v0.49 delay; apologies, and the plan going forward (Biweekly Progress Report, 6-22-2026)

Hey everyone. I won't beat around the bush; v0.49 is being delayed, and at the moment I'm not entirely sure by how much. The tl;dr is that the animations needed for the cutscenes in v0.49 are just nowhere near finished, which leaves those cutscenes - which are supposed to be one of the biggest features of the update - incomplete and not as satisfying to watch as they should be. As such, especially with how long you've all had to wait for v0.49, I'm not really happy releasing the update in its current state.

I'm gonna go ahead and get the Daily Updates out of the way here, then we'll discuss details on the delay, why it's happening, and what we're doing to improve things going forward.

When I made the announcement that v0.49 was slated for release by the end of June, I did it without double checking how Orex's animation work was going. After touching base with him this past week, though, I realized that releasing this month just isn't gonna happen. That's on me for not keeping track of things better, and I'm really sorry I got everyone's hopes up prematurely.

I think I talked about it before, but a while ago, I put together a big list of animations I want to see for the cutscenes in v0.49. It's a pretty ambitious list, with a lot more bespoke animations for specific moments than our other cutscenes have had so far. Most of those animations are definitely not necessary to get the scenes across, even though they'd be nice to have, so I organized the list into 4 different categories based on priority, with only the top priority being ones I considered absolutely essential to have ready before the update could be released. I was hoping to have a good amount of the High priority anims as well, but as of right now, a bit more than half of the top priority animations are finished, and none of the high/medium/low priority ones have been started yet, so.. yeah. I don't really know what to say other than I'm sorry. We messed up the pace of this update; even though my work on the update has been nearing the finish line, Orex still has a ways to go, and we can't really justify releasing the update until both of our tasks are done.

Going forward, I want to avoid being held up like this again, and so I'm working with Orex to figure out how we can increase the pace of our animation pipeline. Crisis Point's animation work is surprisingly more complex than you might think; it's at a higher resolution than your typical pixel art game, and everything is animated by hand, frame by frame. The end result has been some truly excellent work if I do say so myself, but it takes a lot of time and effort, perhaps too much for a team of mostly two. We're going to try experimenting with making some cuts in places; doing less polish work on inbetween frames, reducing the frame count in places where it's not as necessary, etc. The goal is to tweak smaller things that shouldn't impact the overall image and animation quality much, but will hopefully allow us to put out work much faster.

I don't want you to worry about the quality of the game suddenly going to shit or anything; this probably won't affect things like H-scenes, where we'll still be putting our best foot forward, and our ultimate goal here is to up the speed with minimal quality impact. We make tweaks like this all the time as a normal part of game dev, but after having a delay like this, I feel like it's necessary to talk out loud about what we're doing to fix the problem going forward; for things like these cutscene animations that will only be seen once in a playthrough, it seems like we may have bit off more than we can chew in a timely manner, and we need to find a happier medium if we don't want to be stuck in development hell forever.

Again, I'm really sorry to have to announce a delay, and even moreso that I don't have a concrete window to give you. Progress on the update is otherwise progressing smoothly, so it'll be ready when it's ready, and I'll keep you all up to date on how the animation progress is going until that happens. I'm hoping it still won't be too much longer; we're going to be focusing on animation roughs so that all of the scenes can at least be watchable, even if some of the art isn't fully detailed for now. If the lack of polished art doesn't feel too detrimental, we'll probably put out v0.49 sooner than later, and then we can always go back and improve the animations more in the future.

As always, even when the news isn't the good kind, it means the world to me that y'all still show up and care about what we're making. We don't take that lightly - I want CPE to be the game you all deserve to play, which makes delays like this necessary but tough to stomach. Thank you guys so very much for reading; we'll see you again soon, hopefully with better news!