Hey everyone, time for another progress report! Things have been getting a lot better on a personal stress/productivity level, since the last report. My general productivity has been pretty dang good, but admittedly, I've been spending a bit more time than I should on learning 3D instead of CPE work - on the daily updates below, pretty much any weekday that I didn't post about CPE, I was working on 3D game dev instead. It's been a lot of fun, and it is certainly important since we're planning on moving fully into 3D games after CPE is finished, buuuut I should still balance it better, sorry about that! For the most part I'm happy to see any kind of productivity, compared to how things were not that long ago where doing even a single day of work could be a struggle, so I'm trying not to be too hard on myself over it - but I do definitely need to improve the balance between CPE/personal projects.
In any case, this is again going to be a fairly short post, as our main focus continues to be the new and altered cutscenes as part of the story rewrite, which I don't want to share too much about because spoilers. Before I get into it any further though, here's our daily updates from the past two weeks:
As you can see, the majority of my effort has been going into cutscene work, both implementation and audio editing. I still need to get a few retakes from our actors, but I finally finished doing the rest of the VO audio editing. I'll be able to focus mostly on actual implementation now, which should lead to some quicker progress.
Cutscene work is overall going well! There's still two new major cutscenes that need to be added, although neither of them is very complex in scope, so I don't expect them to be too time consuming. The biggest time sink will be that I need to make some level design changes to the lower Deep Soil, to accommodate the new story events related to Kara. Aside from the brand new ones though, I've nearly finished all of the reworked cutscenes now; I just started working on the last rework, which is also the most complex cutscene of the update. It might as well be a brand new scene; the previous version was only about ~6-7 lines of dialogue long with very little animation, while the new one is >30 lines and has a bunch of animation and effects work. It'll take a bit more time to implement than your average cutscene, but hopefully it'll be worth it!
One non-cutscene thing I finished doing this week is adding the ability to switch enemy colors in the Gallery; this only applies to the ingame animations, not CGs (which don't support recolors in general). You'll need to encounter each recolored enemy and defeat it to capture them, just like with the base colors - and unfortunately this isn't retroactive, so you'll still have to do this even if you're continuing an old save that has killed them before - but after that you'll be able to switch colors freely while in the gallery. Not a huge feature, but I know some people have been asking for it, so here it is!
Before I finish up the post, I do apologize for the stream situation lately; I was starting to have a hard time doing them again (not sure if it's anxiety or stress or what), but I managed to push through that last Wednesday and we had a stream that went pretty well, so I'm optimistic about actually getting back to doing 2 a week, likely on Wednesday/Friday.
Since there hasn't been a lot of visuals to show off lately, I'll include a recording of the new Kara introduction scene in the next progress report, so you'll have at least something to look at, but I don't think the next update will take TOO much longer. There's a bunch of misc work I still need to do before it's ready for release, but the cutscenes are the biggest thing. Once those are done, I'm hopeful that the update release won't be far behind.
Alright, I think that's all I have for today. As always, thank you so very much for reading, and we'll see you again soon with the next progress report!