Progress Report - DOAFantasy, Liziverse, Hiveship, Blue Star, Overbreed, Games ; A Superpost (Patreon)

Hey all!

This update is a bit late, because I wanted to get this preview image in a presentable state for it, and I just didn’t quite have the outfit ready last night. The image still isn’t done (need to do finger-posing, face-posing, and pose the outfits to fix some clipping), but it’s definitely far enough along to present the idea. What is that idea, exactly, you may ask? Well, that segues perfectly into the first of many chapters for today’s post:

The DOAFACU

The DOAFACU is something that my Discord and I have been slowly putting together over the past year or so. Standing for the Dead Or Alive Fantasy Aardvarian Cinematic Universe, it is exactly what its name suggests: an extended cinematic universe involving various DOAFantasy ladies, all in a single continuity. The DOAFACU itself is split into three phrases: Phase 1 is introducing the various characters and their places in the DOAFACU, Phase 2 is bringing them all under roof, and then Phase 3 finally is the big Avengers event that the DOAFACU is singularly building up to: an Ocean’s Eleven-inspired sex-filled heist miniseries, aptly given the working title of the DOAFHeist.

The Marie/Helena project that we have been building live on Saturday streams for the past few weeks, and that is quickly coming to completion, is the official debut of the DOAFACU. And the Rachel project will be my next major video is also a part of the DOAFACU. The fact these two videos are officially part of the DOAFACU leads perfectly back to the purpose of the image used for this Patreon post:

It is part of what will be the official DOAFACU splash image.

Basically, every DOAFACU project I release will begin with this DOAFACU splash image, as well as a separate image isolating the characters that the project is focusing on, to clearly denote what videos are part of the DOAFACU, and (by the exclusion of the splash) what videos are not.

Speaking of DOAFACU projects, I have begin putting together a relationships map to visually manage how all of the characters are related to one another. This is very early days, and I have a lot more relationships to figure out. The ultimate end goal is to have every character within 4 edges of Playboy, whom is the center of Phases 2 and 3 (DOAFACU culminates in a harem consisting of the 14 original DOAFantasy ladies, all under the roof of an eccentric male character codenamed Playboy for reasons I hope are obvious).

I spent entirely too much time trying to figure out how to generate this graph in Python, but now that I finally have it figured out, it makes managing this so much easier. The graph is color-coded, with Playboy being hot red, and the nodes “cooling” the further away they get from him, dropping off to a cool cyan at or exceeding a distance of 5. The goal is to have every node be connected such that none of them reach that cool cyan color.

The edges, as I said earlier, represent relationships. But these aren’t relationships in the sense of personal relationships, like X is a friend of Y, or Z works for W. Instead, these are relationships in the sense of the characters having some shared sexual experience—like Helena watching-and-directing Marie getting facefucked, or Tina and Lisa having a FFM scene in an in-universe porno film.

I’m not going to go into much detail, or bring this up again, until I have the graph more fully fleshed out. But it is something I have been and currently am still working on, so I felt it only appropriate to bring up in this fuck-off huge Patreon post.

The Liziverse Report

Next up on the agenda of things I want to discuss is Liziverse and the information related to it. First and foremost, I want to just put voice to how much the positive reception everyone has had to the project means to me. As you likely know, there was a point where I was so disillusioned with the project I was literally one Tweet away from publicly abandoning the project—if it wasn’t for the fact my dinner finished cooking before I finished writing that Tweet, it is very possible that Liziverse would never have been finished.

By and large, I am still very unhappy with how the writing came out. There are literally entire story threads that I ripped out, after having them written, recorded, and animated, just because of how poorly I felt they came together. And if you pay close attention, you can still find the awkward holes they left behind. I did my best to seal them up, but there is some dialogue that I kept that leans on context that simply doesn’t exist anymore.

But with that being said, Innie’s fantastic performance and especially Tonedeaf’s expert sound design absolutely saved the video. I’ve gotten a lot of feedback about how smoothly the internal-monologuing of Liz fighting her urges plays out, and that is 100% thanks to my sound designer and the subtle effects he put on the “thinking” dialogue as opposed to the “speaking” dialogue. Trust me, in my raw SFM export, they sound absolutely indistinguishable and the project is an absolute mess because of it.

