Another status update

Hey everyone, it's back to Anon as usual this week. Thanks to Puffernutter for taking over last week when I didn't have the energy.

So, as you're all aware after last week's update, I'm on a new medication right now and it's been kicking my ass. The ass beating continued this week, though it's been better and better every day, and I'm approaching normalcy now. Because of it, along with everything else going on this week, I didn't have a "full" work week so to speak, but I did manage to get things moving, both with work and with medical stuff.

First off, work. There's not too much to talk about; since I was still pretty low energy this week, I took it easy and worked on the level editor, as well as some programming ideas I've been wanting to try out. One of those isn't quite done, but so far has worked out very nicely, and I should be able to implement a new special effect into the game soon that I've always wanted to be able to do. I'm super excited to share that one with you guys in the near future, once it's complete. The level editor is coming together slowly but surely; Puffernutter is going to do some visual mockups for the editor to give me a style to build off of as well, so that it doesn't look completely hideous when I'm eventually streaming level design.

There's still a LOT of work to be done for the level editor, and I had a kind of paralysis about it earlier in the week - with so many different things that need to be worked on, it was difficult to figure out what to start with, if that makes sense. To combat that, I started a todo list split into smaller tasks, like I do with the main game of CPE. I didn't realize how necessary todo lists were to my own productivity before, but working on the editor made me realize that, and it should allow me to be more productive in the future. In general I get overwhelmed very quickly when it feels like there's too much to do/too much going on (we can thank ADHD for that too), and todo lists prevent me from getting overwhelmed by the amount of work ahead of me so I can just focus on one small thing at a time.

I wish I had done more work this week, but the good news is that things are moving forward a lot on the medical side. Now that I have insurance, I finally made an appointment with a heart doctor for mid-February (the earliest they had an opening), so I'll finally be able to start looking into why my heart rate is so high. With any luck, it'll just be that I'm out of shape and nothing more serious, but we'll be able to find out soon. I technically don't have a therapy appointment scheduled yet, but I'll be scheduling one on Monday; I've picked out where I want to get therapy from, and I'm going to fill out their online application today after finishing this post - I tried to fill it out several days ago, even got to the very end of their very-long questionnaire.. but then accidentally hit the back button on my phone which reset everything :' )

I also saw my general doc this week about the headaches and leg pains that have been going on for years, and after going over my specific symptoms with her, the good news is that I don't really tick off any of the symptoms that would be very concerning. It's likely that my aches and pains are just being out of shape and having terrible posture, and nothing more sinister, but she gave me a prescription painkiller to help with the REALLY bad days, and gave me a few tasks to work on to try and improve them. I'm also starting to take my anxiety more seriously, after realizing that phone calls are the #1 thing preventing me from seeking help. I get such bad phone anxiety that I'm more likely to not answer any calls I get, even if I know who they're from, and making a phone call myself is like pulling teeth. I'm slowly getting more used to it by just forcing myself to do it, and that'll hopefully be another thing my eventual therapist can help with.

I'm still not used to having a lot of appointments and such, and I'd be lying if I said it didn't slow me down and overwhelm me sometimes. Everyone else on the team is working hard while I get myself sorted, though; Puffernutter especially has been doing a lot for CPE behind the scenes, I don't want to share any of it yet but there's some very exciting background art updates coming in the future. We also created a new $11k goal for the CPE Patreon to bring Puffernutter on to the team full time; to put it lightly, she's absolutely sick of her dayjob, so after looking at our finances we decided that's a number we'd be comfortable with supporting both of us as well as Orexius. Living under one roof helps, since we only have one rent bill to pay.

So before I wrap up this post, in the interest of full disclosure, it's very unlikely that CPE v0.46 will come out by late February as I had hoped. It's more likely to be late March, thanks to the things slowing me down throughout January (and likely into the future as well). As always, please remember that if you pledged at the $10+ tier during v0.46's development (aka since the start of 2022), you WILL get the update when it comes out, even if you unpledge - so if the update taking longer bothers you, you can safely unpledge and you will still get it when it comes out.

That's all I have for you this week. Sorry it's not more interesting, but next week should be at least a little better since I'm feeling more normal now. Anyway, thank you very much for reading! We'll see you again in next week's update.