Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! (oh yeah also an update on things, v0.45 coming soon!)

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, everyone! I hope your holiday season has been wonderful, and that you can take some time to be with your loved ones today!

I'm going to keep this update brief, not only because I don't want to take up too much of your time, but also because v0.45 is very close to the point where I'm satisfied with releasing it. I still have a bit left to do, but the last week of development has gone very well and I managed to get a lot done - even had a 12 hour work day on Christmas Eve, during which I only stopped working because it was getting late, even though I honestly wanted to keep going lmao. Right now it's mostly bugtesting and final polish to get it ready for a wide release.

I skipped last week's update since it had only been a few days since the update on the 14th, what with that post being delayed thanks to that stomach bug. I don't have much specific to say this week either, really, to be honest; most of my work has been finishing up stuff that I've talked about before but wasn't completely finished, like the dialogue choice system. It's now a bit more robust and can trigger not only dialogue choice prompts, but also other events, like opening the CG menu when you ask an NPC about conducting 'research'. Previously if you interacted with Birch or Rodriguez for CGs, you wouldn't get any dialogue at all and it would just jump straight into the menu, but now I can add a bit of conversation beforehand. With the way the system works, I can pretty easily add in more custom events too, so the dialogue system should be easier to work with in the future. In general, I've been doing a lot of work to make various parts of CPE easier to develop lately, which has lead to a slower overall development pace but will pay off in spades later by making me a whole lot less miserable :p

Fair warning, v0.45 might be a somewhat buggy release initially. It's been in development for so long, and with my inconsistent work pace, I think some things have fallen between the cracks. I'll be doing a full playtest before releasing the update as always, but even after that it's entirely possible there will be some bugs and/or crashes. Hopefully it'll be stable despite my concerns, but if not, rest assured I will be supporting the update and releasing hotfixes as quickly as possible!

That's all I really have to say for now, but keep an eye out for the v0.45 release sometime in the next few days! Obviously I won't be working on Christmas day, but after that it's full steam ahead until this thing is finally in your hands. Until then, thank you all so goddamn much for supporting us throughout this hellish year; may the rest of your holiday season be wonderful, treat yourself to something nice, and enjoy the rest of 2021!