Liziverse took Tonedeaf a lot longer to work on that we anticipated—between university, covid, the unique challenges of the project (like the aforementioned inner-monologue gimiick), and Premiere being a shit and undoing literal hours of work—but in the end, I think it was absolutely worth every extra day it took.

For as unhappy as I am with the way the project ended up being put together technically, I have to admit that the final project came out extremely slick. And while it’s not my best writing, there’s enough flare in the edit that makes it an overall enjoyable experience. When I hit the big red button and got the renders started, I expected Liziverse to dethrone A Cold Winter’s Night as my worst project to date. But when the dust has settled, I think I’d honestly nestle it as my 8th-favorite project I’ve released so far. Which, when there’s 21 other videos, is honestly a pretty good placement when I expected it to come dead-last at #22.

And it seems like the general consensus has been extremely positive, too! It currently has 52 Aardvarks on the official film page, a 163/6 like/dislike ratio on PornHub, a +373 score on rule34.xxx, and overall positive comments across the board. And above all of that, the 6 days of early access put the project squarely in the black, and even just managed to make a tiny bit of profit. Project cost a cool $1075 to produce, and it pulled in $1480 in new pledges during the 6-day early-access period. Taking into account the ~33% tax rate I’ll be paying on the proceeds for the month, 133% of the production cost means that the effective-total cost of production was $1430. That $1480 yields a nifty $50 profit—I could almost buy a full-price game for that much!

That might come across as bitter or sarcastic, but I do genuinely mean it when I say that I am very excited to see the project be entirely paid for just in new pledges. As I’ve said before, I’m not in this for profit—as long as I end up not spending more in a given month than I make, I am a perfectly happy aardvark. And since Liziverse ended up fully supporting itself, it means all of the money not spend on living expenses this month can go directly into future endeavors, which really is an ideal situation to be in financially.

So to those who pledged-and-left, I appreciate you all taking the dive and splurging on the project even if it was going to go public a week later. And to those who pledged and stay, I can’t overstate how much it means to me that you decided to stick around.

Website Upgrades

Those who were around for the public release of Liziverse—or those who joined in the early-access in the last 2 days before the public release, as well as those who have been going backwards through the archive and finding old early-access links no longer working—were probably all too aware of the… growing pains that we had.

Indeed, Liziverse was actually delayed a full day (almost 2 days, really) because of these growing pains. Allow me to briefly address the reason for those.

In a nutshell, over the past 6 or so months, my web developer and I (really mostly him, I’m fucking allergic to web development) have been slowly overhauling the back-end system for the Films page. The clunky old site that I used to use is something that I had put together myself from scratch in about a week, and while it worked, it didn’t really work well.

At the risk of getting too technical, the old films page was basically two systems that were loosely tied together. The first system was a single really big glorified text file. This text file contained all of the film titles, their banner images, their previews, their descriptions, and their view links. This text file, in its entirety, would be downloaded to the user every time they viewed or refreshed the page. This would result in long load times, because it had to download everything, and then sort it all out and construct the web page, hiding all of the irrelevant data.

The second system in the old films page was the viewing pages themselves. I had to maintain four different web pages for each individual video: A public 720p website, an early-access 1080p website, a 2160p website, and a post-2160p-released 1080p website. On top of this, the old films system had absolutely zero security, as I know people have found as I’ve seen people sharing and pirating the Patreon-exclusive videos rather regularly. The “security” consisted of the fact that I would tag long strings of gibberish to the end of the 1080p and 2160p videos, because people can just guess the filename and get access to the video.

Those are the old systems. The new system, that again we’ve been working on quietly for the past 6 or so months, and we debuted with the public release of Liziverse, is much tighter, more secure, easier for me to manage, and easier for you all to use. First and foremost, instead of being two separate systems tied together with duct-tape and chewing gum, it’s now all a single system—the video player and the main films page are all a single page, instead of a monolithic text-file and a collection of 4 different websites that I have to manage.

And speaking of that monolithic text-file, that has been done away with. Now, everything is stored in a database on the server, and only the information that a user needs is sent. So instead of downloading the pictures and descriptions of all 22 videos as soon as you load the page, you only download them when you click on a film to see it. Much faster and much more responsive.

