(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. Sorry for not posting an update last week, I've been struggling to be honest. With all of my health issues coming to light thanks to my medical appointments, I've been trying to make a lot of life changes to improve things, and it's been kind of overwhelming to have so many things change so suddenly. I've never been good with change, I'm very much a creature of habit, and these last few weeks have been rough. It's all stuff that will be great for me in the long run - going on daily walks, eating out less, cutting sugar from my diet, changing our office setup to accommodate my ADHD brain, and more - it's just difficult to get used to all the changes at once. Work is still progressing, especially from Orexius who has been getting a lot done lately, but my half is going slower than I'd like.

For the time being, I'm putting a pause on the level editor, and focusing on trying to get the most important stuff done so I can put out a new update for you guys asap. We've kept you all waiting so long already, I don't want to push it back any longer if I don't have to. To that end, I've been working on some bugfixing, and implementing the Golem enemy's animations that I posted ages ago; he's proving to be more complex to implement than most enemies, thanks to his floating movement patterns, attack variety, and hands/body being disconnected in many animations, but I think that'll make him pretty interesting as an encounter once all is said and done.

Orexius has been doing a lot of work in a lot of different places: he's currently in the process of updating all of the special effects for Alicia's blaster, and the various upgrade chips you can collect for it. I'll post a few of them here - keep in mind these are just direct exports of the animations, not actually ingame, so they'll look a little different.

As you can see, the bullets themselves are getting more animation, but they're also getting unique muzzle flashes, and unique impact and dissipate animations, depending on whether the bullet hits something or reaches its maximum range without hitting anything. 

He's getting real good at special effects animation lately, as you all saw with the underwater mine explosion, so having him go back and update a lot of our old effects is exciting. He's been getting so many animations done lately that I'm just playing catch-up at this point, trying to implement them all :p

Aside from effects animation, he also started working on the Poison Alraune BE H-scene; it's not animated yet, but he's finished the base sprite and pose. Here's a preview of that, and with the amount of "more futa" requests I get, I imagine it'll be at least a few people's new favorite!

And that's about all I have for game updates. As far as personal updates go, I had a follow-up doctor's appointment a few days ago, and we decided to try raising the dosage on the ADHD medication I'm taking. I'm pretty sure I've mentioned it before, but the medication I'm on right now does seem to work, buuuut only sometimes. Some days I can feel it working and it really helps with productivity, and other days I feel nothing, so with any luck a higher dosage will do the trick. I have another follow-up with her in a month, and I also talked over my options with her during our appointment; if just raising the dosage doesn't help, I have a few other things I can try, like taking the pills in a different order, or taking more than one of the short-term pill at a time. The medicine I'm on is a controlled substance, so I went over all of those things thoroughly with her, to get her approval on what I should and shouldn't do with them. I want to make sure I don't have to wait another full month to try something new if this doesn't work right away, but I'm not about to start messing around with pills without doctor approval, so this seems like a happy medium.

To wrap up, I have high hopes for this coming week; there's loads of stuff for me to implement from Orexius and hopefully the higher dosage of ADHD medication will help me do it. Our upstairs office setup is nearly done, all that's really missing now is a dedicated computer; my laptop will be fine for some types of work, but it struggles to handle the size of CPE's main project file. Still, I should be able to start doing a good amount of work there, and it's a much quieter and more isolated space that should help avoid the ADHD distraction pitfalls of living with a lot of people.

Anyway, that's it for this week. I was hoping I would've been back at full capacity by now, but mental (and physical) health are no joke, especially after years of pushing through the difficulties instead of dealing with them in a healthy way. Thank you for reading, and doubly so for sticking with us even though the path back to full-time work has been a difficult one! It means so much that you've all continued to be so supportive and understanding even after all this. With any luck, we'll see you next week with a better update - and with any luck, I'll also be able to stop prefacing everything with "with any luck" soon!