Progress Report, and Happy New Year!

Hello everyone, and Happy New Year!

2024 was.. well, certainly a year. I won't spend too long reflecting on it here, but it was easily one of the roughest years in recent memory for me (yes, including 2020), on both a professional and personal level. I made a lot of progress in some areas of my personal life, but unfortunately took just as many steps backwards in others. It honestly feels like a bit of a wasted year for me, but I'm going to try not to dwell on that too much, and instead look at 2025 as a soft reset of sorts. If 2024 was a lull year, then I just need to try even harder to make 2025 the year where things come together.

Before we get going on 2025 though, we still have to cover the last few weeks of 2024. The holidays kept me a little busier than usual of course, but I still managed to get a bit more productivity out of myself than usual - nowhere near where I want to be, but any improvement is worth celebrating.

The most noteworthy thing I worked on was the Warped Soldier, who was one of the earliest enemies introduced in CPE. Because of that age, his code is significantly worse than the newer enemies, and since I was already importing the new animations Orex was working on (which necessitated some code changes), I decided to spend the time to rewrite most of it while I was at it, so he's a lot easier to work with now. That part of the work won't change anything about how he functions ingame of course, but I also tweaked his gameplay a bit: now that Alicia has 360 degree aiming, I changed it so even the low-ranked Soldiers will aim directly at the player (rather than only forward), so it's not trivially easy to snipe him from a safe spot. To compensate for it, he fires a bit slower, and doesn't track Alicia as well as the higher-tier Soldiers. We also gave all tiers of Warped Soldier a melee attack, which they'll use if you try and run past them; the attack comes out EXTREMELY fast, so you'll have to be careful about getting near them unless you have a dodge ready!

Anyway, here's the full list of our daily updates since the last progress report:

Aside from the work stuff, some updates on the personal health situation: things with my leg have been slowly improving. The low-level pain that's almost always present has been noticeably improving, but the more intense pains that come from sitting in certain positions aren't much better yet - it's strange, but it's definitely not making anything worse, so I'm just going to keep it up for the time being. More exercise can only help, as long as I'm not overdoing it. So all of that is pretty good news, even if it's taking longer than I'd like.. but then there's also my jaw pain.

Years ago, I used to have really severe jaw pain, for whatever reason. Didn't have the money to get it checked out, so I just lived with it. It could be absolutely crippling at times, leading to migraines that made me lay down in the darkness with a heating pad for literal hours just to feel okay again. I did a lot to try and fix the problem (including things like not wearing headphones/earbuds anymore), and over time, it seemed to do the trick; my chronic headaches and migraines had gone away, and the jaw pain was just an occasional mild stiffness, nothing remotely debilitating. The fun part is, about a week ago, it just came right on back like a fuckin' switch had been flipped, and now I'm getting jaw aches and migraines almost daily again. Just like with my leg/knee, it seems to be very dependent on what position I'm sitting/laying in, but it's frankly even worse than the leg has been. Sometimes it's not so bad (like today), but on the worst days it can basically take me out for an entire day.

It's only been going on for about a week, so I'm not going to schedule a doctor's visit yet (don't really have the money to be doing constant visits), and I'm just praying that it'll go away like it did before, but I will schedule another doctor's visit if I need to. There's some other major stress as well, but I'm not really comfortable getting into that - it just feels like as soon as I'm getting one thing under control, another two pop up. I'm really exhausted and struggling to keep up with it all, but I guess that's just life sometimes. It sometimes feels like things are spiraling out of my control, but those are the times when I just need to redouble my efforts towards the things that I can control. Speaking of which, there IS one straight up win - during my last weigh-in with our dietician, I hit a new record low, so I'm at the lightest weight I've been in years! Still got a long way to go before I'm at a healthy weight, but as long as I keep trending in the right direction then I'll get there eventually.

Anyway, I rambled longer than I intended to there, but I'm sure you just skipped over it if you don't have interest in that. I've started tentatively using my desk in my office again, and I've been able to sit there without too much pain sometimes, as long as I stretch often. If I'm actually able to use the desk for extended periods again, then I really want to start doing dev streams again, but I'll have to give it a bit more time and make sure I'm not overextending with my knee - I wouldn't want to rush back to my desk too fast and end up injuring myself further. As soon as I'm comfortably able to, though, streams WILL start up again! More than anything, I want 2025 to be the year we get back to doing regular playable releases, which means I need to get my tail in gear and get this story rewrite finished and fully implemented.

Alright, that's enough out of me today. Thank you all for reading, and again, for sticking with us throughout the thoroughly underwhelming 2024. The only thing I feel more than the disappointment of last year, is the determination to make sure it doesn't happen again - so hopefully those streams will be able to start up again soon, but if not then no excuses, my laptop works well enough for now and I WILL be getting shit done. We'll see you again soon with the next progress report!