And perhaps most impressively of all, the new system has built-in security, hooking directly into your Patreon account to sort out access. Instead of needing to manage different websites and obscuring their filenames for public 720p, early-access 1080p, and exclusive 2160p, now everyone uses the same video-player—and they simply choose the quality they want on the player itself, being gated off automatically by their Patron status.

Pirating and sharing exclusive content is of course still possible, and we’re not going to try to install draconian DRM systems to protect them. But it’s a lot more difficult than just copy-pasting the URL around or even just literally guessing the filename. Which is honestly all I care about—a modicum of security without inconvenience the everyday user.

The reason for the delay is that my web developer and I were trying to solve a bandwidth capping issue we ran across. The server is so old that you literally can’t even rent a new one of them off the host I use, and it’s using equally old (and slow!) hardware. As such, we have meticulously tuned how much bandwidth a single user can take for each video quality, to try to ensure they get a smooth streaming experience without straining the server and depriving other users of an equally smooth experience.

Despite our best efforts though, we were still getting subpar performance. My download speeds while testing were getting capped at absurdly low levels, and our hardware use was spiking far higher than it should have, to the point it seemed that even 2 people streaming 4K simultaneously would overload the server and effectively lock everyone else out of being able to stream.

The additional day that I took before releasing Liziverse was basically spent just tweaking configuration files and testing how to solve these two issues. In the end, we got it (more or less), but it took damn near 16 hours of trial-and-error to figure it out. And that’s to say nothing of all the technical problems we ran into and rabbit-holes we fell down trying to resolve those.

So yeah. That’s why the Liziverse release took longer than anticipated. But I have to say, the new Films page has been performing above and beyond our expectations (to say that we were a bit pessimistic after spending 2 days fighting the bandwidth issue would be an understatement), and we are tickled pink at how well it’s been performing.

My web developer has been keeping an eye on the user statistics, and has been quietly tinkering away to solving issues as they prop up. Things like people using really old Android phones having the layout break on them, or some flavors of iPhone users straight-up not having the video player at all work on them. So it’s not a one-and-done project, and the site is being constantly tweaked to improve performance and get as many people able to have a smooth experience as they possibly can. My web developer works absurdly hard and, being behind the scenes, no one really even notices the work he does.

So I just want to take a special moment to highlight him and his heroic efforts to keep the hard-drive platters from melting. I might be the aardvark who makes the newd people do the lewds, but he’s the baby yoda who makes it so you all can watch the newd lewds comfortably from your device of choice.

Speaking of baby yoda, he also put together a hella slick management system for me that makes releasing new videos an absolute breeze. I don’t have to manually put together the preview images or the banner images in Photoshop, meticulously screenshotting, cropping, and fading the images. I don’t have to upload 6 different video files and keep track of all of their URLs, to then manually edit a text file and install them, after of course creating 4 new HTML web-pages and managing them as well.

Now, using his “Baby Yoda” plugin, so named because all of the custom elements he added use images of The Child from Mandalorian in absolutely adorable ways, I literally just drop the 1080p video-file into the system, and it automatically allows me to quickly grab stills for previews and cropping for the banner, and edits them all automatically. Then I just target all of the videos to upload, and it automatically manages the file-management and permissions for me. Uploading a video went from an ordeal that’d take half a day to literally just 4 clicks and a bit of typing. It couldn’t be any easier.

And the dust had hardly even settled on the Films page before my web developer turned his attentions over to my Assets page. It was built off the same code-base as the old Films page, and if you thought the system I described earlier seemed clunky and convoluted, let me just say that the Assets page is multivariable calculus compared to that system’s pre-algebra. It is an absolutely nightmare, and updating it is a Goliathan task that puts the Film-page update to shame.

So I implore you all to give your best wishes to my web developer. He has his work cut out for him.

GPU Adventures

As you may or may not know, for the past few weeks I have been having problems with my graphics card. It’s absolutely not a bad card, as a GTX 980 Ti. It’s just old. I’ve had it for about 5 years, replacing a 680 Ti that melted itself to a crisp after 2-odd years of use, and it has been tortured and abused pretty much every day of its life, with intense SFM renders while playing games with 3dsMax and Photoshop and Premiere all running in the background. The fact it lasted 5 years under such conditions is honestly applause-worthy.

