Hey everyone, really sorry updates haven't been posted on here for a while. Life has been busy and stressful, and my wife (who usually handles reposting updates everywhere that isn't Patreon) was out of town for a while, and I completely forgot to do them myself. Work has been getting done, so this is going to be a long post to dump all the update posts that haven't been posted here yet. Sorry again for the mix up!

(The following update posts are (mostly) a copy-paste from these updates posts on Patreon: Biweekly Update 3-21-2023, Biweekly Update 4-9-2023, Biweekly Update 4-30-2023, and Biweekly Update 5-21-2023. 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!)

Status update - 3-21-2023

Hey everyone. So first off, big apologies for how quiet things have been since v0.46 came out. I'm going through a pretty big funk right now to be honest, and I'm trying to break myself out of it, but it's been a struggle. If you don't care about the personal life stuff, feel free to skip to the end of this post, I'll put all the work-related stuff there.

The flow of time has felt really strange the past few months, it's like the days are just melting away and I feel like I can't keep up. A huge part of the struggle is because I started a diet a few weeks ago - and don't worry, it's not some stupid fad diet that does more harm than good. I'm working with a professional dietician to try and get my weight under control, which has been a huge struggle for me my entire life. I haven't been a healthy weight since I was a literal child, and I'm nearly 30 now, so.. almost my entire lifetime of unhealthy eating has led to a looooot of baggage and bad habits. For one, I'm pretty sure I have a food addiction and just never realized it - we started with a very strict diet where all my meals were replaced by a nutritionally-complete bar or shake, and I only made it 4 days on that before needing to get an early appointment to change it. Hell, I didn't even make it to the end of day 1 before getting horrible food withdrawals, 4 days was just my absolute limit - but for that entire 4 day period, I wasn't sleeping well, I couldn't focus on anything, it was just misery all day. It's not a willpower thing either, I haven't cheated on my diet even once since starting it - my stubbornness comes in handy sometimes - but the emotional/mental ramifications of dieting have been just.. unbelievably brutal.

So, needless to say I'm glad I'm seeing a dietician and therapist, so I can work through that addiction with people who are qualified to help with it. The dietician got me on a plan that works a lot better for me, but dieting in general is still one of the most difficult things I've ever done. I'm losing weight consistently, which is more than I can say for all of my previous attempts at getting healthy, so I take that as a win - it's just been very difficult for me to focus on other aspects of my life while dealing with this dietary shift. That's one of my biggest struggles in general, honestly, making healthy changes in my life without those changes consuming all of my focus. I can make genuine improvements in some areas, but it always seems to come at the cost of others. That's something I really want to get better at, and I'm sorry that it's impacted all of you and my ability to work on CPE.

My therapist is also seriously considering the diagnosis of OCD, which makes sense because my mother had OCD and it's a genetic disorder.. which would mean I have this lovely little combo of ADHD and OCD, two things that sound like complete opposites, but they totally can exist together, and it's a brutal combo. It would explain why ADHD medication on its own has never really felt like it "fixed" my brain, like it does for most ADHD people. I'm still trying to figure my own brain out, the manager does a terrible job of keeping things tidy so it's a bit of a mess :p

With all of that being said, my therapist tells me one of the best ways to combat OCD tendencies is to just force yourself to break out of them, so that's what I'm going to do. The gallery update is finally out now, so I'm going to start streaming again like we were before v0.46 came out - starting next Sunday, we'll be trying to stream every day from Sunday to Wednesday, unless something comes up that prevents me from doing it. No specific time of day, I have appointments on some of those days sometimes so we might end up streaming early one day and late the next, but if not having a consistent streaming schedule ends up being a problem, then we'll figure that out when we get to it.

We aren't going to be starting on v0.47 proper just yet - my #1 focus right now is going to be creating that custom level design tool, to make the rest of CPE's development SO much easier, and I'm also going to focus on finishing the story rewrites so that we can actually implement those. We have a LOT of it planned out already, we just need to nail down a few more details before we can start working on assets, to make sure we aren't wasting development time. I'm also going to make a better effort to not skip update posts on here anymore; I never intended to skip any, time honestly just got away from me and before I knew it, nearly a month had passed. Again, I'm really sorry for the lack of communication there!

