Weekly Update - 4-19-2020 (Reducing v0.39's scope, general update)

Hey everyone. Apologies if anyone hoped this would be a great update, but it's gonna be a bit of a bummer. There's less than 2 weeks left in the month, and I'm staring down the barrel of a theoretical gun made up of aaaalll the missing assets needed for v0.39 as it was originally planned, and nowhere near enough time to finish all of them. On top of that, I've been dealing with a lot of aches and pains lately, probably stress-fueled, and some pretty bad burnout.

This has been a really intense development cycle; introducing an entire new area that had almost no assets ready yet, a new enemy, several new H-scenes, a large amount of new rooms to explore (the new area was going to have about as many places as the entire current Catacombs does, and the development of the Catacombs was split across multiple updates), accessibility features, WELL over a hundred new voice lines spread across several cutscenes and conversations in an attempt to catch the game's story up to where our level design has already reached.. It's been an astronomical amount of work, and despite working more and harder than I ever have since CPE started, it just hasn't been enough. I truly don't have the energy left in me to delay the update's release and keep crunching like this for another few weeks, so at this point, for the sake of my mental and physical health, I'm pretty much left with no option other than to reduce the scope of the update, and push some things back that I wanted to be in this one. I understand this is disappointing, and I'm very sorry for it. I'm still going to try and get this update out before the month ends, but it will most likely be missing these things:

-About half of the planned rooms in the new area
-Some optimization work I wanted to do in the new area (there's one VERY large room in the new area that might end up lagging a bit on weaker computers, sorry, I'll be optimizing that room when I can)
-Most of the new cutscenes and conversations (a lot of them were tied to the places in the new area that I won't be completing)
-The Torguis CG
-The new enemy's H-scene (there will still be the regular Kertalus H-scene, and probably a cutscene H-animation (not a full scene, just a loop))
-Some background details and polish in the new area
-Some animations and graphics will be WIP, instead of complete, polished assets

I'm really sorry for anyone disappointed by this. I know I am, I wanted v0.39 to be the biggest update in the history of CPE's development. There will still be a decent amount of stuff to see in here, it's not going to be a pitiful update or anything, it's just not going to be monstrous like I wanted it to be.

As far as what I got done this week, I've just been plugging away at the things I mentioned in last week's update, and there's not really anything visual to show off I'm afraid. I got one of the new cutscenes and some new conversations implemented this week, finished up the new enemy's functionality (though his animations are still WIP), implemented the "Story" difficulty level (for a total of 4 difficulties) where the game is much, much easier than our previous easiest difficulty, did some more level design and polish, as well as some other stuff. Sorry I haven't been streaming, I'm hoping to pick it up again after v0.39 is complete and I'm in a better mental state.

Well, I guess that's all I really have to say this week. Just a reminder though, you'll still get the update when it comes out if you unpledge, even if the update doesn't come out until May, so don't feel obligated to stay pledged if you don't want to. Anyway, I'll see you all in next week's update.