Progress Report 1-29-2026 (Achievements Shop, Alraune reworks/upgrades, new H-scene preview, upcoming stream schedule, and a promise)
Hey everyone; this post is very overdue, and I'm sorry about that! The start of the year has not been overly kind to me, mentally, and I've been having trouble pulling myself out of that funk. Progress has still been happening, just slower than I'd like.
This next paragraph is going to be about personal stuff, so if you're not interested in that, feel free to skip over.
I've been doing a lot of thinking about my situation lately, and.. man, I'm beyond frustrated with myself. So many of the things holding me back are thoughts like "you can't do it", "you've already failed", and the like - and the more I ruminate on those, the more I realize how bullshit they are. Even if I'm failing pretty hard lately, I've already proven I can make games, haven't I? Maybe not at a pace even remotely resembling anything reasonable, but I have the skill and knowledge to do it, or else I wouldn't have gotten this far. As for failing.. I think the only way to truly do that would be to give up on the project entirely, which - to be extremely clear - isn't happening. I've spent too much of my life on CPE to ever give it up, even if the burnout is very real. On top of it all, all of you lovely people have continued following and supporting this project, and you wouldn't have done that if you didn't have some amount of faith in our work. So when I put everything together, I'm just frustrated with myself for letting the negativity win so consistently. I'm not going to say everything is going to be different from today onward, mental health is a constant battle and there will always be bad days, but I am making the promise that I'm done letting that part of my brain rule over me uncontested. I'm going to fight it tooth and nail; the only way to reach that finish line is to keep moving forward, and I don't want to let fear of failure keep me from getting there.
All that said, talk is cheap, so I'm starting the comeback with two major changes to help me stay on track.
First, we'll be returning to dev streams! Starting next week, me and Orex will be live Mon/Wed/Fri, starting at around 12 pm (Noon) AKST; no specific duration, but if memory serves, we used to usually go between 3-4 hours on average. You can follow me on Picarto or join our Discord to get notified when we go live; and even if you can't make it, the last handful of streams are automatically saved as VODs, so you can still check out what we're working on if you want.
Second, I'm going to be returning to biweekly (as in, every other week) update posts. I keep falling into the same trap over and over of putting off update posts until I feel guilty about it, making me want to put extra effort into the post, which makes me put off doing it more, etc etc.. I wanted to try doing fewer updates in an effort to shake things up for me, but I also need to acknowledge when those attempts don't work, and i don't think this one was doing me any favors. So, back to biweekly posts we go.
Between that and the streams, I'm more or less trying to force myself into a more consistent schedule. CPE really should be finished by now, there's no denying that. Development has taken an unreasonable amount of time, and that's entirely on me. At the same time, I can't wake up tomorrow and have the game be magically finished - so the healthiest option for me and the game is to just make progress steady again, and put everything I have into smoothing out this constant rollercoaster I've been on. 2025 really pushed me down hard, with the betrayal of what I thought was one of my closest friends, a cancer scare among other health issues, and lots of personal strife, but despite the state of the wider world only getting worse and worse, a lot of things in my personal life have actually calmed down. I think the stress and pressure I feel right now is almost entirely being caused by my own lack of momentum. It's a difficult hole to dig myself out of, as evidenced by the last several years, but the gentle way out hasn't been working, so it's time to try something new.
Okay! With all of that done and said, this post isn't specifically about personal stuff, so let's get to the actual update part of the post.
For starters, here are the daily updates from our Discord since the last update post, in album link format this time so the main post isn't so cluttered.
The tl;dr is that our work lately has been mostly focused on two specific things; the Alraune and Poison Alraune reworks, and Achievements/the Achievement Shop, both of which are just about done.
So let's start with the Alraune updates! Orex still has some Alraune gameplay animations to finish, but mechanically they've been fully updated, and are much more interesting to fight. I have a bunch of gifs of their new abilities coming up, but some of them do have WIP/incomplete animations, so please excuse any oddities! (They're also in censored mode due to this being a public post; don't worry, their full package is still intact ingame)
The first change is that instead of standing around in the world waiting for you, some Alraune will spawn from a flower like so:
Which looks pretty rad, thanks to Orex's fantastic (albeit incomplete) animation work, but more importantly, the flower they spawn from becomes a collision object, blocking your path forward until you manage to defeat the Alraune that the flower belongs to..
..after which the flower will dissolve, allowing you to continue forward. Not every Alraune will spawn from a flower, some are still just standing around, but this allows me to use Alraune as a roadblock in level design, making them (and other enemies near them) harder to ignore and run past. (I plan on applying a similar dissolving effect to Alraune enemies when they're defeated, too, just haven't gotten around to that yet.)
