Weekly Update! 12-2-18 (Camp, save effect, new NPC)

Hey everyone, time for another Crisis Point: Extinction weekly development update! I don't have nearly as much to share visually this week, I'm afraid to say - in general the visual side of things is going to be slower for the rest of this update now, since we ended up getting a lot of that done earlier in the update cycle, leaving mostly behind-the-scenes work for the rest of it. That said, there's still definitely some visuals to show off, so let's get started!

First off is the human encampment in the Caves, seen up above! (I included a gif so you could see some of the background animations and a still image so you could see it all in higher quality - the gif did some exceptionally strange things to colors this time around..) All of the assets there are still subject to change, but we felt like it was about time for the camp to actually feel like a camp, not just some random room everyone happens to hang out in. And now Rod's line about there being air filtration at the camp makes a bit more sense, huh? Particularly keen-eyed viewers might even see some improvements in the Caves tileset. You can see the camp scene gif in higher quality here: https://gfycat.com/InfantileFakeAnkolewatusi

Next up is a save point animation. I'm still considering doing something fancier with this animation, but one thing I want to avoid is locking the player in a lengthy animation every time they want to save - some games do that sort of thing and I've always found it to be rather annoying, so for now I'm just sticking with some special effects that don't lock Alicia in place, you can save and then keep moving immediately, but at least now there's some more feedback when you save your game so it doesn't look so plain. You can see this animation in higher quality here: https://gfycat.com/QuickThunderousGreatargus

Lastly on the visual side, we have the first shot of a new minor NPC that will be coming to Crisis Point.. eventually! She's still a tad on the unfinished side (she's still using Alicia's standing pose for one, but she'll be getting her own eventually), but I love her design too much to wait before showing her off. Before you get too excited, she WILL NOT be in this update - I have plans for NPCs that will unfortunately take longer to pull off than what we have time for right now, so her full inclusion in the game will have to wait, but hopefully a quick tease will get you excited to meet her good 'n proper later on.

That's all we have to show off visually for this update, sorry it's not quite as exciting as last week's. Aside from that, I spent most of this week working on retiling rooms in the Summit (we WILL be rid of the old Summit tiles by the end of this update, I swear it), fixing up various bugs, polishing the game all over, and writing dialogue. Orexius finished up some work on a few cutscene animations, and has since moved on to working on death animations for the Sentry and Soldier enemies to try and polish up the enemies that will be available in the public demo.

Development of this update is going absolutely fabulously, and I can't wait to get it in everyone's hands! As always, thank you all so, so much for supporting CP:E's development - we wouldn't be here doing this if it wasn't for all of you. If ya stuck through the entire post, thank you so much for reading - we'll see you in the next update!

-A42