Progress Report 3-19-2025, and an update on v0.48 plans (it's coming soon!)

Hey everyone! There was a pretty long gap between posts again, but for once it's not for any negative reason; productivity has been going great and I'm feeling good, I've just been wanting to focus my work time on the game itself. I don't want to keep you all waiting too long between progress reports, so I plan to keep to a bare minimum of posting once a month; I'd like to get back to posting every other week or so, but I've noticed that needing to write an update post every week or two will sometimes throw off my workflow, and with how things have been I think I should probably put more focus on the game itself, so I hope you don't mind if progress reports stay a little sporadic for a bit longer!

In any case, enough preamble. My main focus has been the Worm Attacks Camp cutscene, which is now pretty much finished up. I still need to get in contact with our VAs for a couple retakes/action vocals, but those will be very quick to implement once I have them, and aside from that everything is done, so I've moved on to reworking other cutscenes. Since they're all non-action scenes, they're going a LOT quicker than the cutscene reworks I've done so far, so I expect to be able to burn through the remaining ones pretty fast - with a few exceptions we'll get into in a minute.

Before we get into the meat of the post, here's our daily dev updates from the last month:

Alright, with all that preface out of the way, let's talk about our plans for v0.48! Initially, I was planning on holding off the story rework until v0.49 at least, but since v0.48 has taken so much longer than expected, we had a lot more time to work on that, and a good chunk of the reworked story is now going to be included in v0.48 - but not all of it. Trying to avoid anything too spoilery here, but basically everything in the rewrite related to Kara, a character that's currently introduced in the late Deep Soil, will not be in v0.48. This is by far the biggest change in the story rewrite, because it introduces her into the story a LOT sooner and gives her a much greater presence in the events leading up to the 5th area of the game, but unfortunately there are quite a few roadblocks preventing us from finishing up those parts of the rewrite quickly. We have a pretty good amount of the Kara reworks done too, but we're far enough away on them that I don't want to delay v0.48 even longer just to finish them all, and thankfully it doesn't create much awkwardness to leave the Kara stuff as it was for now.

We'll be gunning for finishing the Kara story rework in v0.49, so we have a bit more time to polish it up, but every other part of the story rewrite (including the major cutscene changes like the reworked intro and Worm Attacks Camp action scene) will be in v0.48! The intro will probably have some WIP assets, but it's still a lot more interesting than the one that's currently in the game imo. With all that said, here's an updated list of changes/new features that will be in v0.48:

-Story rewrite, not including Kara things
-Hoverjets rework, along with new obstacles and level design tweaks to accommodate it
-Lucas+Verreda+Alicia CG scene added
-Localization systems have been implemented, so users can do fan translations with ease (no new official translations will be added to the game until 1.0 at the earliest)
-Playthrough stats menu to track things like playtime, H-scenes viewed, etc.
-Toggleable damage numbers added to combat
-Warped Soldier gameplay animations reworked and new melee attack added
-Save files were rewritten to reduce filesize by around 90%, and multiple save file support was added with up to 42 manual slots, plus a slot just for autosaves, so manual saves are never automatically overwritten
-More Alicia recolor palettes
-Speaker names added to all dialogue
-Debug Menu unlock at end of demo will now be saved to your save file, for remainder of current version and its hotfixes - will reset and become locked again when the save is loaded in the next major version, after it's released

I wouldn't be surprised if there's a bunch of smaller things I forgot about in the time v0.48 has been in development, plus there are a couple of other things I'd like to add as well if I have time, but those are all the guaranteed things. Most of that list is implemented already, and I'll be focusing on finishing the remaining things over the next few weeks. The largest part still remaining is the rest of the non-Kara story rework, but most of it is pure dialogue scenes, so those reworks will go WAY quicker than the cutscene reworks I've been doing so far.

So now you have a good idea of what will be in v0.48, but when is it coming? Well, my current goal is to have the update released by the end of April at the latest, but I'm hopeful we can get it done sooner than that! It's been a long time coming, but things with me and my mental health have finally really been improving in the last month or two, and I'm excited to get CPE development going at full speed again. You guys have been so incredibly patient with me while I'm trying to get my shit together, and I seriously can't thank you enough. I'm eternally grateful to have such a kind and understanding community surrounding this game, and it's high time for me to finally start making it up to all of you.

Alright, I think that's enough out of me for today. Thanks for reading, everyone; take care of yourselves, and we'll see you again soon with the next progress report!