But it’s gotten tired and unstable lately. It got to the point that the graphics driver would crash once every day or two, causing every program running that used the graphics card to crash with it. So that’d be OBS (my video recording and streaming software), 3dsMax, Photoshop, Premiere, any games, and of course SFM itself. Then the driver would crash every day. Then twice every day. Then three times. Four times, five times.

It got to a point that I basically couldn’t play games. I’d be lucky if I could literally go more than 10 minutes in Monster Train (a 2D card game) without a crash. At one point, I crashed 7 times in a row, never getting more than 30 seconds into the game. The past few streams have been punctuated by my graphics card crashing and dragging the stream down with it.

I’m a stubborn motherfucker, but even I can see the writing on the wall when it gets to the point that just running Discord can cause the driver to crash. The 980 Ti is on its last legs, and even though it’s giving all it’s got, it’s just not enough anymore.

The awkward part is that I have already made plans to build a new PC with my family this Christmas. My parents are huge tech-heads like I am, and one of my dad’s absolute favorite things to do is build PCs. But for the past few years he’s had job-security issues, and as such hasn’t been able to splurge on new PC parts like he likes to. He hasn’t built a new PC in half a decade now, and he’s been eagerly waiting for when I finally upgrade my PC, because he knows I’ve been having much more financial stability than he has been (which is a queer thought, believe you me).

Initially I was hoping that the 980Ti would hold out until Christmas, but as its stability degraded further and further with each passing day, it soon became apparent to me that it wasn’t going to make it. So I began looking and asking around for a placeholder card. Eventually my father and I settled on an old GTX 780 he had laying around (again, tech-head, so just having GPUs sitting around is a thing in the household I grew up in), and he mailed it on up to me.

The card arrived on Wednesday (hence why the Wednesday stream was cancelled), and basically all of Wednesday was just spent benchmarking my 980Ti in various applications, and then Thursday was spent installing the 780 and benchmarking it. The 980Ti benchmarks were extremely thorough, because I also want to use those numbers to compare to my new computer I am building on Christmas. The 780’s benchmarks were far simpler, because I just wanted a rough idea of how it performs.

Overall, the 780 gives me a solid 80% of the 980Ti. It’s two generations older, and a weaker model (X80 vs X80Ti), so worse performance is expected, but I am honestly impressed with the fact it’s as high as it is. I get a solid 25fps less in games with the 780 than I do the 980Ti, but seeing as I can still push well over 100 frames at 1080p 60Hz in most games (don’t judge me; I am using free secondhand monitors that were getting thrown out when my dad’s workplace upgraded their computer system), that’s really not much of a loss.

More relevant to this Patreon, SFM renders seem to suffer that same 80% penalty. I tested with a sequence from Liziverse at 2160p, and where the 980Ti was able to render at 17 seconds per frame, taking 1:55:00 to render 387 frames, the 780 took 21 seconds per frame, and ended up taking 2:20:00 to finish the render. With Liziverse in whole taking 19.5 hours to render on my 980Ti, it would have taken the 780 almost exactly 24 hours to render.

For such a generational gap between the two cards, that’s honestly not a bad setback.

So, between now and Christmas, I will be using this notably-weaker-but-still-respectably-strong GPU. My hardware FAQ page has been updated to reflect this. And it will be updated again once the new computer is built.

The Immediate Future – Rachaos, Phazon, and Hiveship

That’s enough discussing things that have already come to pass. No, seriously, the previous chapters take up literally 6 MSWord pages and over 3500 words. It’s time to move on.

First up, the next Short I am working on, Rachaos. I have discussed it a few times before, and there haven’t been any major updates yet, so I will just make this brief: Rachaos has formally entered full preproduction. Most recently, I have worked around the technical problems I was having with Rachel’s outfit, and I have finished building and faceposing Rachel herself. She is fully production-ready.

I have @WancesWitDolves doing some texture work for the armor, while I have been working on the DOAFACU poster (which, while not directly related to Rachaos, is technically start part of the production, since Rachaos is a DOAFACU video and as such needs the DOAFACU poster finished to put in front of the final video.) I still have to hunt and polish some other assets, and I need to finish the screenplay yet. I will report more on those in the next update post, where I will have hopefully made some notable progress on them.

