(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our bi-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!)

Hello everyone, and welcome to another CPE development update! There's not gonna be a whole lot of stuff with this one; Orexius had some minor nose surgery (don't worry, it wasn't for anything serious) that knocked him out for a week, so he had less time to get stuff done than usual, Puffernutter has had a lot of freelance work keeping her from working on the game, and for my part, I did get some good work done, but it was mostly spent on doing more shader experiments! That said, we do have two new WIP backgrounds to show off from Puffernutter, and I've solidified my shader knowledge a bit more with a few new effects I'll be adding to the game!

To start off, here's two of the backgrounds Puffernutter has been working on, this time for the Deep Soil:

The Deep Soil has always been a bit of a sore spot for me. It's by far the most organic area in CPE by design, and because of that it has suffered the most from our limited background art. My original idea for the area was to have massive vines shooting up from the ground to seemingly infinite heights, spearing through large clumps of dirt to create a twisting organic maze, where you spend half the time navigating the vines themselves and the other half along the dirt that they hold suspended in the air. The original art for the area captured.. baaaasically none of that. It's a testament to my inexperience; I wasn't able to get across what I wanted to our background artist at the time, and the entire area suffered as a result.

Those of you that have been around for a while might also remember that the Deep Soil is the only area in the game to undergo a complete redesign from the ground up; its original iteration was confusing to navigate with too many small rooms, so in general it's always been one of the areas that I was least satisfied with. All that to say, Puffernutter's early concept work for redesigning the area makes me SO EXCITED! She's doing a wonderful job of capturing what I always wanted the area to look like, and while we're mostly focusing on the Caves and Summit for right now (to get the early parts of the game polished up as much as possible), I can't wait til we can focus our efforts on the Deep Soil.

Next up, my work. Before I get into the shader stuff I worked on, a quick update on the lighting engine upgrade. I've managed to cut out the old lighting system and implement the new one at a basic level, so the hardest part is done. The main things left now are fixing some of the visual bugs that happen with different video settings, and more importantly, to re-add lighting functionality to all of the different light sources in the game now. That part will take the longest, since there are so many of them, and since the new lighting has more features it'll be more effort than just a simple conversion. Regardless, I'm happy with how it's going, and I fully expect it to be included in the next playable update!

Now for the shader experiments, I have 3 things I managed to figure out: an outline shader, a (very) simple bloom shader, and a distortion shader. I won't bother showing off the outline shader, that one's self-explanatory, but it will allow me to try out a few effects I've been interested in. The bloom shader is a bit hit-and-miss; if you're worried that I'm about to introduce a ton of bloom to the game, don't worry, I know it's a rather polarizing effect, so if I do use one I intend to do so in moderation. That said, there are a few places I think it would be beneficial! 

I decided to start by implementing it specifically on light sources, and this was the very earliest version of the effect:

As you can see, it's uh.. it's a bit much, haha. The one exception is the laser fence on the right, which I actually think the effect looks really nice on! Here's a comparison of the fence with and without the shader:

We could just bake that visual into the fence by hand, it's not complex at all, but using a shader means I can do some fun stuff with it like giving it some procedural animation. So at the very least, for simple things like this, the shader works pretty well. I tinkered with it A LOT to see if I could make it play nicer with the lights and torch, but I haven't found a solution yet that I'm satisfied with, so I won't talk about those any further for now. I have some ideas to make it look nicer, so I'll definitely be messing with it more, and you can rest assured that it won't look anywhere near that jarring if it makes it into the game!

Lastly, and the most exciting for me, is a distortion shader, essentially allowing me to warp images in real time, like so:

(Apologies for the quality not being great, gifs aren't a great format! It looks a bit nicer ingame but the gif gets the idea across just fine)

The first use in this gif is the heat distortion on the torch in front of Alicia, which is something I fully intend on adding to the game proper, I'm super happy with how it came out. The crazy warping effect on the bottom right was just me playing around with the effect and seeing what I can do with it - it's using the exact same shader and concepts as the heat distortion, just with a rotation effect applied to it. The shader allows for distortion in any direction, so I can do just about anything I can think of with it.

I'm not 100% satisfied with it yet - you can't tell from the gif, but when multiple distortions overlap with each other, they don't merge in the way I would like them to, and instead one distortion seems to take priority at random - but I had already spent multiple days of work to get it to this point, so I put that aside for future Anon to deal with. Who knows, overlapping distortions might not ever be an issue anyway, so if I spent even longer on it now that might just end up being wasted work.

And that's all I have to talk about for this week! Sorry again it's not as big of an update, but 2/3rds of the team was unable to work for most of it, and I've definitely been bit by the shader bug now that I'm starting to understand them lmao. I intend to bring my focus back to the game itself, so we can try and push out a playable update before too long, but it's still going to be a bit before we have one ready for release.

On that subject, I do have one question I'd like to pose to you all: most of our work recently has been on upgrading old systems and art, and not really on "new" content. We try to maintain a balance between the two, but we're in a bit of an odd place right now; the playable builds are rapidly approaching some important story moments, but we're actively updating and retooling some parts of the story right now. Even though nothing major will be changing, creating more story content right now is iffy, as it may need to be changed or altered soon after. Because of the lack of new content, I've been very hesitant to try and push out a playable update, but at this rate it's going in the same direction as the previous playable update, where I put it off repeatedly because "it's not big enough to justify the time everyone waited", and I don't want that to happen again. So with all of that considered, are you guys okay with updates that contain no/limited new content, and are instead focused on reworking and polishing things, for a bit? Once we finish ironing out the remaining story beats, I fully intend to get back to more balanced updates, it's just awkward right now - so please leave a comment to let me know how you feel about that so we can plan accordingly!

And as a reminder for our patrons, if you've pledged at the tier for a demo at any point since the last update came out (so, for the entirety of 2022), you WILL be getting the next playable update even if you unpledge. If you're not okay with waiting a bit longer, I completely understand, and you can safely unpledge for the time being without sacrificing the rewards you pledged for.

In the meantime, thank you so much to all of you who stick around! I know new sexual content is what a lot of folks are here for, so I really appreciate that you guys are understanding and let me focus on other parts of the game as well. I'm still feeling great about being able to work consistently again, and with all this new knowledge and experience, we're well on our way to making CPE a better game than it's ever been before. Thanks for reading, and we'll see you again in the next update!