Aside from that, the Alraune has a few new attacks, in addition to her leaf throws:
First off, her leaf throws no longer leave behind libido spores; instead, her libido effects have been rolled into a new attack where she blows a kiss (it's the heart gif up above, the actual attack animation hasn't been implemented yet) which causes a large amount of libido buildup if it hits Alicia. These changes, as well as the other attack which is a spiked vine that spawns directly under Alicia, were made in an effort to make Alraune more interesting to fight, but also to reduce their area domination in combat, so that now I can put more than 1 of them in a single combat encounter! There already is one area where you can encounter 2 at a time, but I've been mostly avoiding doing that, since their only attack was their leaf throw, which covers a huge area and leaves behind long-lasting spores. Fighting more than 1 at a time was kind of unfair, but now I can put multiple of them together without it being overwhelming. Which is very important, because..
..well, this is the part where I WOULD post a .gif preview of the upcoming Alraune Duo H-scene, but this is a public post and I have to keep it SFW. I might already be pushing it with the censored Alraune gifs, but hopefully that'll be fine. Anyway, I'll be posting a followup Patron-only post after this one with a proper gif preview of what is now the longest and most complex H-scene in the game. I know a lot of you have been asking for it, so I hope you're hyped!
Aside from the regular Alraune, the Poison Alraune is also being updated, and their abilities are now unique, more powerful variations on what the regular Alraune can do. I still have a bit more work to do on their mechanics, so I only have two of their attacks to show off right now, but they have a few more tricks up their sleeve in addition to these, and I'll share those in the future.
Moving on from the Alraune for now, it's achievements time!
I've already talked about the Achievements menu quite a bit, so I won't go into it too much right now, I just wanted to post a gif of the screen to show some of the animations and extra detail that's been added since the last time. I put a lot more effort into polishing this menu than any of the other ones in the game, and I want to update other menus later on to have more little animated bits and details like this one.
(Ignore the fact that the story achievements weren't unlocked in order here, just dev debug stuff :^)
Next up is the Achievements Shop menu.
When you earn achievements in CPE, you might get a direct reward like an Alicia color palette, or you might get AP. AP is a currency that can only be gained from achievements, and this is the menu where you'll be able to spend AP on things like color palettes and cheats. The gif above doesn't show it, but some AP Shop items will be locked behind other achievements, such as the BE Size Swap cheat; first you need to unlock it in the shop by getting a specific achievement, then you'll need to spend AP from other achievements to buy it before you can use it. Some cheats will be significantly cheaty-er than others and may prevent you from unlocking some achievements (particularly difficult ones), but those will be plainly labeled so there's no guesswork involved.
For the time being, toggleable cheats (like BE Size Swap) can be toggled on and off by going back to the Achievements menu and clicking on them after they've been purchased, so don't worry about them being permanent or anything.
Now, to be honest, I'm REALLY not happy with the way this menu looks. Next to the Achievements menu, the AP Shop menu feels kind of hideous and is wasting a lot of space. I've been really struggling with the design of it for a while though, and I don't want it to hold up the rest of the update, so now that it's at least functional I'm putting it down until a future update.
The list is pretty barren right now, but there will be more purchases available once the update comes out, I just haven't implemented many of them yet - I've been focused on the visuals and save file integration of AP and Achievements. Total AP earned and Achievements unlocked are shared between save files, but AP Shop purchases are not; plus I wanted to make sure that I can easily change achievement rewards/AP Shop prices in future updates without breaking existing savegames. Because of all that, the technical implementation was a lot more complicated than usual, but all of that is functioning properly now, so I just need to populate the menus with more achievements to unlock and stuff to purchase.
Okay, I thiiink that's finally about it for this update! A few tl;dr/reminders, there will be a preview of the Alraune Duo H-scene in a Patron-only post after this one (it'll also be visible free on our Discord, just have to keep public posts SFW). Also, me and Orex are going to be hosting devstreams again, starting next week - the plan is Mon/Wed/Fri at 12 pm (Noon) AKST. You can follow us on Picarto here, so I hope to see you there!
As always, thank you all so much for reading. I'm looking forward to streaming and making my dev progress more consistent, and I hope you guys choose to stick around while we settle into the new rhythm. Hope to see you at the streams, but if not, we'll see you again in ~2 weeks with the next update post!