As to the formerly-Phazon hexalogy and the formerly-Samus film Hiveship… As you all likely know by now, some weeks back my Patreon got slammed hard with DMCA takedowns for everything and anything related to Samus and Metroid. This most imminently impacts the Phazon hexalogy, and also has widespread repercussions for Hiveship—both of which need to now be adapted to use fully-original characters and IPs, as to avoid any future DMCA shenanigans.

I have discussed previously that the story impacts of this change are minimal. The Phazon hexalogy has very few ties to the Metroid IP, with Samus being the only strong connection—Phazon is just a macguffin substance used to justify the narrative of the hexalogy, and can easily be replaced by Unobtanium without any tangible changes to the story. And Hiveship itself is even less tied to Metroid, eschewing all of the existing alien designs in the Metroid franchise to favor entirely unique and original designs that myself and Ordagon are putting together.

But something I have failed to really put weight onto is the inverse side of that coin. While it’s relatively simple to decouple the story of the hexalogy and film, decoupling the assets is a different story altogether. The character previously portrayed by Samus Aran has to not only be built from scratch—face, hair, and body—but also all of her outfits. And not only do we have to make those assets, but we have to come up with wholly original designs too, which if you’ve ever done any asset-creation work for a project, even just 2D, then you know that often the design process can be far more time-intensive and laborious than the actual creation process.

And then there’s more outside of just the protagonist character that needs to be built from the ground up with these changes. There’s also the characteristics of the substance formerly referred to as Phazon—its origin and properties can no longer be conveniently borrowed from viewer knowledge from the games, but has to be explicitly designed and explained within the videos. The same goes for the visual cues—the Phazon glowing pulse, among other things.

Then beyond the Phazon itself, there is also the overall aesthetic of what was formerly the Galactic Federation. If we’re going to be going to a completely original IP, with completely original environments and creatures in Hiveship, then we can’t really just fall back to using Mass Effect environment assets. So we effectively have to design an entire space station from scratch, both visually and functionally, and then build those assets as well.

All in all, the amount of actual asset work that goes into the hexalogy has been criminally understated in the past, and I take full responsibility for that. And Hiveship itself has already been extremely slowgoing in its preproduction, just due to the scale of the responsibilities we had before the complications of this move to an original IP.

As such, the hexalogy is delayed indefinitely—and by indefinitely, I do not mean it’s cancelled. I’ve had people misinterpret my use of the word “indefinitely” in the past. By “delayed indefinitely,” I mean “delayed for an amount of time I have no way to even predict.” It is absolutely still planned to be finished. But it’s just going to take a while. Maybe by the end of 2021 we’ll be in a position I can resume production. Maybe sooner than that. Probably later than that. As a wise bearded man with a forge once said—these things, they take time.

As a consequence of this, and after much deliberation on the subject, I have ultimately decided that I am going to put Hiveship back on the shelf. For the past few months, it has been my “Long” project—part of the “Long/Short cycle” I built in response to Blue Star Episode 3burning me out from working on for months nonstop, where I would alternate between working on a large-scale “Long” project and various small-scale “Short” projects. And all of those days spent on it have been in preproduction. A lot of progress has been made, but it’s all very high-level things like plot outlining and flowcharts of environments and how they connect. Not a lot to show, and even less to actively produce content with.

But seeing as Hiveship is fundamentally built on the foundation of assets established and used by the hexalogy, and the hexalogy itself is delayed indefinitely (again, NOT CANCELLED!!), I have come to the conclusion that it only makes sense for Hiveship to be put back in the freezer for the foreseeable future.

It’s a project that has been teased since 2016 (if not earlier), and it pains me to put it back. But at the same time, I can see the writing on the wall, and I realize that it’s a very long way away from actively being produced. And if I can’t even work on the prequel miniseries that it uses as a literal foundation, then saying that Hiveship itself is the current “Long” is a bit of a farce.

So where does that leave us then?

The Farther Future – Blue Star, Overbreed, and Game Development

You noticed that Blue Star mention previously? That other really big project that, while certainly have more to show for it than the ephemeral Hiveship does, hasn’t been touched for nearly 2 years now, with every question about its continuing being answered with “after Hiveshipis done”?

Well, with Hiveship officially being put back on the shelf… can you guess where that puts Blue Star?

