Progress report + Community recolor 2 boots color poll results

Hey everyone. First off, apologies again for the huge delay between posts here; I already updated on what was holding me up for most of the past month, but I forgot when I made that post that my birthday was just a few days away, so at first I was relaxing and enjoying that, and then immediately afterward, the election happened. I'm not going to really talk in detail about that, I despise politics even at the best of times, but suffice it to say it's been a stressful and depressing week for me. Couple that with the leg pain (which hasn't really changed much since my brief update), and I just kinda retreated into my shell for a bit. That said, I'm doing my best to get back on the horse instead of letting it keep me down, so here we are!

My work days have been incredibly erratic, but when I have been able to sit at my desk without pain and get shit done, I've been mostly continuing work on the intro cutscene. Feels like I've been working on it for ages, but it really is the most complex cutscene in the game so far; since it's the intro, most of the scene doesn't take place in the game's standard platformer view, and instead we have a lot of bespoke backgrounds and art. Unlike CGs, the intro has a lot more animation/motion to it - in total, the scene runs about 4 minutes in length, with none of the "static text explaining what happened" malarky that the current CPE intro has, and I'm pretty proud of how it's coming out. I want to share a video of it (and I still might once I'm done putting everything together), but the entire thing is using programmer art right now so it's not particularly visually impressive yet. That said, I've already put a lot of work into the animations and camera movements that happen during the scene, so once the finalized art assets are ready to go it won't take long at all to put the finishing touches on everything.

Before we get to the recolor poll, here's our daily updates from the past ~3 weeks or so, since the last time I posted a progress report:

And now, before the update wraps up, it's time for the last part of the 2nd community recolor poll! Here's our winners from the last poll:

As the image says, it's time to vote on the last part of Alicia's color scheme: her underwear. The poll itself isn't really NSFW, so we'll keep this post open to everyone, but later in the week when we post the variant poll, that will have to be marked as Patron Only, due to not being able to post anything NSFW in public posts. Don't worry, though - if you aren't currently a patron, you can still vote on the Discord poll, which is open to anyone and everyone! And as always, you can pick as many poll options as you like, so if you can't decide between two options, just do 'em both! The poll will run until we post the variant poll later this week, probably on Wednesday.

Aaaand that about does it for this post. Again, big apologies for the huge gaps between updates; until my leg pain started up, I was finally getting into a good work rhythm again thanks to some lifestyle and scheduling changes, so I'm going to keep focusing on trying to get my leg back in working order so I can actually use my desk regularly again. I'm still feeling the urge and motivation to work - it's honestly been really frustrating to not be able to use my desk much lately - so I really do think things are going to improve a lot once this roadblock is taken care of.

Thanks so much for reading, and for being so patient with the lack of updates! Even if my leg continues to be a problem, I'm going to really try and stop skipping progress reports, so I can AT LEAST keep everyone up to date on what's going on. Anyway, get your votes in, and we'll see you again in a few days with the final poll of the 2nd Community Recolor!