Bi-Weekly Update - 9-12-2022 (Pretty lights, major story planning)

Hey everyone, and welcome to another CPE biweekly update! Sorry this one is a day late, I wasn't feeling great yesterday so I took the day easy, but we're here now!

Like last week, we don't have a ton of visual stuff to show this week, and this update is going to be pretty short because of it - rest assured that it's not due to a lack of work, though! Puffernutter has been busy with freelance work again, so she hasn't had much time to work on CPE; Orexius has been doing minor tweaks to a lot of Alicia's old gameplay animations, to bring them more on-model with her current sprite design, so it's important work but nothing really worth showing in an update; and for my part, my focus has been split between 3 things: the new lighting system, the game's story, and just a bit more shader experimentation. If it seems like I'm spending a lot of time on the new lighting engine, please forgive me - to try and prevent getting burnt out again in the future, I'm trying to shake up what I'm working on more often to keep things fresh and fun, so unlike before I'm not picking a single task and focusing on it until it's done anymore. Anyway, enough preface - on with the update!

Since I don't really have anything to show from Orex and Puffernutter, I'll just be focusing on my own work for this post. Out of those things, I don't have anything worth showing from the shader experimentation yet, so I won't talk about that much; I did learn some more stuff though, and I'm enjoying tinkering with them! I expect to be able to add a lot of little polish tweaks to the game as my shader knowledge improves, and it's a good creative break from other work when I need it.

As for the lighting, some of the visual bugs I've found with the new system have given me more trouble than expected, so I've spent a good amount of time fixing those. I still have a few more things to fix, but most of the issues have been squashed now, and I've started working on updating all of the old light sources to function properly in the new system. Each light takes a decent amount of effort to update; putting them in at a basic level is pretty quick, but the new system is so much more robust that I'm trying to give each light a bit more attention than that. It'll take longer of course, but that bit of extra polish is super worth it while I'm already in the code and actively working on them.

The game itself kinda looks like a mess right now, with all of the half-finished things being updated, but I put together this scene using Puffernutter's concept art as an example of what things are eventually going to look like!

I put some color-shifting functionality on here to show off some of the fun stuff we can do with lights in the new system. This only scratches the surface of what we can do, and I'm excited to see how the game ends up looking by the end of it! An important note; while this is using Puffernutter's new background art, the backgrounds aren't really going to be updated for v0.46. We are trying to give the Caves a new base tileset, and hopefully that'll be done in time for v0.46, but none of the rooms are going to be this complex or interesting looking just yet. We need more time and a few more things in order to make that happen, like my custom level editor, so it'll still be a while yet for the full glowup - but the lighting itself WILL be updated for v0.46, so it'll still be a big upgrade!

Aside from the lights, which are the only visual thing I have to show off this week, there's also the matter of the game's story. I've mentioned several times that I've been messing with the game's story recently, as there are some things I'm unsatisfied with. The reason I keep bringing it up is because it's taken me a long time to really figure out something I'm happy with, so it's been on my mind for a long time now. CPE wasn't anywhere near as thoroughly planned in the early stages as I would've liked; I didn't even know when I started this project that it would end up being a career for me, so it was much more casual early on, and I've been paying the price for that lack of planning for years now.

During these past two weeks, though, I finally had some big breakthroughs! I can't get into any details without spoiling things, so forgive me for not really having anything concrete to talk about here. The things I finally figured out are core to the game's story, though, so now that they're finally settled I can really start doing the necessary rewrites and improvements to the script. There's still plenty of stuff I need to finish planning out, but by far the biggest one has been taken care of now.

Just to be clear, the story of CPE isn't going through any massive changes or anything like that, so don't worry that this is going to be a huge time sink - all the basic story beats are still the same, but with all the uncertainties ironed out, so I can inject a lot more stuff like foreshadowing and lore into the script.

One piece of concrete information I can give you guys is regarding the game's multiple endings. I haven't talked about this in a long time, but I originally planned CPE to have two endings, one "sexy" and one "SFW" ending, pretty much. As part of these story rewrites, I thought a LOT about that concept, and I've come to the conclusion that multiple endings just isn't the way I want to go. Before you get upset, this DOES NOT mean that there will be no difference between a NSFW and a SFW playthrough! CPE already has a number of dialogue lines that change depending on how naughty Alicia has been, and I fully intend to keep that aspect of the game, and maybe even lean into it harder - so basically, instead of having 2 explicitly different endings, we're going to focus on having 1 story with 1 ending, with a lot of small dialogue changes depending on how lewd the player is while playing. It's substantially less work for the team, and allows us to really focus and polish up the one experience, while also avoiding the pitfalls that come with multiple endings - for example, if there are 2 completely different endings, at what point does the game shift over from the SFW to the NSFW ending? How do we relay which ending the player is going to get? Is it a dialogue choice the player makes? If so, that means their behaviors don't actually matter in determining the ending, just that one dialogue choice, which is lame. Do we add more endings to smooth out those "middle ground" playthroughs that don't focus exclusively on being pure OR horny? That would undoubtedly be a better experience, but it's WAY more work than just 2 endings, and we're quickly going far beyond the story's intended scope. CPE was always intended to be a gameplay-first experience, and putting that much emphasis on story changes feels at odds with the rest of the game.

My original plan for the different endings is something that doesn't really fit our goals anymore, with how the game has changed during development, and after thinking long and hard on it I realized that I was keeping the idea alive not because it's the right choice for the game, but because it's what I said I would do in the past. 

I hate disappointing people by changing plans partway through development, but sometimes it's just not healthy to keep old ideas alive when they no longer fit in, and I believe this is one of those cases. I understand that this will be a disappointing change for some of you, and I'm very sorry for that. I do think this is a change that needs to be made for the sake of the game, though, and I hope you can understand why I'm doing it. The spirit of the idea will live on in those SFW/NSFW dialogue changes I've talked about, but we're going to be focusing on one story, and putting the idea of multiple, completely different endings to rest.

Well, that's about it for me this week. Sorry the update is on the smaller side, most of the exciting visuals are coming from Puffernutter lately, so when she's got a lot of freelance work coming in, we generally won't have too much visual stuff to show off. Progress is going great though, and while the updates right now might not be the most exciting, a lot of our efforts right now are creating the groundwork for future updates, so I expect development to pick up the pace pretty significantly by the end of the year! Thanks for reading everyone, and for continuing to follow the game - see you in the next update!