Weekly Update! 7-29-18 (Status menu, bugfixes, and cutscenes)

Hey everybody! Like I said in last week's update about the new melee attack, I'm trying to aim for at-least-weekly updates on Crisis Point's development from now on! I don't have too much to show this week, visually speaking, as most of my development time was spent on writing and bug fixing, but plenty of stuff has been done!

First off, as you see in the image above, I've been working on the final menu tab, the Status Screen. There are 3 submenus in the Status Screen.

The first submenu is Upgrades, where you'll be able to see what upgrades you've found for Alicia (along with a description of them), how many health pieces you have, and how many Skill Points you have (more on that in a moment).

The second submenu is for your Blaster Chips, where you can set your A and B chips for two different chipsets, which can be swapped between in-game at the push of a button. This will allow you to set up two different sets that function however you want and swap between them easily, making Alicia much more versatile in combat, compared to the clunky way you swapped between each chip manually before.

The final submenu is the Skills submenu. You may have been wondering what the floating yellow object was in the Melee Attack gif I posted last week - say hello to Crisis Point's newest collectible, Skill Points! Skill Points are completely optional collectibles that you can find scattered across the game world, either out in the open but requiring an upgrade, or in cleverly hidden areas. By collecting and spending Skill Points, you can upgrade Alicia in a number of interesting ways, such as stealing health from enemies when you hit them with a melee attack, or making enemies take more damage from your other attacks when they're set on fire with the Flare Shot. Skills come in 3 categories - a Base set that upgrades Alicia's core and movement abilities, a Force set which (predictably) upgrades the Force Shot, and a Flare set that does the same for the Flare Shot. There are a total of 5 skills in each category, though some skills in the Base set will be locked until you find certain upgrades, such as the Kilogrip or Dash Chip.

Aside from the status menu, the other two major things I've been working on are bugfixes and cutscenes. Huge shoutouts to patron and discord member Sinful Desire, who took it upon himself last update to do an INSANE amount of bug hunting - the bug log for this update is at least 3 times longer than any previous update, and it's all thanks to him being incredibly thorough and testing everything he could think of. Because of his efforts, I now know about many bugs that have been in the game, some for months or even years - one major bug is a memory leak caused whenever you pause the game or enter a new room, leading to ridiculous memory usage if the player plays the game for a long time. That bug has since been squashed, thankfully! If you're interested in looking at the other bugs that were reported and which have been fixed, I decided to start up a Trello board for our bugs, so you can check that out here if you like: https://trello.com/b/aXXoJjTJ/cpe-bug-list

The last major thing done this weekend was writing Crisis Point's first two cutscenes! They've both been finished and sent off to CPE's voice actors and actresses, which is RIDICULOUSLY exciting to me, and hopefully to you as well! The cutscenes in CPE are mostly going to take two forms - traditional cutscenes that take control away from the player, and dialogue that happens as you explore and play the game. We'll most likely only have a handful of cutscenes in the former style, as I don't want to interrupt the flow of gameplay too often, but we're aiming to have a lot of small cutscene-specific animations to make them feel more alive, though for now a lot of cutscene animations will probably be missing just due to a lack of time. I don't know if it'll be in for this next update, but cutscenes in the final game will be skippable, and environmental dialogue will also have a toggle in the options if you don't want to have people chattering in your ear while you play.

One final thing before I go, I wanted to announce the official, final, definitive date for the return of devstreams. Orexius recently started at a new dayjob that has a MUCH better schedule for us working together, so for this week, we're going to be streaming on both Tuesday and Thursday, starting at 1 pm EST and going for however long we're feeling up to (at least 4 hours though)! I'll post about the streams with a link to them on the day of.

Well, that's about it for me this update. Thanks for reading and being such incredible supporters, everyone - I'm feeling really good about what the future holds for CPE!
-A42