That's all I have to talk about today. Whether you care about the personal stuff or not, thank you all for always being so understanding and supportive of myself and the rest of our team! We have some really exciting plans for 2023, and I can't wait to share some of them with y'all. Thanks for reading, and I hope to see some of you at the streams next week!

Biweekly Update - 4-9-2023 (Story rewrite and level designer progress)

Hey everyone, hope this update finds you well! We're back to our regular update post schedule now, so it's time for another biweekly update.

There's not a huge amount to talk about today, so let's get right into it. Our focus right now is mostly split between two things: the story rewrites, and my level design tool for CPE. I made some huge strides with the story rewrite these past two weeks, and nailed down some important story beats that make up the core of CPE's plot. I wish I could talk about this stuff in depth, but I don't want to spoil anything, so I'll try to be vague and focus more on what we're trying to achieve with the rewrites, rather than anything specific. The main goals with the story rewrite are:

• Give certain characters more history and screentime, the most obvious example being Kara, who comes out of nowhere in the current story
• Flesh out each character's personality a bit more (e.g. giving them flaws so they feel more like real people)
• Improve the pacing of the story by making the beginning of the game less exposition-heavy, so you can get into gameplay faster
• Update some of the lore and dialogue to accommodate the ways the story has changed since those early conversations were written

For the most part, you can expect the first chunk of the game to not change too much, mostly just some altered dialogue and cutscenes. It's when Alicia reaches the Deep Soil that things will start to change pretty heavily. The most important part of this story rewrite is preparing for future content, though - we had reached a point where the game was missing story things that are necessary for creating more content, which is part of why we haven't been working on strictly new content for a bit now. Once this rewrite (and the level design tool) are complete, we'll be in a MUCH better place to focus on new content. In the meantime, I really want to thank you all for being so patient with us about this stuff - I know reworks and rewrites aren't nearly as exciting as new content, but CPE has grown a lot since we started making it, and I've been really feeling the need to overhaul some of this stuff for a while now.

As far as the level design tool is concerned, progress is going very well! I've said this before, but just to clarify again, this level editor tool is ONLY for internal use by me - it's not something I can give out to players, unfortunately, because the method I'm using to inject the levels into the game requires me to manually edit project files, so it would be impossible for anyone else to use it.

Anyway, it's still a ways off from being usable, but it's getting closer every day! I managed to solve a few important technical challenges this week, and other than that the focus has been on designing the UI, laying down the groundwork for all of the features I want it to have, and doing data entry (basically filling out the list of placeable objects with the ones from the game itself, so I can actually put together levels).

I'm getting to a point now where I think the level editor is going to start progressing very quickly; I put a major focus on early optimization, since the main reason I'm making this tool in the first place is because the built-in level editor in my engine runs like shiiiiit. Because of that, the early parts of working on it have taken quite some time, but it will start paying dividends soon by making it much easier for me to add in new features without needing to worry about how optimized they are. I'm super excited to be working on this; not only will it be ridiculously useful and allow me to make much detailed levels much more easily, but it's also just kinda fun to make my own development tool! It's been a fun change of pace from the content grind.

Anyway, that's it for me today. It's still going to be a bit before we get back to regular content development, but once these two things are done, we'll be in a much better position to get new stuff out. Thanks for sticking with us while we prep for the future, I can't wait to show you what we have in store for the game! Thanks for reading, see you at the next biweekly update!

Biweekly Update - 4-30-2023 (Story rewrite nearly finished!)

Hey everyone! Sorry I missed last week's update; 2023 feels like it's disappearing out from under me, with how quickly time is passing, and I honestly thought today was the 2 week mark. Oops. Nonetheless, we're here with an update now!

There's not too much I can talk about this week, because my main focus has been on Crisis Point's story rewrite, and I don't want to spoil everything for y'all. That's also why I haven't been streaming; I don't like writing in front of people, so.. yeah. Here's the exciting, non-spoilery news, though: the story overview rewrite is finished! I'm still in the process of rewriting individual scripts for cutscenes and dialogue, but the overall story, what order events take place, etc., is all fully planned out now.

