Progress Report 5-27-2025 (Nearly done, update still coming soon I swear!)

Hey everyone. May has come and is nearly gone as of this post, and the update unfortunately still isn't out, though not for a lack of trying! There's a few reasons for it, but before I get into the specifics, lemme just get the daily updates out of the way so you can see what me and Orex have been doing for the past month:

So I think I may have mentioned this before, but because of the long gap between updates and my extremely rocky mental health during that period, a lot of the work that I've done since v0.47 was left partially unfinished. This past month has involved a lot of playtesting and finding all of those spots, so I could finish them up before getting the update out, and cleaning up my mess has been a lot more work than usually goes into an update release. The Hoverjets rework especially had so many unfinished bits it took me several work days to get it mostly fixed up, and there's still a few stubborn issues I'm having trouble getting rid of.

In general May was a bit of tough month for me due to some personal stuff, so I was working a bit slower than last month in the first few weeks, though I've mostly broken out of that funk now. The main reason it's taking so long is just that it's been the hottest of minutes since the last update came out, and I forgot how much work goes into polishing up a release for the public. There's a BIG difference in effort when I'm just developing and testing things internally, compared to the polish and stability needed for a demo release, and I'm honestly a bit out of practice with that part of development.

The update is REALLY close to being ready for release now, though; I recently asked a friend who has a knack for breaking games to run through the entire update (she decided to do a 100% run, so it was quite thorough), and almost all of the issues we found during that test have been fixed. Probably ended up being somewhere around 50 bugfixes, and only a handful of them were gamebreaking, so the update was generally more stable than I was expecting. Now there's just a few things left to finish up, like a few more missing assets in the intro cutscene, and doing a bit more testing to make sure all of my fixes didn't cause more issues.

In any case, my current estimate for the update release is sometime during the first week of June; I underestimated the amount of work left when I said something similar a month ago, but this time I'm a LOT more confident in it. Sorry that y'all have had to wait even longer, but I want to make sure the update is actually worth playing, and I'm still getting back in the swing of regular development after being effectively on hiatus for so long!

Alright, that's enough out of me for today. There's no doubt in my mind that my next update post will be the release of v0.48, so I hope you're excited for it despite the extended wait! Thanks for reading and for gracing me and the CPE team with your infinite patience; we'll see you again very soon, hopefully within the next week or so, with the release of v0.48!