Biweekly Progress Report - 3-2-2026 (Shortcut ladders, more enemy color palettes, stream schedule update)

Hey everyone. This post is a few days later than I would've liked, mostly thanks to the unwelcome return of my sleep problems! Hooray! Over the past few weeks my sleep has been getting steadily worse, at one point getting all the way down to only ~3-4 hours a night. I was fine dealing with it for a bit, but the exhaustion buildup really caught up to me last week and brought things to a screeching halt. Because of that, and the generally spoiler-y work I've been doing, there's a lot less for me to talk about with this progress report, but we're still here anyway - no more radio silence for months at a time.

To start, here are the daily updates from the past ~2 weeks:

Let's go over the few visual things I do have to show off.

First off is an update to ladders; I decided to go ahead with implementing them in the level design for v0.49 after all, and to that end I've added in a shortcut ladder mechanism, ala Dark Souls. Here's how shortcut ladders work currently:

Before activation, the ladder will be folded up and unclimbable. Once you reach the nearby switch and interact with it, a ladder will fall down to act as a shortcut. These shortcut ladders will stay unlocked permanently once you flip their switch, so I'll be able to put them in a bunch of locations like this to help reduce backtracking.

Aside from shortcut ladders, I've also decided to do a whole set of enemy-based color palettes for Alicia, and here's a preview of another one of those:

I'll have at least a few more color palettes ready for v0.49; I spent a day recently setting up a better dev environment for creating these color palettes, and it's already made the job SO much easier and more enjoyable. Eventually we'll have a proper ingame color palette creator, since I want to support custom palettes (probably tied to a difficult achievement), but that won't be for a while yet.

Aside from the visual stuff, there is one more big thing - we finally found and hired a new VA for Kara! This was one of the major things holding us back from working on the rest of the story rework, so now that we have that position taken care of, we've started working on cutscenes again in earnest. The first reworked Kara cutscene is nearly finished now, just need to insert voicelines and get a few more edits to the art Orex made for the scene, and I'm already well into work on her second scene as well. I won't spoil anything now, but Kara's relationship to Alicia is pretty much the same as it was before, just much more fleshed out. Her cutscenes all play out very differently so we're basically redoing them all from scratch; between that and the several brand new cutscenes involving her, there's quite a bit of work to do, but it'll be our main focus for the near future. On a somewhat related note, there's also a new gameplay mechanic being added as part of the story, but I'll talk details on that at a later date.

Before I wrap up, a quick update on our streaming schedule. I took a good amount of time off last week to try and rest, with mixed results. I'm doing a bit better this week, but my sleep is still pretty messed up, so in the immediate future I've decided to switch up my streaming schedule a bit. Because of how tired I've been, I'm falling behind on some of the non-stream work I have on my list (like this progress report for example), so I'm going to go down to a guaranteed 2 streams a week, with the goal of still doing 3 if I'm feeling up to it. I'm going to try and see my doctor soon about the sleep problems, but she's usually booked up well in advance, so it'll probably be a bit before I can get in.

In any case, that's all I have to talk about for this progress report. The next few reports will probably be on the slimmer side as well, thanks to all the spoilery work we're doing; the second half of this story rewrite is much more substantial than the first half was, though, so there will be a lot of new story to see when v0.49 comes out! And once this is done, we'll finally be able to start pushing forward on BRAND NEW content again, and I'm just as excited for that as I'm sure the rest of you are. As always, thanks for reading, and we'll see you again in two weeks!