Biweekly Progress Report - 2-13-2026 (Poison Alraune fight, recolor updates, and ladders)
Hey everyone! As promised in my post at the end of last month, we're going back to update posts every 2 weeks, and so here we are.
As you know from the last post, we've started up devstreams again, and they're going really well so far! I skipped out on today's stream to work on this update post, though - sorry to anyone who was hoping for the stream today, I didn't think through the logistics of when I would be writing this post beforehand so replacing the stream with this was a last minute decision. I already have a plan to fit this into my work schedule better for future weeks, though, so it won't interfere with streams again.
We're still figuring out exactly what works best for us with streams; at the moment we're still doing Mon/Wed/Fri, but the exact timing is up in the air a bit. Because of my ADHD, having a few hours between when I wake up and when I stream typically results in me just.. doing nothing and wasting time during that period, so I've decided to pretty much hop into the stream as soon as I wake up and get my day going, to avoid the dreaded "waiting mode".
Scheduling uncertainty aside, though, since we've been streaming, productivity has been a LOT better, and I have several things to show off that we've been working on! First off, here's the daily updates from the past 2 weeks:
The bulk of my work has been on the Poison Alraune fight, which is now functionally complete! There's a recording of me fighting her embedded up above; she still needs new combat animations for her new moves, and I'd like to implement some more special effects, so try to ignore the old/placeholder animations for now.
The Poison Alraune mostly fights with a more dangerous version of the regular Alraune's moveset. The targeted vine spike instead acts as a wave of spikes instead of a singular one, and her leaf throw has become a 3 throw combo that will always aim directly at Alicia, with the 3rd throw being a poisonous leaf that leaves behind a deadly poison cloud when it hits something. Lastly, to suit her status as a miniboss, the Poison Alraune has a desperation move once she reaches half health. You can see it at around 15 seconds into the video up above, but essentially she traps Alicia in a small zone using thorny vine walls, and then delivers difficult attacks in rapid succession. It's worth noting that the speed of these attacks is heavily affected by difficulty, moreso than other enemies; the video was recorded on Normal mode, so if you're on Easy there will be a significant gap between attacks, and she'll do fewer of them as well, while on Hard you have to be very deliberate with your movement to avoid damage. She'll only use this move once, and on Normal difficulty or below, she'll have a short period of recovery afterwards where you can freely attack her; on hard she goes right back to fighting, though it's still possible to damage and kill her during the attack if you're aggressive enough. She only uses this move one time per fight, so don't worry if you need to just focus on surviving through the DM, the fight will return to normal afterwards.
Next up, some updates to Big Alicia! First off, Big Alicia now has 2 extra variants, Torn Clothing and BE, so she'll accurately reflect Alicia's current ingame state. Unfortunately both of those are extremely NSFW, so I can't post images of them here, but there is one other feature I can post: recolors!
This is just a few examples of it, but all of the color palettes available ingame will now be shown on Big Alicia as well - including both the torn clothing and BE variants, of course. We had to add a bunch of new colors to each of Alicia's palettes to support all of the extra detail, but I definitely think it was worth it.
On another recolor-related note, I did some tweaks to the recolor shader this week to enable the use of transparency in Alicia's color palettes! There are some graphical issues with transparent colors for now, especially with H-scenes where parts of Alicia were never expected to be transparent or hidden - we'll fix them eventually, but maybe not in time for this update. In any case, though, here's a preview of one of the new color palettes using that transparency!
Do you think she should keep her regular clothing and hair colors, or should I swap everything else over to slime green as well? Maybe something inbetween?
Lastly, the one other major thing I worked on was something I talked about ages ago but never got around to, which is the implementation of ladders.
Ladders are now fully functional, though lacking proper visuals as you can see. I still need to actually add them to level design as well; that will probably come in a future update when we're adding new rooms and redesigning old ones, so you might not get to play around with these just yet, but I'm looking forward to having access to more vertical traversal options for Alicia, it'll make level design a lot more interesting.
Alrighty, I think that's it for me this week! I'm really happy with the way streams have turned February around for me; January was a rough start to the year, but I'm feeling a lot more optimistic now with the changes to my schedule. As always, thank you all so very much for reading; I hope to see some of you at our streams in the future, and we'll see you again in 2 weeks with the next progress report!