Final polish passes! (Biweekly Progress Report, 8-03-2026)

Hey everyone, welcome to another CPE progress report!

Part of me was hoping the update would be out before this progress report, which obviously didn't happen, but I'm not too upset about it, because our work output has been pretty solid - it's just a lot to get done. Before I get into the details though, let's get the daily updates from the last 2 weeks out of the way:

After the last progress report, I immediately started a full game playtest, which was thankfully more stable than I was expecting. Still, there were loads of issues to fix, and my focus has been entirely on that. Pretty much all of the high/medium priority issues I found myself have been fixed, and Orex did a playthrough of his own on that build. He found plenty more issues, but only a handful of them are serious enough that they NEED to be fixed before the update release, so as far as bugs are concerned right now, we're in pretty good shape. I'm sure there will still be some broken stuff, but it's impossible to find EVERYTHING with only two people doing testing; we have some crazy good bug hunters in the community (looking at you Xans), so I'll be supporting the update with hotfixes as usual if anything gnarly gets discovered.

Basically, the update could be really close to being ready for a release - however, there are a handful of really obvious improvements that could be made, and I think I want to get some of those things in first. There's some issues from Orex's playtest that I want to fix, and some cutscenes that really need improvement on the audio/sound effects front, but the main thing is that while I was doing bugfixing, Orex prepped a bunch more animations for cutscenes, and I want to make sure we have time to implement those. The updated story is one of the biggest features of v0.49, so I want to make sure those cutscenes are in the best place they can be.

Right now, my expectation is that we'll be releasing the update around the middle of the month. We still need to finish the update itself, and then put together things like the update release trailer, and another 2 weeks or so sounds about right for what we have left - so with any luck, this will be the last progress report before v0.49 is officially released!

Just as a reminder, this is the last update where we're focused exclusively on reworking content. There are still early game improvements we want to make, so we're not going to be completely ditching the idea of improving earlier content. After v0.49 though, since the story rework is finally done, we're going to actively start developing brand new story content again. I'm really excited to get things moving and see where the road takes us! I've had these things stewing around in my head for years so it'll be amazing to finally let it all out into the world.

Alright, I think that's about all I have to say for today. As always, thank you so very much for reading, and for being so patient with us while we make sure this update is the best it can be. We'll see you again very soon - and hopefully with something more than just another progress report!