I was never happy with the latter parts of the game's original story, and the ending never really came together how I wanted it to, so I'm THRILLED to finally have a version of the Crisis Point story that I'm completely satisfied with! To be clear, the story as a whole (especially the parts you guys have seen) is still pretty similar to how it currently is -  there's a few major changes, like (trying to be as nonspoilery as possible) we'll be introducing a certain character much earlier in the game, so you get to know them before a certain story event happens. There's also a LOT of small details that have been changed, and the script for a lot of early cutscenes is being rewritten to reference those new details (and also try to be a bit less verbose), but the biggest change by far is that the later parts of the game have changed completely. That's why I wanted to take the time to sit and do this rewrite now and not later; if we continued with the original story plan, we would've basically had to throw ALL of it out when we did this rewrite, which would be a huge waste of development time and resources, so now was the perfect time for it.

I'm not sure how quickly all of these story changes will make their way into the game itself - some of them will be very quick changes, like recording a few new lines of dialogue, while others will require a lot of animation work and such, so they might take longer. As one example, we plan on changing the cutscene that happens early on where one of the giant worms attacks the human camp and Birch captures it; currently, that cutscene happens totally off-screen, with Alicia just standing around while you hear the sounds of battle over the communicator. Now though, we're going to rework it to have Alicia teleport back and see the capture happening, which is a lot more animation work, but about a million times more engaging. In general, we're trying to add more life into the game's cutscenes, with more camera movement, more character animations, and more exciting things happening. I'm really excited to see the new story come together, I know you guys are gonna love it!

So that's what I've been focused on these past few weeks. Now that the outline of the story is there, we have the answers to a lot of questions I've been asking myself for years, and putting together the actual script rewrites is coming pretty easily! I expect to have the game's current cutscenes fully rewritten (or at least close to it) by the next biweekly update. Then, Orex's focus will be doing all of the new animations the story rework requires, while our voice actors works their magic bringing the CPE cast to life. I'll be switching back to focusing on the level design tool, so once the story rewrite is done you can expect our development streams to return in full force! Sorry to everyone who looks forward to them, but some of my work just isn't conducive to streams.

Anyway, that's about all I have to talk about this update. I really wish I could get into more of the details, but since Crisis Point's story is rather ~mysterious~ by nature, talking about it too much would ruin the fun, and I don't want that. So for the time being, I'll just say THANK YOU to all of you for being so patient! I know development continues to be a bit on the slow side right now, but once this is all done, we'll be in the perfect place for content to come out hot and fast. I hope you're all looking forward to it, and we'll see you again in the next biweekly update!

Biweekly Update - 5-21-2023

Hey everyone, time for another biweekly update. To be honest, I don't have a very good one here, and I'm sorry about that - things have been stressful in my personal life, and my depression has been flaring up again because of it, so I've been really struggling to keep my work output up.

I've still been picking away at the script rewrites, which didn't go quite as smoothly as I had hoped, but they're making good progress. Since I've been struggling to focus on script writing more than I hoped, I plan on getting back to streams this week, and splitting my time between scriptwriting when the mood strikes me, and working on the level editor when it doesn't. Because of that, I don't plan on having an exact streaming schedule, but you can probably expect streams to start at around 1-2pm Alaska Time.

Aside from me, Orexius has been hard at work doing more cutscene animations. I think I've talked about it before, but as part of the script rewrites, we want to make cutscenes more visually exciting by adding more character animation; even though the rewrite isn't finished yet, we have enough information for him to get started on some of the more important ones, so that's what he's been doing.

Again, I'm really sorry I don't have a better update for y'all. I'm trying to get my depression back under control as fast as I can, and I think streams will help with that - whenever I'm struggling to get work done I always start to feel really useless, and streams/community interaction usually help with that, so fingers crossed that after some work streams, I'll have a much better biweekly update for you next time.

I know I've said it many times before, but it bears repeating how much I appreciate how patient you guys are with us. Slow periods in development always suck, but it means the world to me that you continue to stick with us during them, and it really does brighten my days to know just how much people are looking forward to this game. That's it for me today, thanks for reading, everyone - and here's to a better update next time.