February Progress Report - Week 3 of Leliana Short (Patreon)

Today's progress report shows a debut of Milly Stern's delectable take at Leliana's quasi-French accent. You can watch the WIP video here. 

We almost didn't get that preview, though! Milly's household has been fighting off a nasty cold (and a sniffly, stuffy-nosed Leliana would just be no good!), and then dealing with some good news that nevertheless took her away from being able to record for a few days.

Indeed, I didn't get this audio until less than 24 hours ago. All of Leliana's animation you see here was done earlier today. As always, all of the animation you see is done entirely by hand - no motion-capture, no automated tools, no assistant animators. Every little detail keyed by hand, by yours truly.

Unfortunately, progress on the Leliana short has been stunted for most of the week, as I was waiting on this audio. I am waiting on a last bit of audio from Milly, so that I can complete the sex scene's dub-sequence and get that pushed. Hoping to get that by Friday, so I can have the dub-sequence pushed by Monday. Everything goes well, I should then have the dub audio by next Thursday, and then from there have everything ready for a release by the Thursday after.

Which, if you pay attention to the time table there, means that the short is going to end up releasing a week later than planned, with a projected release date of March 8. It's unfortunate, but it's what happens when a project gets delayed for about 10 days, waiting on audio.

BEYOND THE LELIANA SHORT,

everyone's favorite Elizabeth / Liara / Samus voice, InsideIncognita, is finally rid of her crushing obligations she's had since the new year, and we have been spending time this week working on the Elizabeth video. We've almost finished working out the details for the dub sequence (which will be a 5-minute non-stop sex sequence), and I ended up revising a few of the animations made for it slightly, to better accommodate the ideas that Innie wanted to execute in her delivery.

There's no ETA on that project, since it's now been relegated to the backburner, and is basically being worked on whenever I hit a roadblock on the Leliana short, or just need to take a break from it. But progress is being made on it, and I will keep you all apprised as it moves along.

And speaking of backburner projects, I have also been making some progress on the D.Va project, as well. Now that Innie has her schedule freed up, and she was reaffirmed to me that she's excited to give babbling in Korean a chance, I've been working on hammering out the finalized screenplay for it, as well as adding some of the non-sex animations that screenplay facilitates (I previously only had the sex animations done for it).

Like the Liz video, there is no ETA on the D.Va project, either. It only gets worked on when I've hit a roadblock / need a break from both the Leliana short and the Liz video, which means it doesn't get worked on much.

I have not made contact yet, but I do have the name of a native Korean speaker who might be willing to help me and Innie both verify our translations for the Korean (about 95% of D.Va's lines in the video are in Korean), and possibly serve as a voice coach for Innie's enunciation. She is a huge consumer of Korean media (she loves Korean dramas to an almost unhealthy degree), but she doesn't fluently speak Korean, and just listening to the language passively isn't enough to pick up the nuances of speaking it.

I always strive for getting things as close as possible to the original source material, and so getting the Korean and the pronunciation right is pretty important to me - if it's possibly achievable, then I will strive to achieve it.

Since the project is now moving forward, even if slowly, I suppose now is as good a time as any to announce a unique feature to it: I am looking to have a few Patrons (that's you guys and gals) contribute some male voices to the D.Va project (sorry gals, I don't have a spot for you on the project).

I'm not accepting auditions right now, but if you're interested in contributing to the project, then here is the breakdown for the voices, ordered with most lines to least lines:

• A cocky young show-off, bangs D.Va
• A lazy smart-ass, bangs D.Va
• Five super chill, casual young guys
• Two e-sports television announcers 

As you can see, I have nine total character voices to fill. That doesn't necessarily mean that I need nine voice actors, since it's possible for a single actor to voice multiple characters (see how many characters in Mass Effect that Mark Meer voiced). Similarly, it doesn't necessarily mean I will be pulling all of those voices from my pool of Patrons (for example, I plan to ask Ivan about the e-sports announcers, simply because I know from experience he has the ability to project his voice in a way that may be conducive for that).

Similarly, I explicitly mention the "bangs D.Va" because that means that, in addition to just providing lines, they will also need to provide dub audio for the sex scene (which for the guys is mostly breathing and grunting), without overacting and making it really distracting (since I think I speak for most of the guys here when I say that having a really loud gorilla of a man in porn is annoying).

Everyone sans the two announcers say lewd things, so if you're not comfortable with that, your potential to contribute is pretty limited.

The voice rolls will all be paid, at a rate of $50 USD per minute of audio used (NOT audio recorded!), with a lot of rounding up in the voice actor's favor. I am picky about both technical audio quality (no hiss, no static, no ambient noise, no tinny sound, no reverb, no popping or crackling; I'm looking for professional quality audio) and performance.

But if any of you are interested in providing some voices down the line, and think you can meet those requirements, then I would certainly recommend you make sure you got the best equipment you're comfortable investing in, and maybe start practicing some voice warm-ups, for when I do finally open the auditions sometime in the following months.

Beyond those video projects, I have also been making progress on the Vault Elizabeth game design document, which I will be posting on Sunday. It has a two-page overview, with currently four pages of details, which go painfully in-depth of explaining the mechanics and even the mathematics behind the systems. I have a lot more sections to write details on, but regardless of how complete the document is, it will be posted Sunday evening. The overview is the important part, and it's hammered in, so the rest is just syntactic sugar that I don't expect 90% of people to read anyways (of the people I expect to read it at all, which is only like 10% of you guys and gals anyways).

I think that's all for now! I will see you all next Thursday, which will be the first of March, and so the first day I resume work on Blue Star Episode 3! However, next Thursday's progress report will still be primarily focused on the Leliana short.

Until next week!