(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. So, we've officially entered 2023, and the update isn't out yet. The closer we got, the more certain I was we were going to miss the date; to be honest, we still have quite a bit more to do before it's ready for a release, and if I had forced the update out it definitely would've been rushed, so as bummed as I am about missing the 2022 release window, I'm a little relieved that the pressure to do it is gone now. Everyone has been waiting so long for this update, I don't want it to have loads of issues when it finally does, if I can avoid it.

So, like I said in the last biweekly update, now that we've entered 2023 with no update release, I'll be posting weekly updates instead of biweekly until the update comes out. I'm going to keep them simpler, so they don't take up much of my time compared to usual, and I can focus more on getting the update itself out, so let's get right into it.

The main things left to do are testing, and the UI. With testing, this update has SO many radical changes to the game that odds are, there are tons of issues I haven't run into yet. It'll be hard to find all of them before releasing the update, so I'm probably going to save testing until everything else is done, and then get some close friends to help me test the game as thoroughly as possible. I'll let you know when we get to that phase, since it'll hopefully be right before the update comes out for everyone.

For the UI, progress is going very well. The Blaster and Skills menus are both complete, and I've started on the Options menu as well, which is the most complex menu but also the last major one. There's a few smaller menus that also need an update, like the difficulty selection menu when you hit New Game, and the Warp menu, but those are extremely simple and should only take a few hours of work each. There's also the Database menu, which I haven't started yet, but the good news is the Database menu isn't a very interactive menu, unlike the other ones - it's just a menu to display information and lore, so it will be more complicated than the super small ones like the Warp menu, but much simpler than any of the main ones like the Options or Skills menus, so it shouldn't take too long to complete.

There's still a bit of work that needs to be done for 360 aiming, but Orexius is still working on the animations for that, so I can't finish it up on my own. I've been adding animations as he finishes them though, and almost all of the most important stuff is finished, so it won't be much longer til 360 aiming is done enough for a release.

So that's where things stand right now. I'm sorry we missed the 2022 window, but we're going to continue streaming ~4 times a week and posting weekly updates until it's out, so you'll all be updated every step of the way. Thank you all for being patient with us while we finish this up! This is the biggest update CPE has ever received, despite the lack of new content - playing it is like playing a completely new game and I'm so excited to get it in your hands, I'm positive it's going to be worth the wait! Thank you for sticking with us, and I hope all of you had a fantastic holiday season and brought in the new year with style. We'll see you during this week's streams, and next weekend with the next update!