Yes, that’s right! I am officially moving Blue Star Episode 4 into the Long docket. I’m not sure when I will start preproduction in earnest on it, though right now I am thinking I might take an especially long preproduction period and pull double-duty on both the Rachaos preproduction and the Blue Star preproduction.

One of the things I’ve been wanting to do for a few months now is sit down and write out a Blue Star bible, with all of the backstory I’ve in mind for the series spelled out, as well as high-level overviews of the full 20-episode course of the project. I think what I will do is take the time to do exactly that.

More specifically, I am thinking that I will finish the Rachaos preproduction, then write the Blue Star bible, and then finally revisit, revise, and finish the Blue Star Episode 4 screenplay. I won’t go full-blast on the BSE4 preproduction and begin the asset-construction stage, but I want to at least have a full and finalized screenplay treatment ready. The version I posted before is over 2 years old, and my writing has (hopefully) improved a fair bit by then. So revisiting and revising it is definitely a good idea.

Once the BSE4 screenplay is tuned up, I intend to post it here on the Patreon, and then jump into the Rachaos production.

As to when the last of BSE4 preproduction, the asset creation and dialogue recording, will begin? I’m honestly not sure. Right now, I am tentatively thinking that I will give Rachaos a solid 4 weeks of production (not counting the preproduction). Hopefully it will be more or less done and be in the last stages of detailing, if not straight-up being in post-production, after 4 weeks. Depending on exactly where Rachaos is will determine how much attention is given to BSE4, but after those 4 weeks, I want to start putting serious attention to it. And, of course, any such developments will be reflected in the progress reports going forward.

Rolling attentions to 2021, I only have one video project squarely in my sights (outside of BSE4, of course), and that is the first episode of Overbreed, my futa Overwatch series I have been quietly nursing and then not-as-quietly showcasing for far too long. It will be the Short immediately following Rachaos, with some BSE4 work being done in between.

Outside of that, I am very intentionally not making a schedule for 2021, like I did for 2020. I’ve mentioned it before, the schedule for 2020 was a colossal failure because, well, 2020. I’m not going to put myself through that stress again.

Similarly, I want to reiterate this point: I am throwing away the arbitrary deadline of “Short gets released at the end of the month.” These “Shorts” have ballooned to the point that’s just not a viable deadline, and life is stressful enough as it is without voluntarily throwing more on stress on top. And so from now, videos will take as long as they need, and will release when they’re well and ready. And again, as always, the weekly progress reports will keep you all abreast of how things are going in that regard.

Beyond Overbreed, I have long been mentioning how I want to start getting some experience in proper game development, most likely using Unity. This is all toward the ultimate goal of realizing the grand plan of the main Fallen Throne story as a game. But I don’t want to jump straight into the major project, and instead work on smaller, simpler projects, to get used to the workflow and quirks of the tools.

It took me 4 years of animating loops before I had the confidence to tackle fully-voiced projects. I want to go through a similar (though hopefully quicker) process of “practice” games before tackling the full games.

I had alluded in some previous posts to a visual novel idea that I was exploring as my first project. In my spare time I have been doing some high-level concept work on that, and I have come to the decision that—while I do want to eventually do the visual novel, just out of a passion in the idea itself—I don’t think it’s a good idea for a first game-development experiment.

Put simply, visual novels—and especially the one I have in mind—are extreme exercises in writing. They are honestly 95% writing to 5% game development. And while writing experience is always valuable, my focus with these game-development projects is, well, the game development. Not the writing.

So I am putting the visual novel idea on the shelf. I don’t know what I will do as a first game development in its place. Maybe some of the minigame systems I’ve drafted for the visual novel could be adapted into their own game projects. Maybe I can revisit some of my old game ideas, like Vault 68, or the Normandy brothel, or SLUT Squad, or the BAS Liz adventure game I don’t think I ever publicly discussed. Maybe I can come up with something entirely original.

Right now, I’m not focused on it. But it’s in the back of my mind, and as Overbreed winds down production, I will be putting a lot more thought into it. As of right now, these are just my thoughts on the subject.

I think that finally concludes this Goliathan post. Almost exactly 9 full pages, and over 5500 words.

That’s all for now! Kudos to those of you who actually read the whole damn thing. I apologize for all of the typos and grammar errors—I’ve been writing this for over 2.5 hours now, and it’s currently 2:20AM. I am very tired.

Until next time, everyone!