Biweekly Update - 11-19-2023 (Cutscene and story work; gradual improvements!) (Patreon)

Hey everyone. This won't be a super long update; I'm not going to say the last few weeks of development went amazingly, but I am happy to say that I'm finally moving in the right direction! Things were a little slow at first because I was celebrating my birthday earlier this month, but once those festivities were done, trying to force myself to sit down for at least a few hours a day has been very helpful; not perfect, but it HAS been working slowly but surely. I'm not up to a satisfactory pace yet, but at this point I'm happy to see any improvement at all, and we can only go up from here.

I've been spending my time working on the story rewrite, and a new cutscene coming in the next update; I've talked about it before, but it's an introduction cutscene for a pretty important character who's already in the game, but gets very little screen time currently. It's one of the main reasons for the story rewrite in general, and I'm MUCH happier with their involvement in the story now.

I don't remember how much I've talked about it before, but the story rewrite is fairly extensive. A lot of the basic beats remain the same (when you meet each character, the order Alicia goes to each area, things like that) - but we'll be adding a new character or two, and Alicia's motivations in particular are changing a good deal. She's still the same character, so don't worry about her personality changing or anything like that, but I wanted to give her more personal motivation rather than just professional. We're also removing the plot point of the virus causing all children to be born female, as it was never particularly relevant to the story we're telling and I could never come up with a satisfying way to weave it in. Rather than trying to force that in, the virus is being altered so it causes degradation in the parts of the brain that control critical thinking, essentially reverting humans to their primal instincts, and I'm sure you can see how that fits into the existing story of CPE a little better.

In any case, I don't want to spoil too much about the new story, so I won't go into it any further, just wanted to give you an idea of what to expect! I'm not confident that ALL of the story changes will be in v0.47, but we'll try and get in as many as we can.

So that's what I've been working on; it's not too much, but it's SOMETHING. As long as I can keep the ball rolling and gain momentum slowly but surely, it won't be long before I'm actually able to work properly again and I can finally stop letting all of you down. Seriously, I can't thank you enough for continuing to support us; I don't blame anyone for jumping ship, I've been dropping the ball so hard for such a long time, but I can't tell you how much it means that any of you at all still believe in me, and I can't wait to get back into the swing of things. It's so frustrating, because I WANT to work, but that's somehow not enough to get my brain on the same page - but I guess that's just how life is sometimes, for ADHD/neurodivergent brains like mine.

Speaking of ADHD, small update on the medication situation - all the little issues I've been having all finally seem to be sorted out, but there's one final catch that I can't really do anything about: supply. I didn't realize it, since I've been off ADHD medications for a while, but there's been a supply shortage for ADHD medications in the US since late 2022. Still, the prescription is there and they've ordered the pills and everything, so it's only a matter of time before I get them, it's just hard to say how long it'll be. Here's hoping I'll get word sooner rather than later.

And that's pretty much all I have to talk about today. I should have the new cutscene finished by next update, so maybe I'll show a small clip of it then? I don't want to spoil anything, but then again you can always choose not to watch it if you don't want spoilers, and I'd like to have some visual stuff to show you guys soon! In any case, thank you so much for reading. I plan on trying to do a stream sometime in the next few days, I've been actually WANTING to this time, so keep an eye out for that if you're interested. If not, we'll see you again in the next update!