A bit of a slow start, but huge environment art updates coming! (Biweekly Progress Report, 9-28-2026) (Patreon)

Hey everybody! We officially started development of v0.50 in our last update 2 weeks ago, and it's been a.. strange start. Not due to anything with the game itself, just a lot of stuff suddenly happening in the personal life as soon as we announced the beginning of v0.50, including my grandmother passing away. I'm taking her passing well on a personal level; I didn't have a very high opinion of her thanks to the way she treated my mother, and she was suffering from worsening alzheimer's over the past few years, so if anything it's a relief she's no longer suffering. That said, it's still a big event and it's a lot to process. Now that she's gone, we're also left with grandma's house to deal with, and considering she was a hoarder, it's an absolute mess and it's going to take a LOT of work to figure everything out. Fun times ahead.

In any case, with everything that's been going on lately my brain has been real distracted, and I didn't get as much CPE stuff as I was hoping - but we're still making steady progress! Here are the daily updates from the last two weeks:

My two main focuses right now are planning out and experimenting with mechanics for Boss 4, which we're hoping to include in v0.50, and fixing up a bunch more issues from v0.49 - courtesy of Xans in our discord, who's made it a regular habit to deliver EXTREMELY detailed bug reports every time we put out a major update. I can't thank you enough man, having a thorough list of bugs to fix saves me so much time it's not even funny.

In any case, I don't have anything fun to show off from my own work atm, but it's progressing well so far, and it's already fun to work on a brand new boss fight again. I already had a general idea of how I wanted the fight to work, but I want to get the design fully settled as soon as possible, so Orex has enough info to work from when designing the boss's sprites and visuals.

While he's waiting on me to do that, Orex has been taking a crack at environment art again. There will be a brand new area to explore in v0.50, so we need some new tilesets, and he's been warming up by redesigning an area that's been in desperate need of a refurbish since it was originally implemented. Some spoilers ahead for an early-midgame area and characters, so feel free to stop reading here if you've been trying to avoid anything like this.

Say hello to the new (but still WIP) Torguis camp!

Background art in CPE has almost exclusively been done with tilesets up until now. It's the most practical way of filling in a large amount of levels with wildly varying geometry, so it's an important part of building the environment, but it does often have the result of making a lot of areas look same-y, which has been a huge issue with the game we've just never been able to dedicate the funds/manpower to fixing. It's going to take a long time to fix the problem across the whole game (don't expect improvements like this for every zone in v0.50), but with Orex practicing his environment art skills a lot more, we're gonna start making each area feel more lively and unique by making larger, more bespoke props and designs, starting with the areas like this where it really matters.

Not only is there a lot more detail in general, but one thing you might notice is that we're shifting the perspective on the background art: previously it was a perfect side view where you can only see the walls, but we're going to (gradually) redesign our tilesets so that you can see part of the floor like this, enabling us to provide a lot more environment detail.

Once he's finished experimenting with the Torguis camp, Orex is going to shift focus to designing a tileset for the new area, which is where most of our focus for v0.50 is going. It's a smaller zone, not a full biome like the 5 main areas in the game currently, so don't expect anything quite as grand as that, but it DOES have some important lore hints, so I hope you're looking forward to finally exploring something brand new in CPE - it's been a long time coming!

Alright, I think that's enough out of me for today. Thank you all so very much for reading, and continuing to keep up with our progress; despite everything that's going on in my personal life atm, it's exciting to finally be working on something new again. See you again in 2 more weeks with the next progress report!