Happy New Year! Moving forward + v0.47 plans

Hello everybody, and welcome to the first CPE development update of 2024!

2023 was, uh.. not a great year for us, and that statement is already in the running for "biggest understatement of 2024". I'm pretty ashamed of how bad my productivity was last year, but despite my horrible CPE work output, I did do a LOT of work on myself and my mental health last year. I'm proud of that much, and I'm really starting to reap the benefits of it. I've been getting into more hobbies, spending more time working, and generally I'm just in a much better place now than I was for.. pretty much the entirety of last year.

With all that said, I'm going to wipe the slate clean here and now. Instead of dwelling on how poorly 2023 went, I plan to take 2024 as an opportunity to regroup and focus on what matters: making CPE the best game it can be. Consider this my last apology for it: I'm sorry 2023 went so poorly, both to my team and all of you lovely folks reading and supporting. I dropped the ball hard, but I've also been dwelling way too much on those failures, and I think I'm finally ready to shrug off all that baggage, pick up the pieces, and start moving forward in earnest again. Thank you all so damn much for sticking by us, through all the crappy dev logs and complete lack of update releases.

So, with all that said, it's time to get into the update proper! I don't really have anything to talk about from the last few weeks of development; there were holiday celebrations, and I also got sick, so I lost a bit of time there. I did get a lot of work done, but it was all writing related, so nothing I can really talk about or show off unfortunately. Oh, I DID finally start learning how to draw properly though, so once I get some more experience in I should hopefully be able to help out more on the art side of CPE.

Since I don't have too much to talk about from the last few weeks, I think it's time to look at the next CPE update, and what exactly our plans are for it!

        Crisis Point: Extinction v0.47 plans
-All cutscenes updated with camera movement and zooms
-All cutscenes added to Gallery
-Updated HUD design
-Smooth zoom during H-scenes
-Gun design and colors change based on equipped chips
-New trigger type
-Alicia recoloring

I don't think I ever actually released a list of plans for v0.47, so let's fix that now. The list speaks for itself for the most part, but as a brief overview: I plan on updating all of the cutscenes currently in the game, even the ones that will be changing later on, to utilize the new camera controls that I implemented recently. The story itself won't be changing yet, but I'll detail why that is later in the post. We'll be updating the game's HUD (Alicia's healthbar and such) to match the new UI style; the zoom used during H-scenes has been improved to smoothly zoom in and out instead of being instant, which I can also use during cutscenes; Alicia's blaster will change colors, and shape, based on what Blaster and Trigger chips you have equipped, and we're adding another Trigger type to go with it.

Lastly, and probably the most exciting, we're going to be officially implementing recolors for Alicia! For the record, recolors will ONLY apply to sprites, not CGs - but they'll apply to all of Alicia's ingame sprites, including cutscenes and H-scenes. Eventually, I plan on having unlockable color palettes that you can earn ingame through things like achievements, but I'm also experimenting with the possibility of custom palettes as well. I'll have more information on the recoloring in future updates; we've done some initial testing to make sure it's possible, but it's still in the early stages.

The last thing I want to note is that, despite all the work we've been putting into the story rewrite for CPE, it's going to be a bit longer before the new story is implemented, and there are a few reasons for that. Even though a lot of the basic story beats are staying the same, the changes are big enough that, if we replaced it bit by bit, the story would become disjointed and hard to understand - so all of the story changes basically need to happen at the same time. While that's a lot of work in general, with how much content is already in the game, it's not so much that it can't be done in a single update; the bigger problem is that the amount of dialogue that needs new voice recordings is going to be rather expensive, and with our Patreon funding being (very understandably) lower, I just can't afford all of it at once. I don't want to leave the game mostly un-voiced just to implement the new story sooner, so over the next few months, we'll be commissioning as much voice acting as we can afford, while working on the story in the background. Once it's all ready, we'll add in all the story changes at once.

The other negative of this, though, is that we also can't really add NEW story, which means new content would be difficult for us to do. For the time being, we're going to mostly focus on adding new features, updating old level designs, laying the groundwork for future content, and fleshing out existing content rather than adding new areas to explore with new story. That also means that the new biome I talked about a while ago isn't actually going to be in v0.47 like I previously stated; we're still actively working on new areas, but none of it can be fully implemented into the game proper without the story overhaul. Because of that, the next one or two update releases aren't going to have a ton of NEW stuff, but we'll try to add in some fun features like the recolors to make up for it!

Alright, I think that about wraps it up for today. 2023 may have been a really rough year for me, but I'm honestly feeling pretty pumped right now. I'm ready to kick 2024's ass, it's gonna be a hell of a year for us and I can't wait to share some of the stuff we have cooking with you all!

Much love to all of you out there reading this; I wouldn't still be here if it weren't for you, so thank you for your endless support and love. Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year to each and every one of you beautiful people! Let's start 2024 off strong!

-Anon42