Biweekly Progress Report - 5-11-2026 (Cutscenes are nearly done!)

Hey everyone, and welcome to another CPE progress report! These past two weeks, perhaps unsurprisingly, the focus was all about cutscenes, so it's not gonna be a super long update. The good news is, they're nearly done - or at least my part of the work almost is! There's still a lot of animation work for Orex to get through, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Like always, let's start off with our daily updates from the past two weeks, and then we'll get into details.

So like I said, cutscenes have continued to be our main focus, and my part of the work has nearly reached the "good enough" phase; as in, the cutscenes are nearly all fully watchable and don't have any jarring issues. There will always be more polish and effects work that can be done for cutscenes, and I expect to improve pretty much all of them over time, but their core implementation and basic things like camera, music, and character motions are (almost) all in place.

There's a lot of important animations that Orex is still working on, and he'll most likely continue to do so even after the update comes out; the list of bespoke animations is a lot longer than previous cutscenes, so it's a big workload and not all of them will make it into this update, but hopefully the added animation fidelity pays off!

I don't want to show off too much of the cutscene work we've been doing, to avoid spoilers, but we wanted to share something at least, so embedded at the top of the post you can watch the entirety of Kara's new introduction cutscene. She enters the story much sooner now (very shortly after entering the Deep Soil for the first time), and while she and Alicia still share the same general backstory as before, everything related to Kara and her place in the story is where the majority of the story rewrite effort went. I'm looking forward to seeing everybody's thoughts and theories when they get their hands on v0.49!

I still have a lot of non-cutscene work to do before the update is ready for a release, so just to be clear, it's not coming out in a week or anything like that - but it should be soon! We still need a little bit more time to cook; v0.49 is one of the biggest updates the game has ever received, so while I do apologize for the length of time it's taking, I think it'll be worth it - and it'll leave us in a great position to finally start working on brand new story content again, which is extra exciting.

Alright, I think that's about it for me today! Sorry again it's a bit of a short update, but we're really locked in on cutscenes atm so there's not a ton of specifics to talk about. I expect to finish the core implementation of cutscenes this week, and from there I'll be doing a full pass over the rest of the game to figure out what's really left to do before v0.49 can release, so I should hopefully have more to talk about in the next progress report. As always, thank you very much for reading, and we'll see you again in another two weeks!

CPE - Kara introduction cutscene preview (YouTube)