Comments (7)
Hello, we used to talk pretty frequently on ULMF like... a decade ago. I doubt you remember me, but my profile picture was a charming picture of a cat vomiting if I recall lol. Anyway you have no reason to think I know enough about you to extrapolate in the way I'm about to. Feel free to assume I'm crazy, but I'd prefer if you just took my word for it that I've seen enough of your writing, game design, and personality to conjecture the following: I think you are a lot like me. I think you, like me, have developed one of the most abstract, tenacious, and impenetrable defense mechanisms a person can: I think you use thought to avoid suffering. I think you rely on your giant brain to provide you with an endless stream of plausible ideas, considerations, hunches, hypotheses, things to research, topics to bring up with loved ones, and anything else it can to achieve what is subconsciously your true objective: to make your problems so complicated and so specific that you become fully immune to outside influence. No one can change your perspective. No one can even try, because they don't have enough information to make a credible assessment of your problems. I accidentally became middle-aged because I (unknowingly) used this same strategy. I spent ten years talking, talking, talking to therapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and neurologists. I read dozens of books, meditated with strangers, and contacted famous authors. None of them said anything I hadn't heard yet, and it made me feel hopeless. I believe, as absurd as it sounds, that was my goal: to be hopeless. Being doomed is liberating. People stopped calling me lazy and weak, and started to see me as a brooding anti-hero instead. "Look at how much he's suffering - how could anyone be so petty as to think he isn't trying to change?" I wasn't, and I don't think you are either. I think you have engineered the same bizarre and invincible psychological construct that I did, and you're doing it for the same reason I did: I was afraid to have wasted ten years of my life grappling with a problem that turned out to be as straightforward as any teenage girl's angsty myspace post. I wanted it to be overwhelmingly difficult, special, and unsolvable so nobody would judge me for it (and consequently, so I could stop judging myself for it). I didn't want to have to explain ten years of miserable stagnancy with "eh I realized I was just lonely. I asked my coworker out, got turned down, made me realize that's all it was. I'm fine now." I think you are dealing with the same awful cocktail of ennui, insecurity, fear of change, and a dozen other things that everybody else does, but you've used your giant brain to juice it up and make it sound bigger than it is. That's it. That's all. That's the end of the story, and you fix it the same way everybody else does: you exercise, maintain a healthy diet, try new things, challenge yourself, etc. The superficial nonsense people told you the first time you ever told someone you were sad about this. That was the answer. It's not superficial. That's why everybody says the same fucking things: those really are the fucking answers. Moreover they are the ONLY answers. They work every single time, for every single person, since the dawn of humanity with absolutely zero exceptions. They can work for you, too. Like I said at the beginning of this long and increasingly embarrassing essay, I am totally fine posting this knowing you are overwhelmingly more likely to think I'm dumb, wrong, or crazy than you are to take my words to heart. I'm not. Nobody writes shit like this insincerely. Posting this will be humiliating. I'm doing it anyway. That is how confident I am that you are like me. You and your life aren't as complicated as you think or want them to be. You're just imaginative and resourceful enough to have constructed an invincible suit of armor for yourself to die in. You could be happy a few weeks from now if you chose to be. Just do all the dumb shit everybody told you to do from day 1. If you decide that your problems are simple, they don't become simple. When you decide they are simple, they ARE simple. It took me ten years to identify the distinction between them, and I am gambling that spending an hour of my workday gushing to a random guy because we like the same bizarre pornography might nudge you into avoiding the same fate. That, or you'll make fun of me and I'll feel ridiculous. PS. Make a dog that does an anal knot animation pls. This was all I was going to type originally lol.
You got this. The simple fact is you haven't stopped.
I also suffer from depression for over 20 years, and I can assure you that these negative thoughts are not yours; they are symptoms of an illness. If you suffered from a heart condition, you would feel chest pains. In our case, they are bad thoughts, something to be fought. I have been following your work closely. I have played dozens of games on this platform, and yours is undoubtedly the best I have ever played. I was impressed by the quality; it looks like the work of a large company with dozens of people. You are an inspiration to me. Don't blame yourself for going slowly; slow is better than standing still. Millions of people can't do a fraction of what you have done.
Truly is good to see you back at it. Your comment that CPE should be done by now hits hard even for me, but better late than never. Actually just picked up playing an old demo earlier today and it felt bittersweet. Wishing you best of luck not just with your game but your irl struggles.
There is no time like the present to seek personal improvement! Like mr Lebœuf one said: Just do it! I think if you get going you’ll be quite satisfied with yourself. Just posting this update must feel quite good. Keep up the schedule and soon enough you’ll be back on track. I’ve kept being a Patreon all these years cause I believe in you, your talent and potential. No trying just do it ! <3 <3
What a great update! At times I was worried about when you'd post again (because I don't keep an eye on Discord). But I wanted to say thank you. In case no one has told you this in a while, I wanted you to know that your work and abilities are incredible, and whether the steps are small or large, you're making progress. I'm going through the same thing with my own projects. I can empathize with your feelings. We can't do anything to make you feel better, but if there were a button that could make you feel better instantly, I'd press it without hesitation. Take good care of yourself, Anon42.
You're incredibly kind, thank you so much ;v; I hope you can find success in battling your own demons, too - I'll be rooting for you!