Weekly Update! 8-26-18 (cleanup, cutscenes, and audio) (Patreon)

Hey everyone! Time for another weekly CPE development update! Once again I don't have much to show off visually, so sorry about that, this'll be a text post - but the reason for that is that all of the major features were completed already, so I've been entirely focused on polish, small things, and cutscenes (which I think are funner to keep private so you can see them for yourselves). Because of that, v.31 is very close to completion now! The only major thing left on my todo list is to playtest as much as possible to iron out any bugs - this is one of the biggest updates CPE has ever had, with a feature list including but not limited to: a complete revamp of all CG dialogue, a new skill tree system providing passive upgrades to Alicia in combat, the ability to warp between any unlocked save points, a proper menu for equipping Blaster Chips, the introduction of our storyline which includes 4 cutscenes and 3 different conversations between Alicia and NPCs that will happen as you wander around, a gallery in-game that allows you to watch any CGs you've unlocked whenever you like by warping back to base camp and talking to an NPC, a new, much more useful melee attack for Alicia, and a stagger system for enemies that makes heavy, single hits much more useful. This is also one of the first times we've planned such an ambitious update, and not only didn't have to scrap anything, but were able to get the update out in roughly 2 months, on our promised timeline. I'm unbelievably proud of the work we've done here, but enough about that, let's talk what we did this week!

For my part, I spent this week doing a few different things - the most noteworthy of which was working with CPE's actors and actresses for the various dialogue we needed for our cutscenes, and then balancing volume levels, picking out takes, and implementing all of those voice clips. In doing so, I discovered a pretty severe audio glitch that's been in the game for quite some time that was leading to AWFUL audio quality on some audio, mostly voice clips. The good news is that searching for a solution lead to some pretty nice optimization in audio filesize, and since we're starting to add lots of voice clips now, it'll prevent all of our voice acting from bloating the filesize too much. Aside from that, I spent the rest of the week doing a bunch of various things around the game, finishing up small bits of polish everywhere, nothing too exciting on its own but all very necessary for reaching the level of quality I'm aiming for.

Orexius spent this week working on various animations for cutscenes, such as walkcycles for all of our main characters, and a few small animations and poses for specific scenes. We really want to do more smaller cutscene-specific animations and poses, to give the cutscenes more life, but this will be a very long-term goal - he only has so much time to work on CPE after his dayjob and animation is definitely a time consuming process, so for now our focus is mostly on more important animations and H-scenes.

LustFire spent his time updating more CGs to fit the new writing. I believe about half of them have been fixed now, but the rest are sadly going to have some inconsistencies, as we want to do more with those CGs than just change Alicia's expression, and there's not enough time to complete those overhauls before the end of the month.

For streams this week, I'm honestly not sure what we'll be doing - we'll probably try to stream on Tuesday and Thursday, 1 pm EST, as usual, but it's possible we might end up skipping one or both. Either way, the update will almost definitely be out this week, unless I run into something catastrophic while bug testing.

Welp, that's it for this week. Thanks so much for your support everyone, I can't wait to get v.31 into your hands! Love you all <3
-A42