(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, you can try a free demo of the game on our itch.io by clicking here! If you enjoy the game, please consider supporting us on Patreon! We couldn't make this game without our supporters!)

Hey everyone! Someday I will succeed in posting the weekly update on Saturday, like it's supposed to be, but today is not that day :' )

I struggled to get stuff done more this week compared to the last few, so there's not too much to talk about. I think the change in ADHD medication last week might not be working as well as I hoped; I plan on giving it one more week to see if I just need more time to adjust, but if it still feels worse by next weekend I plan on scheduling another appointment to alter things again. I think I mentioned the details last week, but I switched from 1 extended release pill in the morning and 1 short release pill in the afternoon, to just taking two of the short release pills, one in the morning one in the afternoon. Now that I've been on that for about a week, I get the feeling that it wasn't that the short-term medication is more effective, and more that the long-term pill from the morning was still active when I took the afternoon short-term pill, and the combination of the two of them was what made it feel more effective. If that's the case, it's very possible that just upping the dosage would be a good solution, but I have no intention of trying that without approval from my doctor first, so we'll see what happens.

In any case, between that and the fact that we also had both Puffernutter and Orexius's birthdays this week (send 'em some love!), it led to me getting less done than I'd hoped - but not nothing. I spent most of this week implementing some of the animations Orexius has been working on, as well as tinkering more with special effects and shaders. I redid the little dust clouds that Alicia leaves when she jumps, lands, or dashes across the ground - I don't have footage prepared to show it off, and it's a bit of a subtle change, but I like the new effect a lot more. We also gave Alicia a different ledge grab animation for when the ledge she grabs is too short to give her a foothold, so she'll grab on with both hands now instead. I also optimized various parts of the game's code; I'm still refamiliarizing myself with my codebase, since I hadn't worked on it in 4 months, and now has seemed like a great time to optimize and tweak things to be easier to work with. It's not exciting work, but it makes all my future work easier, so it's well worth it.

Like I mentioned last week, we're revisiting the visuals of older areas and analyzing them thoroughly to see where we can improve them, but we also spent some time this week working on the art design for a future piece of content as well. Too much of CPE's art design has been handled nonchalantly, since it all started back when the team consisted of just me (and I'm no art designer), so we're trying to be more thorough with stuff we create now. I know, in hindsight it seems like an obvious thing to do, but hey, mistakes now means we make better stuff in the future, and you can't learn from mistakes without making them in the first place :p

So that's the major stuff I worked on last week, but I do believe I promised a .gif dump in the title, didn't I? Here's a handful (but not all) of the animations Orexius has been working on, both character animations and effects:

Even though I've been struggling with work, Orex has been a busy bee, with a good mix of new and reworked animations to fill the game out. As you can see he's taken to special effects animation very well, and we're finally giving NPCs some actions to do at camp so they're not just standing around idly whenever you come back.

Well, that's about all I have for this week. Thanks for reading everybody, and for continuing to be patient with me - it would be great if getting back to work meant I was at 100% right away, but that definitely hasn't been the case, and I really appreciate you all letting me take my return at a healthy pace. We'll see you again in next week's update!