Anon42 - Planning, prose, and pornography (Biweekly Progress Report, 10-26-2026)

Hey everybody, and welcome to another CPE progress report! v0.50 development is proceeding smoothly, and I'm working on a number of things right now, some of which I can actually show off! Let's get into it, starting with the team's daily updates from the past 2 weeks:

One thing I want to get out of the way right away; early in this batch of daily updates, I have the note "Started experimenting with tracing over one of our H-CGs into pixel art, to unify the CG artstyles - will probably ask for Patron feedback about this soon". We're currently working on redrawing one of the scenes to give you an example of what this would look like, before we dedicate to the idea fully, but we're not quite ready to show that off yet; in the meantime, I can describe the concept and our reasoning behind it at least.

We had the idea of tracing back over all the CGs currently in the game in a pixel art style, basically the same general style and resolution as the story CGs added in v0.49. The plan is to use Big Alicia's color palette for this, so that the H-CGs will be able to support recolors just like the story CGs - and since we're redrawing them anyway, we can make tweaks to how things are drawn to try and unify the style across the game better. Each of the artists that have worked on CPE are really talented, but our CG art is very clearly from a variety of artists, and that stylistic inconsistency has always nagged at me a bit. Redoing them just for the sake of it feels like a waste, but if we can add recolor support as part of the process, it becomes a lot more worthwhile! The resolution and detail will be reduced in a pixel style of course, and it'll take some time away from other things, which are the two primary negatives - but I think the gains are more than worth it personally. Again, we'll have an example of this to show soon, but in the meantime if you're strongly for or against the idea, let me know!

Aside from that, and some bugfixing work to round things out, there are 2 major things I've been mostly focusing on: planning and writing.

I've had ideas for the next biome floating around my brain for a while now, and now that we're finally developing new content again, I've been actually plotting out the actual progression path and what mechanics/enemies will be present in the area. We have a much better idea of how things will play out once I get to designing levels now, which I intend to start doing soon. To go with those, I've also started planning out a few cutscenes that'll be in v0.50. The cutscene workload is pretty light this time, just a few short scenes with mostly exposition and not a lot of animation. Our planned v0.50 content ends right before a major story scene though, so the eventual v0.51 should be starting off with a bang!

I've also implemented a new Datalogs menu in the Database, which will be CPE's version of lore collectibles. They're pretty self-explanatory, but these will be collectibles left behind by other characters that contain optional lore tidbits, anything from silly gags to deep lore. None of it will be mandatory for beating the game or understanding the core story, but there might be answers to some smaller mysteries you can piece together through these. I've already written a series of very important datalogs I've been considering for ages, was nice to finally get those out of my head and onto a page.

Some (but not all) of these datalogs will also contain mini H-CGs! I'll post an example of this at the bottom of the post; it's very much NSFW, so rules are it has to be in a Patron-only section. Basically, these are just a single sexy image, accompanied by some text, something we can put together much more easily than the full CG sequences. Orex has already drawn 3 of 'em, though they need a bit more refinement before we can truly call 'em done.

Orex has continued to stay focused on environment art for the time being, while also taking care of a few other tasks as I send them his way. He's focusing on nailing down a style for the new zone currently; it's pretty damn important lore-wise, so we want to make sure we get it right. I probably won't be showing anything about this area ahead of the v0.50 release, so apologies if not a lot of Orex's work ends up being shown or talked about in progress reports!

Anyway, I think that just about wraps it up for this progress report! Things are going smoothly over here and it's been a lot of fun to work on new content again. The Mini CG preview is just below for anyone with a pledge; if you don't have one, you can seek out our Discord to see the preview if you want, I just can't post it publicly in free posts because of Patreon rules (same reason I can't just post a link to the Discord, apologies). In any case, thank you as always for reading, and we'll see you again in another ~2 weeks with the next progress report!

Here's the mini-CG preview! The art in this is still a rough currently, so you can expect them to be a little more visually polished when v0.50 launches, but I hope you're excited about collectible H-CGs :p