Biweekly Progress Report - 5-25-2026 (Cutscenes "finished", on to the final checklist!)

Hey everyone, time for another CPE progress report! Things have been going pretty well since the last update; this past week was a bit of a struggle because one of our cats had a sudden health issue. My cats are one of the most important things in the world to me, so I was dealing with a lot of anxiety around that. Thankfully our vet was able to eventually figure it out and get him back on the road to recovery, even though it took a few visits and some uncertainty to get there, and he's doing much better now. Aside from that stress, it was a solid two weeks of productivity!

So my main focus, as you probably know, has been finishing all of the new and reworked cutscenes that will be included in v0.49. There's still a number of improvements I want to make to them eventually (like additional visual effects), and Orex is continuing to work on new character animations for them. I'll need to import and script those in before the update comes out, so I hesitate to call them truly finished.. but the vast majority of the work is done and they're all fully watchable now, with proper camera work and music and such, so I'm switching my focus over to the rest of the update - mostly finishing up features I've previously talked about, like filling out Achievements and the AP Shop.

Basically, once we get to this point in the development of an update, I sit down and do some playtesting, writing down a list of issues or incomplete features I find. Once I have enough of a list, I start working my way through it and fixing them, while adding any new ones as I come across them. Eventually the list is finished, or the remaining problems are minor enough to justify a release, and that would normally be when the update comes out. This time is more or less the same, but I'll be going back to the cutscenes to add in all of the animations Orex has been working on first, and after that is when the update will be released! I'm not going to commit to a specific date or anything yet, but my goal is to release the update by the end of June, so fingers crossed we can make that happen.

At the moment there's maybe about ~2 dozen items on the list, with the biggest one being the level design changes needed in the Deep Soil. The 3rd boss fight is being moved a bit; it's still in the same general area, but there's a longer gameplay event associated with it now, and I still need to implement the levels and mechanics related to that. After that it's mostly tying up loose ends from previous work and doing a lot of testing to make sure nothing bad slips through the cracks. There's a lot of changes/additions to save files in this update too, since we're tracking things like achievements now, so I'm trying especially hard to make sure those don't break!

Anyway, I think that's everything I have for today. Sorry it's a short one, but it's pretty much business as usual now as we move into the last stages of work on this update. It's taken a lot longer than I would've liked, but we're finally almost there! This will mark the end of the focus on reworking content - we'll still be improving old stuff as we go, if it's needed, but the story rework is something that really needed to happen before we could work on brand new content. It'll be real nice to start moving forward on the game at last.

As always, thank you all so very much for reading, and I hope you're as excited for v0.49 as I am for it to finally be done! See you again in the next progress report!