasing the parallax effect for the starting area - it looks a lot nicer with the parallax if you ask me - but in addition to that, there's one more piece in the background, the ship Alicia and her crew used to reach the planet, art courtesy of Puffernutter! In previous updates, Alicia mentioned her ship crashing, which was never really shown before. In addition to the ship in the background there, this next update will have a short cutscene at the beginning of the game detailing the ship's crash and the moments leading up to it; I plan on using CG art for this one, but this update is most likely just going to have sketches of the art, as the full pieces won't be done in time. You can see the gif above in better quality here: https://gfycat.com/OffensiveQuestionableAsianwaterbuffalo and here's a static screenshot of it as well.

Sorry to say that's all of the visuals we have to show off this week; Orexius did get another enemy death animation done, and I've been working on some minor visual updates (like the caves tileset and some screen shake on certain actions), but I feel those are better saved for the game itself. Aside from that though, we were still making progress elsewhere - I spent the week on a few things, like changing level design and replacing the tilesets of more rooms in the Summit (I'm so close to finishing them all now), as well as doing bugfixes. One of the things that I implemented this week that I've been wanting to do for a long time was a function to dim the volume of Alicia's blaster when the player fires rapidly - before, the blaster sound effects could be pretty loud and sometimes drowned out the other sounds in the game. I've lowered the base volume of bullets slightly, but also made it so that when the player shoots repeatedly (whether manually or by using the Rapid Trigger), after a few shots, the volume of the sound effect will dim considerably to a little less than half of its original volume - it will stay that way until the player stops shooting for a few moments, at which point it'll return to normal. I tried to make the process quick, so that if the player is delaying their shots rather than shooting as fast as possible it shouldn't take effect and they'll be full volume every time; this is mostly to make the audio of the blaster less annoying if the player is shooting a lot, while still maintaining the satisfying punch of every shot.

Anyway, sorry for rambling for way too long about a minor background volume mechanic that nobody will care about half as much as I do :p If you haven't noticed by now this week's update is a bit light on content. A lot of my work on this update is finished already, especially the bigger stuff, I'm just waiting on work from other people while picking at the rather large handful of minor things I have left, so I can't promise next week will be any more interesting. I'll probably be focusing a lot on bug fixes and that doesn't make for a terribly exciting update, but hey, now you know not to get your hopes up. I think that's about enough outta me for this week though; sorry again for the sorta lame update, but as always, thank you all so much for your continued support! I'll see you all in the next update!

-A42