Everything is spoilers? (Biweekly Progress Report, 10-12-2026) (Patreon)

Hey everyone, welcome to another CPE progress report! For this update I'm struggling to come up with much to show off, but not because we're not making progress, and that's what makes it so weird. Now that the team is finally moving on to brand new content again, a lot of the work we're doing ends up being on very spoiler-heavy things, and I think I'm just struggling to decide how much to share and how much to keep secret.

CPE's story has a heavy element of mystery tying everything together, and as a Metroidvania, discovering all the gameplay elements and enemies and such is a huge part of the thrill imo, so it's always been a bit of a struggle to decide how much to share and how much to withhold. I tend to err on the side of secrecy for the most part, but that results in weeks like this one, where almost all of the work we've done is stuff I'm unsure about sharing. At the same time, I don't want to leave you guys with no information about what we're working on, so.. I dunno! I'm not sure where the right balance is. If you have any particular feelings about this sort of thing, please do speak up in the comments.

Before I ramble on any further, let me just get the daily updates for the past 2 weeks out of the way real quick:

Even these daily updates have some mechanical spoilers you can infer from them, if you really want to! Hopefully you can see my dilemma lmao, but I'm a very spoiler-averse person so maybe I'm just being overly cautious?

In any case, at the very least I can talk about what we've been doing in loose terms. Like the last progress report, a lot of my focus has been on Boss 4, which is coming along nicely. I came up with a brand new concept for the fight last week that I've been experimenting with, and I like it a lot so far; I might scrap the original idea for the fight in favor of this new one, but they also share a lot of similarities, so I'm also thinking I might be able to combine the two into a multi-phase fight. It just depends on how it feels while I'm iterating on it.

Just as a warning, Boss 4 will not have any H-scene associated with it - and in general, we're considering dropping boss fight H-scenes as a whole. Minibosses like the Poison Alraune will keep theirs, of course, and there may still be some cases where characters/enemies you fight as bosses get H-scenes later in the game, it just wouldn't be tied to the boss fight itself. The need to have boss fight H-scenes not only makes bosses take more time to develop (H-scene animations in our artstyle are really complex), but it also makes it impossible to do certain things with them story-wise - you can already see this problem with Boss 3 right now, where the presence of her H-scene makes no sense with the rewritten story. If we do go ahead with this, we would be removing the H-scenes for bosses 1-3 that are currently in the game; they're already only accessible through the CG menu rather than being part of the fight, and we've been unhappy with the way all of them are animated/integrated for a long time now. Maybe we could keep them available in the standalone gallery app so there's still a way to access them long-term?

All that said, you don't need to worry about this resulting in the game having way less H-scenes, or becoming less focused on the H-content, or anything like that; I'm still open to getting feedback on this from you guys, but we mostly just want the freedom to implement more unique encounters without feeling like they MUST be designed to also have an H-scene. Rather than less scenes overall, we would be redirecting that H-scene work into things like story-related H-scenes, or more regular enemies with H-scenes, instead of bosses. Do let me know how you feel about the idea, though; I've been mulling it over for a long while, and I figure getting some input would help decide exactly what changes we'll make going forward.

Anyway, on top of Boss 4, I also overhauled the way the Wire Shot's targeting system works. I've been meaning to do this since we implemented 360 aiming, and it kept getting pushed back for various reasons, but it's finally done now! Essentially, it now functions differently depending on if you're using a mouse or gamepad for aiming; for the mouse, it relies exclusively on the position of the mouse cursor to choose a target, as long as the target is close enough to Alicia to be reachable. For gamepads, it still looks at Alicia's position compared to the Wire Shot target like the old system, with closer targets being chosen over farther ones, but now with a few tweaks. It can now select targets behind Alicia (they were ignored completely before), and it also heavily factors in the direction Alicia is actually aiming in instead of just her position - so even a target that's farther away could end up getting picked if you're aiming directly at it. You shouldn't need to know any of these technical details, though; the new system feels a lot more intuitive imo, so hopefully you won't even notice it and it'll all just feel natural!

Orex has continued to work on environment art; he's started designing tilesets for the new area, which I'm not going to be sharing because of spoilers, but I CAN share the revamped Summit tiles he's been working on!

This is still heavily WIP, so expect more changes by the time these tiles are actually ingame, but I really like the direction it's going in so far.

Unlike the interiors, which came together pretty easily, we were struggling a lot with this one at first. In earlier versions of this scene, the sand/orange stone was the same thickness as the green brick path on the left. That size looked great with interior locations, but once we got outdoors, where you'd expect more organically shaped geometry, the artificial nature of a long, thin strip of land became REALLY jarring, so we've been iterating on it for a while to try and make it feel better. By making the sand and rock sections thicker than the manufactured brick pathway, and adding more foreground and background elements to break up the shapes, I think Orex has struck a pretty nice balance so far! I'm really excited to see what the rest of the game ends up looking like in this new style.

So overall, progress is going pretty good! I'm not fully satisfied with my own progress atm, though. There have been a LOT of distractions in my personal life that have been making it a struggle to stay focused, and I think I've been keeping it together pretty well despite that (especially compared to how things were a year or two ago), but I also really don't want to fall back into the habit of using that as an excuse.

Streaming tends to be a good refocuser for me, so I'm going to try starting up CPE devstreams again; specifically, me and Orex will be streaming every Wednesday and Friday, starting at around ~10 am Alaska time. We usually go for about 3-4 hours depending on the day, so if you're available at that time, come hang out with us! I can't post a link here because of NSFW content, but we stream on Picarto, so you can find us pretty easily by searching for it.

Alright, I think that's all I have to talk about today. Thank you all very much for reading, and I hope to see some of you at the stream on Wednesday! If not, though, we'll see you again in 2 weeks with the next progress report!