Biweekly Progress Report - 4-13-2026 (Steady as she goes, lots of audio/cutscene work)
Hey everyone, time for another progress report! Today's is a bit of a weird one; the last two weeks didn't go the best ever, lots of worrying over the state of the world, but I've also been picking up momentum, especially in the past ~5 days or so.
For starters, the antidepressant situation is looking good so far! The withdrawal effects have largely faded and I'm feeling fairly steady now, at least when I'm not busy paying attention to the rapidly declining state of things. I'm not about to get into politics here, but I don't think it's unreasonable to say that we've all been feeling off lately, and I'm no exception. Some of the.. events.. from the past two weeks fucked me up pretty hard, but I've been trying to shake it off and put more of my focus into creativity. Largely that means I've been working on personal projects more (getting back into learning 3D game dev especially, which has been a LOT of fun (and only occasionally very frustrating)), as a way to blow off steam, but my CPE productivity has been getting better again as well.
That said, I still don't really have anything visual to show off this week, sorry! That will probably continue to be the case, since we're trying to focus all of our efforts on the stuff that NEEDS to happen before v0.49 comes out, and that mostly boils down to lots and lots of cutscene work, for both me and Orex. Speaking of which, before I babble on any further, here are our daily updates from the past two weeks:
So yeah, not great on my end, but getting better. I did a lot more personal project work than usual these past two weeks, but for CPE I was really focused on audio editing work in particular, just getting all of the voice acting work ready for use ingame. Lemme tell you, I love our voice actors so much - there's so much talent and skill on display and I have so much respect for how hard they all work to bring our characters to life. CPE really wouldn't be the same without them.
In addition to the general cutscene VO work, I finally did something I've been meaning to do for ages, and added a radio-styled filter effect to all of the voices that play over comms during dialogue. It seems minor, but I'm personally a huge fan of the change, makes those conversations feel a lot more grounded in-world if that makes sense. I debated over it for a while, it would make sense for comms audio quality to be nearly flawless with space-age technology, but after I tried implementing it on one conversation as a test, I just really liked how it pulled things together, so I did the rest right away.
I also spent some time just reviewing our goals for v0.49 and zeroing in on what we need to get done before we can release it; there's a LOT of bespoke animation work for the new and altered cutscenes in v0.49, enough that Orex definitely won't be able to finish it all before everything else about the update is ready, so now he's armed with an organized v0.49 Animations Priorities List™ to make sure the work goes where it's needed most. Even if some smaller ones have to wait until next update, it won't hamper the scenes much.
Speaking of, as of now there's still two brand new major cutscenes and an accompanying gameplay section that need to be added, which is by far the biggest remaining chunk of work. In addition to that there's 2 existing cutscenes with significantly changed/updated scripts, but those will still be a lot less work since we already have a framework to alter. After that there's plenty of smaller things, like populating the achievements list and AP shop with stuff to unlock, but I'm feeling pretty optimistic about getting everything wrapped up in a reasonable timeframe, if I can keep the momentum up.
Before I finish up here, apologies to anyone waiting for more streams! I haven't really been doing them much, since I just wasn't in a good mental place for much of these past two weeks - largely thanks to a certain "president". I don't want to use world events as an excuse, but fuck, man, it's really hard to not get dragged down by all of it lately. At the very least, I've been trying to take care of non-stream work like audio editing during that time, so I'll have lots of work ready to do on streams when I am feeling up to it.
Alright, I think that's about all I have to talk about with this update. v0.49 is progressing slowly but surely, and even though it still needs a bit of time in the oven, I can't wait to get it into your hands. I'm going to try to get back to at least 2 streams a week, so we can get things properly back on track, so keep an eye out for that if you want to watch 'em, probably on Wednesday and Friday. In the meantime, thank you all so very much for reading, and we'll see you again with the next progress report in about two weeks!