(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, consider supporting us!)

Hey everybody! This week's update is gonna be smaller than last week; most of the stuff I worked on is related to writing and level design and such, so not particularly interesting to show off.

I've been doing a LOT of writing lately - since fully laying out the plans for CPE's story, rather than just keeping it all in my head, I've gotten a much clearer idea of where the game's story and progression is headed and what I need to write to get us there. It's honestly been a blast! Some of what I'm writing won't even be in this update, mostly due to not having the assets I need to make certain events happen, but in general I'm trying to frontload a lot of the writing work in this update. Since every script needs to be voice acted, I need to give our actors and actresses plenty of time to get their lines recorded, so I'm trying to get as much writing done as I can early in the update cycle so they have time to record.

Aside from the writing, I also did a chunk of level design this week. The 3rd boss now has a (mostly) permanent location; the fight itself is still going to undergo a complete rework later on, and that might include slightly altering her location, but her general location is here to stay. Defeating her also gets you access to a real upgrade now - the Weighted Boots! As you can imagine, the Weighted Boots allow Alicia to sink in water rather than floating, allowing for underwater exploration at long last. It comes at the cost of reduced mobility though; while underwater, Alicia can't dash or slide, and she moves slightly slower, so you'll have to be careful when traversing underwater areas. There's no breath meter to worry about though, so you can take your time and explore freely.

Lastly, I have two NSFW things to show off, a teaser for the Slime CG rework Red is doing, and a comparison shot of the Alraune BE H-scene Orexius just finished reworking.

The CG isn't finished just yet, there's still some work to be done on it (the original colors were too desaturated, and Red is out of town right now so I had to up the saturation values myself - the final colors won't be the exact same as this), but it's nearly done and hopefully you'll agree with me that it looks absolutely fantastic.

Aside from that, here's the H-scene comparison - top is old, bottom is new:

I'm sure you'll agree with me that it's one HELL of a glow up; Orexius really outdid himself with this scene.

Before I go, I do want to mention that I'm making a slight update to stream schedules - my sleeping schedule is still all sorts of whack, I'm not waking up at consistent times at all. I'm most productive early in the day, so naturally when I wake up earlier, streaming at 5 pm EST is very difficult for me; because of that, I'm going to scrap the idea of having specific times for the streams. We'll still be streaming Monday/Wednesday/Friday, but the time will change depending on the day. I'd like to fix my sleeping schedule and get some consistency, but for the time being I just gotta make due with what I've got, super sorry for any inconvenience this causes!

Alright, that's all I have for this week. Thanks so much for the support, everyone! v0.38 is shaping up nicely and I'm having a great time working on it, can't wait to get it in your hands!