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

(Doodled by our animator, Orexius!)

Hey everyone, welcome to the weekly update! We had a nice productive week, so let's get into it!

First off, the song at the top of this post. Our musician finished up the boss fight track for Boss 3, and you can listen to a preview of it up above! I love how it came out, so hopefully you'll be excited to hear the full thing once the update releases! I wasn't sure if I wanted to give each boss a unique theme at first, but our composer does such amazing work every time that any excuse to get more music from them is a good excuse in my book!

Next up, Puffernutter started work on a brand new tileset for a new area, an offshoot of the Summit, this week! Absolutely EVERYTHING in this image is subject to change, as most of the assets are either placeholders or are still in a very rough state at the moment, but we were so happy with how it was turning out that we wanted to show off a preview now!

Next, on top of some other stuff (like increasing the speed of Boss 3 so the fight's not so easy), I worked on a system this week to allow for player choices during dialogue! This likely won't be used super often in CPE - we're not going to have a branching storyline or anything - but it will be very useful for chatting with folks back at camp. I hope to use it to help flesh out their personalities by giving everyone optional dialogue here and there.

Also, to help out anyone struggling to make their way through the game, I'll be giving Rodriguez an "advice" option (as you can see in the image above) that has him point you in the right direction on where you should explore next, so hopefully getting lost won't be as common in the future. I like this implementation a lot, both because it's organic within the world (as compared to a waypoint marker or something like that), and it's also completely optional for the player; if you prefer figuring it out for yourself and don't want to be told where to go, just don't ask him for advice!

Lastly, Orexius finished the animation a while ago, but I don't believe we ever showed off the Tentacle BE H-scene, so here's an in-game preview of that!

And that's it for this week! We didn't end up holding any Picarto streams this week, sorry about that, but we DID go ahead and set up a second, more casual form of streaming on our Discord server! Unlike Picarto, our Discord streams aren't archived (and don't have audio), so I plan to use them for shorter casual dev streams rather than the usual 4+ hour streams we do on Picarto. I'm hoping it'll help fill the gaps when we're not feeling up to a lengthy stream, to allow us to still engage with people while we're working on a smaller scale. At the moment, anyone can watch the Discord streams by being in the server, but only Patrons are allowed to use voice chat, so hopefully the streams won't get too crazy!

The rest of this post will be a personal health/life update, so feel free to skip it if you want. Thanks for reading, and we'll see you next week!

Fitness took another dip this week, and I didn't do any real exercise, unfortunately - BUT, we've been sticking strong to eating better! We've fallen into a rhythm of only eating out once a week, ordering less when we do eat out that one time per week, and cooking a LOT more (and with healthier, fresher foods) at home, so I'm still feeling pretty good about it all things considered! Once I finish posting this update I'm gonna head to our exercise room and get back on that exercise train immediately, so next week will already be off to a better start than this one was.

And that's it for this week! Thank you so much for continuing to follow and support us, everyone, it really means the world to our team! We wouldn't be here without you!