Progress Report 8-15-2025 (Alraune combat reworks, Achievements, Big Alicia updates, and more)

Hey everyone! Before we get into the post, I want to apologize for the HUGE gap between posts after v0.48 was released. Even when I'm struggling, I aim to have no more than 1 month at most between posts, and we've gone well past that this time; we weren't on an extended break or anything, progress towards v0.49 has been ongoing and steady since the last update came out, but there's been A LOT going on in my personal and professional life that's been leaving me feeling pretty overwhelmed. I decided to more or less keep my head down and focus on working on CPE and sorting things out for a while; some of those things are finally calming down a bit, so I don't think we'll end up having a large break between posts again after this one, but I did want to address it and say sorry at least!

The good news is, despite the stress and overwhelmed feeling, my mental health is actually in a pretty good state. There have been a fuckton of changes in my life these past few months, which is normally the kind of thing that makes me shut down hard, but I've been able to handle them a lot better than I expected. I'm not sure what changed for me, but I feel like I'm handling stress better than I have in a really long time, so I'm hopeful that some of those life changes have ended up putting me on a much better path going forward.

Aside from the personal stuff, though, what have we been working on? First things first, here's our Daily Updates since the v0.48 hotfix came out:

If you don't feel like reading through all of that (I wouldn't blame you, it's a lot), the TL;DR is that we've been hard at work on a number of things - the Alraune/Poison Alraune combat rework, implementing an Achievements system, giving the Sniper Trigger unique visuals (which required a bunch of extra work, since it's a 2 handed weapon compared to Alicia's usual 1 handed stances), some new H-scenes that I think people will be very excited about, and implementing recolorable versions of Big Alicia (the high-res sprite of Alicia used in menus).

The Alraune combat reworks are about 95% complete functionality-wise, they still need a lot of new animations and visuals but their new abilities are nearly fully functional and the fights are much more engaging. Since the art is still WIP, I don't want to share a video yet, so in lieu of that, here's an overview of their new moves and combat behaviors:

Alraune
-Overhand/underhand leaf fan throw, alternates between them every time this is used (no longer leaves behind libido spores)
-Creates a thorny vine that briefly shoots up directly underneath Alicia
-Blows a kiss, creating a slow-moving heart projectile that's surrounded by a cloud of libido spores, and causes heavy libido damage if it hits Alicia directly

The goal with the Alraune was to make her moveset more diverse, but also a bit less oppressive; her leaf fan throws cover a HUGE amount of screen space, and since that's her only attack in the game right now, she can be a lot to deal with if we try to team her up with any other enemies. Now that she has more attacks, her AI will never do multiple leaf fan throws in a row, and they don't leave spores behind anymore. As a result, she no longer dominates the battlefield so heavily, while still keeping her threat level higher than most other enemies. This will allow me to group up the Alraune's with other enemies more often, and even have more than 1 Alraune in a fight, while hopefully avoiding the problem of it being too overwhelming for the player.

Poison Alraune
-Quick combo of 3 leaf throws that each directly target Alicia, with the last one creating a cloud of poisonous spores wherever it hits
-Creates a moving wave of large thorny vines, starting from the Poison Alraune and continuing forward along the ground until reaching a wall
-Targets Alicia directly with several long, thin spiked vines that shoot out from the floor/ceiling after a short delay
-Upon reaching low health, the Poison Alraune now surrounds herself in a shield of spiky vines, becoming resistant to damage and starting a unique attack that covers the entire ground (or ceiling, picked randomly) in large thorny vines (like the wave, but all spawned at the same time). Repeats that attack at random a few times, while also targeting Alicia with barrages of the thin spiked vines between waves of large vines. Eventually the shield will fail, leaving her vulnerable for a time, after which the fight returns to normal until she is defeated

As you can see, the Poison Alraune especially is now much more deserving of the "miniboss" status she was originally supposed to have, and she's much more fun to fight! Everything but the last Poison Alraune attack is fully functional, and I'm making good progress on that last attack as well, so their combat reworks will be functionally complete pretty soon.

Aside from the Alraune stuff, the Sniper Trigger visuals are nearly finished, just needs some bug testing and a fix for a few visual issues. Recolorable Big Alicia is making good progress as well; she uses a lot more colors than base Alicia, so we've had to expand Alicia's color palette to accommodate them, which is somewhat fiddly work, but that part is just about done and the rest will go by much faster. (Her ingame sprite remains unchanged, just for the record, the new colors are ONLY used for Big Alicia). We're also making Big Alicia reflect Alicia's ingame status as well, so she'll have things like torn clothing/BE status when applicable, in addition to reflecting the color palette you're using.

The Achievements system is one I just started work on recently, and I'm really excited to get it implemented - somehow makes it feel more like a legitimate game :^) We plan on having most achievements grant points for use in an achievement shop, so you can choose what rewards to unlock in what order, although some achievements will give unique rewards directly as well.

For some more details on the technical side of things, we plan on handling achievements in a semi-global fashion; when you start a new save, you'll have access to all of the achievement rewards you've unlocked so far, but you'll still be able to re-unlock any achievements you previously obtained on a different save file, you just won't get additional rewards for doing so. The menu will also show if it's impossible to get an achievement in your current save file, so if we have achievements like "beat the game without getting any H-scenes", you'll be able to see at a glance whether or not you still qualify for that achievement, no guesswork required. Always been a pet peeve of mine in games that have achievements like that, so I wanted to make sure I addressed that problem right away.

So, as you can see we've been pretty busy! Sorry again for the huge-ass wait between posts, I'll do my best to make sure I stick to the at-least-once-a-month update schedule from here on, but at least this time it wasn't because no progress was being made!

I'm hoping to have some actual visuals to show off with the next update, but I hope you'll accept a big text post in the meantime. I hope you all have been enjoying v0.48, and are excited for v0.49! I'm DETERMINED to avoid another 1+ year wait between updates this time. We're well on our way towards avoiding that, so I'm feeling good, despite the marked increase in stressors!

Thank you all so very much for reading, and we'll see you again soon in our next progress report!
-A42