(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, time for another CPE development update! I don't have a ton to show off this week, since I spent a lot of my time working on the accessibility features I announced last update. The good news is, over the week, I managed to implement every single one of them - there's still some testing and tweaking to do, but they're all functional already, so any players in need of them will be able to use them once v0.39 comes out! I also plan on adding an easier difficulty level as well, which I'll probably work on during this next week. With all those options, I really hope anyone who struggled playing CPE before will have a much more enjoyable time going forward.

The gif you see up above contains some more of the Area 5 background work Puffernutter did this week. There's now a rock layer at the surface of the water (which you can see at the start of the gif) that will act as a transition point between the above and below water areas. The above-water section still hasn't received much love yet unfortunately, but we'll get working on that soon. Underwater, we also have some breaks in the rock wall pattern, through which you can see some more parallax layers, to add some nice depth to the scene. In general during this update I've learned some new techniques for handling parallax environment art, and it's really nice to bring it all together for a brand new area! I'm really happy with how it's turning out, and I expect this to be the nicest looking area in CPE by far.

Aside from accessibility features and the background art, I mostly worked on more Area 5 level design this week. I want there to be a decent amount of stuff to explore in Area 5, so a LOT of my work for the rest of this update will be focused on that, and future weekly updates might end up staying pretty small - sorry about that! Orexius is working on the new enemy's H-scene, Red is still plugging away at the Torguis CG in his limited spare time, and I'm also looking into hiring some new people to voice new characters! I can't guarantee they'll be introduced in this update, just because of the amount of work that's left to do, but I'm trying my best to get them prepared in time, so fingers crossed.

Alright, that's it for this week's update! Thank you all very much for reading, and for continuing to follow us! We'll see you in the next update!