(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!)

Hey everyone, welcome to another CPE development update! Sorry this one is a day late - I managed to mess up my thumb over the weekend so typing was difficult, and I generally wasn't feeling well yesterday, so I decided to wait a day. I'm feeling much better today, so here we are!

This one isn't going to be too big, and I'll get into the details during the post. The only visual I have to show off this week is the progress we've made on the UI rework, so let's start with that!

Here's how things are looking so far. Keep in mind these are still very WIP, so anything and everything on these is subject to change - but since the last version we showed was in greyscale, I wanted to show how things are shaping up now that we're adding color. Let me know how you feel about it so far!

Things have been pretty standard for the rest of us since the last development update. Puffernutter has had a LOT of freelance work, so her time to work on CPE has been limited; Orexius has been continuing work on the BE Vines animation update, and the new gameplay animations needed for 360 aiming; and I've still been working on 360 aiming, the lighting update, and the screen size update. I've been changing between tasks as needed to keep my programming life interesting, so even though I'm still working on a lot of different things I talked about several weeks ago, they'll probably end up all being finished at about the same time.

Aside from that though, I also had the realization last week that I was falling back into the trap of having too much going on, and I was starting to run myself ragged again. My work hours on CPE are MUCH healthier than they've ever been before, so that part isn't an issue, but I had too much going on in terms of appointments and such, and it was starting to take a toll on me. In the last weekly update, I talked about getting a health examination, and I ended up canceling that for a few reasons - the first one was to give myself a break from major appointments, and the other was because the exam is a fairly expensive one, and so I decided to save it for early next year so it can count towards next year's health insurance deductible. Gotta love US health insurance.

In any case, now that I'm done with physical therapy for my knee, the only major appointments/obligations I have are standard life things, working on CPE, and going to therapy every other week. I'm already feeling a lot better now that my todo list has been simplified, so I'm going to really be able to dig in and focus on getting all these major CPE overhauls completed so we can get you guys a playable update! I really do have to thank you all for being so patient; I know development is weird right now and I'm so grateful to you all for being patient with me while I figure things out. Because of my upbringing, I have a lot of difficulty dealing with high-stress situations, and I get stressed/overwhelmed more easily than anyone else I know - leading a game dev team can often take a lot out of me, but I've been able to really enjoy working on CPE again lately, and that's entirely thanks to both my team, and all of you supporting us, who have been so patient and understanding even when things are slow and I'm struggling. All of your comments mean the world to me, too - it's easy to feel rather isolated when working on a game like this, but seeing you all cheer us on really keeps my morale up, so even if I don't respond to all of your kind words, please know that I am reading them and I appreciate the hell out of each and every one of you!

Before I finish up this post, we're almost out of the "fun" stuff to show off for this next playable update, so the next few biweekly updates will probably be pretty simple, just updating on our progress for the stuff you already know we're doing. Since these updates are getting pretty straightforward, I want to make up for that by doing regular streams until v0.46 is completed and in your hands. Our internet here is still having some issues, but it's usually fixed by just rebooting our modem and router, so it should be stable enough to do streams even if it blinks out every once in a while.

With that said, we're going to tentatively schedule streams for Monday and Wednesday, starting at 4 pm AKST(Alaska standard time). Not today of course, since we're already past that point, so our next stream should be this Wednesday. I always tweet (and @ in our discord) when we're starting up a dev stream, so if you want a reminder, you can either follow me directly on Picarto (https://picarto.tv/Anon42), follow me on twitter (@Anon42_CPE), or join our Discord and give yourself the Picarto Streams role in our #roles channel! https://discord.com/invite/MveBYb2 Because our Discord server is NSFW, I can't post the link to it publicly here on Patreon, but I'll post one on all the other places we post dev updates - and if you're pledged to us, you should be automatically invited into our server if you link your Patreon and Discord accounts.

Alright, that's it for me today. Thank you for reading everyone, and I hope to see you at our stream on Wednesday!