Status update

Hey everyone. Sooo, despite my saying in the last weekly update that I'd be able to deliver more consistent updates, my consistency is probably not going to actually be all that great until our move is done. We had a lot going on over the past two weeks; on top of all the new weekly things like therapy, personal training, and bass lessons, we've also started working with a mortgage broker and a realtor, to help us get preapproved for a loan and to find us a house respectively. Both of those have either required appointments, lots of paperwork, or both. There's rarely a day where we don't have to leave the house to do something, in stark contrast to my usual habits.

Luckily, the therapy and antidepressants are still doing wonders, and I'm mentally in a good place despite the craziness life is throwing at us right now. It is making work suffer, though, and I apologize for that - I'm trying to get what I can done, but it's difficult to balance right now.

I don't really have any visual things to show off this week, but for my part I continued work on the resolution upgrade, while Orex finally finished the last parts of the Poison Alraune BE H-scene (if you're wondering why it took so long, the climax animation is roughly *100 frames* - remember that our oldest H-scene loops used to be 4 frames, and you can see just how lengthy this animation ended up being!)

So aside from work and moving things, I've got to be honest with myself at this point and say that there is definitely a lot of CPE burnout happening for me. Let me assure you that CPE is not going anywhere - I'm extremely committed to this project, and I'm not taking a hiatus from the game or anything like that. CPE still has a ways to go before it's finished, which I can largely blame on my own inexperience; this game has been in development for way longer than necessary because of the mistakes I've made along the way, and my own personal growth as a developer has lead to a LOT of content reworking, which.. isn't the most exciting stuff to do, even if it results in the overall game being far higher quality.

All this is to say, I'm going to be sitting down in the very near future and making an ironclad, definitive plan/roadmap for the remaining content in the game, not only to avoid feature creep and too much reworking, but also to just give the team some definitive goals to aim for. I probably won't be sharing the roadmap publicly or anything, it's more for the team internally to give us a better idea of how close we are. Don't take that as me saying that we've been winging it or anything, I've had an outline for the game for a very long time, but I've left plenty of wiggle room in the past for ideas to grow and expand; at this point though, CPE's identity has long since been fully formed, and I need to really start looking towards the end of the project. I think one of the first things I want to do is finalize the entire game's script; I do all the writing for the game, and having an unfinished script hanging over me has definitely been a source of stress, so I think that'll be my focus once I finish the roadmap.

Alright, I think that's all I have for this week. I'll keep you guys updated on the progress of the remaining script once I start on that in earnest; I don't want to spoil the plot though, so don't worry about that, I won't share anything specific. Oh, and one final last note - I do want to start streaming again, but not until after things settle down from the move. Once we're settled in to our new place, wherever that ends up being, I'll announce a more formal streaming schedule like we used to do in the past.

Thanks for reading, everybody, and as always for sticking with us. It's going to be a little bit longer before things can return to normal for the team, but we're doing what we can in the meantime, while working on ourselves and our health, so we can be here making games for you all long into the future. See you next update!