Status update - 3-21-2023 (Patreon)

Hey everyone. So first off, big apologies for how quiet things have been since v0.46 came out. I'm going through a pretty big funk right now to be honest, and I'm trying to break myself out of it, but it's been a struggle. If you don't care about the personal life stuff, feel free to skip to the end of this post, I'll put all the work-related stuff there.

The flow of time has felt really strange the past few months, it's like the days are just melting away and I feel like I can't keep up. A huge part of the struggle is because I started a diet a few weeks ago - and don't worry, it's not some stupid fad diet that does more harm than good. I'm working with a professional dietician to try and get my weight under control, which has been a huge struggle for me my entire life. I haven't been a healthy weight since I was a literal child, and I'm nearly 30 now, so.. almost my entire lifetime of unhealthy eating has led to a looooot of baggage and bad habits. For one, I'm pretty sure I have a food addiction and just never realized it - we started with a very strict diet where all my meals were replaced by a nutritionally-complete bar or shake, and I only made it 4 days on that before needing to get an early appointment to change it. Hell, I didn't even make it to the end of day 1 before getting horrible food withdrawals, 4 days was just my absolute limit - but for that entire 4 day period, I wasn't sleeping well, I couldn't focus on anything, it was just misery all day. It's not a willpower thing either, I haven't cheated on my diet even once since starting it - my stubbornness comes in handy sometimes - but the emotional/mental ramifications of dieting have been just.. unbelievably brutal.

So, needless to say I'm glad I'm seeing a dietician and therapist, so I can work through that addiction with people who are qualified to help with it. The dietician got me on a plan that works a lot better for me, but dieting in general is still one of the most difficult things I've ever done. I'm losing weight consistently, which is more than I can say for all of my previous attempts at getting healthy, so I take that as a win - it's just been very difficult for me to focus on other aspects of my life while dealing with this dietary shift. That's one of my biggest struggles in general, honestly, making healthy changes in my life without those changes consuming all of my focus. I can make genuine improvements in some areas, but it always seems to come at the cost of others. That's something I really want to get better at, and I'm sorry that it's impacted all of you and my ability to work on CPE.

My therapist is also seriously considering the diagnosis of OCD, which makes sense because my mother had OCD and it's a genetic disorder.. which would mean I have this lovely little combo of ADHD and OCD, two things that sound like complete opposites, but they totally can exist together, and it's a brutal combo. It would explain why ADHD medication on its own has never really felt like it "fixed" my brain, like it does for most ADHD people. I'm still trying to figure my own brain out, the manager does a terrible job of keeping things tidy so it's a bit of a mess :p

With all of that being said, my therapist tells me one of the best ways to combat OCD tendencies is to just force yourself to break out of them, so that's what I'm going to do. The gallery update is finally out now, so I'm going to start streaming again like we were before v0.46 came out - starting next Sunday, we'll be trying to stream every day from Sunday to Wednesday, unless something comes up that prevents me from doing it. No specific time of day, I have appointments on some of those days sometimes so we might end up streaming early one day and late the next, but if not having a consistent streaming schedule ends up being a problem, then we'll figure that out when we get to it.

We aren't going to be starting on v0.47 proper just yet - my #1 focus right now is going to be creating that custom level design tool, to make the rest of CPE's development SO much easier, and I'm also going to focus on finishing the story rewrites so that we can actually implement those. We have a LOT of it planned out already, we just need to nail down a few more details before we can start working on assets, to make sure we aren't wasting development time. I'm also going to make a better effort to not skip update posts on here anymore; I never intended to skip any, time honestly just got away from me and before I knew it, nearly a month had passed. Again, I'm really sorry for the lack of communication there!

That's all I have to talk about today. Whether you care about the personal stuff or not, thank you all for always being so understanding and supportive of myself and the rest of our team! We have some really exciting plans for 2023, and I can't wait to share some of them with y'all. Thanks for reading, and I hope to see some of you at the streams next week!