Biweekly Update - 4-9-2023 (Story rewrite and level designer progress) (Patreon)

Hey everyone, hope this update finds you well! We're back to our regular update post schedule now, so it's time for another biweekly update.

There's not a huge amount to talk about today, so let's get right into it. Our focus right now is mostly split between two things: the story rewrites, and my level design tool for CPE. I made some huge strides with the story rewrite these past two weeks, and nailed down some important story beats that make up the core of CPE's plot. I wish I could talk about this stuff in depth, but I don't want to spoil anything, so I'll try to be vague and focus more on what we're trying to achieve with the rewrites, rather than anything specific. The main goals with the story rewrite are:

-Give certain characters more history and screentime, the most obvious example being Kara, who comes out of nowhere in the current story

-Flesh out each character's personality a bit more (e.g. giving them flaws so they feel more like real people)

-Improve the pacing of the story by making the beginning of the game less exposition-heavy, so you can get into gameplay faster

-Update some of the lore and dialogue to accommodate the ways the story has changed since those early conversations were written

For the most part, you can expect the first chunk of the game to not change too much, mostly just some altered dialogue and cutscenes. It's when Alicia reaches the Deep Soil that things will start to change pretty heavily. The most important part of this story rewrite is preparing for future content, though - we had reached a point where the game was missing story things that are necessary for creating more content, which is part of why we haven't been working on strictly new content for a bit now. Once this rewrite (and the level design tool) are complete, we'll be in a MUCH better place to focus on new content. In the meantime, I really want to thank you all for being so patient with us about this stuff - I know reworks and rewrites aren't nearly as exciting as new content, but CPE has grown a lot since we started making it, and I've been really feeling the need to overhaul some of this stuff for a while now.

As far as the level design tool is concerned, progress is going very well! I've said this before, but just to clarify again, this level editor tool is ONLY for internal use by me - it's not something I can give out to players, unfortunately, because the method I'm using to inject the levels into the game requires me to manually edit project files, so it would be impossible for anyone else to use it.

Anyway, it's still a ways off from being usable, but it's getting closer every day! I managed to solve a few important technical challenges this week, and other than that the focus has been on designing the UI, laying down the groundwork for all of the features I want it to have, and doing data entry (basically filling out the list of placeable objects with the ones from the game itself, so I can actually put together levels).

I'm getting to a point now where I think the level editor is going to start progressing very quickly; I put a major focus on early optimization, since the main reason I'm making this tool in the first place is because the built-in level editor in my engine runs like shiiiiit. Because of that, the early parts of working on it have taken quite some time, but it will start paying dividends soon by making it much easier for me to add in new features without needing to worry about how optimized they are. I'm super excited to be working on this; not only will it be ridiculously useful and allow me to make much detailed levels much more easily, but it's also just kinda fun to make my own development tool! It's been a fun change of pace from the content grind.

Anyway, that's it for me today. It's still going to be a bit before we get back to regular content development, but once these two things are done, we'll be in a much better position to get new stuff out. Thanks for sticking with us while we prep for the future, I can't wait to show you what we have in store for the game! Thanks for reading, see you at the next biweekly update!