CPE Development Update - 3-10-2024 (Daily updates, cutscene improvements and gallery finished, recolors finished, feelin' REALLY good) (Patreon)

Hey everyone, welcome to another CPE development update! This week continues the trend from last week of having good news all around; my productivity has been improving rapidly, and I'm feeling really good about things!

Before we get into the work we've done these past few weeks, I want to start by letting you all know that me and Orexius decided about a week ago that we're going to be keeping a public, daily development log of all the work we do for CPE! Because it's a thing we'll be constantly updating, we've decided to host it in a separate channel on our Discord server, for ease of access; for those of you who AREN'T in the discord server though, I plan on grabbing screenshots of our posts once a week and posting them on here, so we have more consistent updates that DON'T take a bunch of work for me to write. (I think I've talked about it before, but dev blogs like the one you're reading now can often take me a few hours to write and collect assets for (like screenshots and videos), so they're a decently big undertaking, which is why I don't do them more frequently.)

In any case, if keeping up with our work on the daily sounds good to you, you can find it in our discord server now! It's been about a week since we started, so let's start the rest of the post off with those screenshots:

As you can see, we had a pretty good week! Admittedly, the two weeks before this one weren't the most productive ever, but there was still steady progress - and thanks to the daily updates channel, I managed to be more productive this week than I have in a while. I think it's a mix of the extra accountability (which is kind of filling the role that streaming used to), plus the positive motivation from folks being able to see/comment/react to the work, is REALLY making a huge difference for my silly ADHD brain. I honestly wish I had started doing this a while ago, but I really think this is what I've been needing, so I hope you're as excited as I am to see how the rest of 2024 goes for us!

Enough babbling about the method, though. The two main things I focused on this last week were the cutscene improvements and gallery, and importing Alicia's new, recolor-ready assets. BOTH of those things are also complete now! Every cutscene in the game has been updated to include camera motion and dynamic zooms, giving them some much-needed life. To make the process easier, I decided to focus on finishing the cutscene gallery first, so scenes would be rewatchable much more easily, which I finished doing at the start of this week. Technically, the intro cutscene doesn't work properly in the cutscene gallery yet, since it functions a bit differently from the other scenes, but I don't expect it to be a difficult fix. 

Aside from that, the other major thing I worked on was importing all of Alicia's recolor-ready assets. It might sound like an easy process, but there were a number of inconsistencies with the in-engine assets that I had in CPE, compared to the assets Orex had for importing - so even though it was a fairly easy process, it was very time-consuming and tedious, with a lot of back and forth between the two of us. Thankfully though, the process is done: Alicia's sprites are now fully recolorable, including gameplay animations, cutscene animations, AND every H-scene in the game! There's even a surprise in there, a major update to the normal (non-BE) Warped Soldier H-scene! It's now one of the best animated scenes in the game, if you ask me, Orex really did an amazing job on it. The only thing left for Alicia's recoloring system is to actually add more color palettes, and to add an in-game menu for selecting a palette. I plan on adding that menu to the Save Point menu, next to the Save and Warp options.

For v0.47 specifically, I think what we're going to do for recolors is to add color schemes based off of all the NPCs in the game (like Birch, Rodriguez, etc), which you'll unlock as you meet them. Eventually, we want to support custom color schemes, but we'll need a bit more time to make that happen so it won't be in this update.

So that's what I got up to this past week, and I'm feeling really good about it! With those things all finished, v0.47 is on track to be finally released in March. The only things remaining are the recolors menu, the new trigger type, changing gun design based on which trigger you have equipped, and updating the HUD design (which might need to wait until v0.48 unfortunately, Puffernutter does our UI design but she's going on a family trip soon so she might not be able to finish it in time). None of that is particularly difficult work, so my goal right now is to finish and release the update by March 21st (if you know you know), meaning this should be the last dev blog before the update is in your hands!

I've said it before, but try to go into v0.47 with expectations tempered; this update is not a year's worth of content, as much as I wish it was. I'm not going to painstakingly go over all the reasons why that is, I've done that plenty in our dev logs, I just feel the need to say it one more time as v0.47 development draws to a close.

And that's it for today! I'll keep the outro brief, but seriously, thank you so much to everyone who has kept rooting for us this whole time. You guys are the reason I haven't given up. I can feel in my heart of hearts that something is different this time; I really do think we're turning a major corner in development right now, and I can't wait to see what the rest of 2024 has in store for us! Thanks for reading, everyone - and with any luck, we'll see you sometime in the next few weeks for the v0.47 release!