Progress Report - Friday, June 11, 2021 - Projects Update: Rachaos, Femiranda, Overbreed, and Others (Patreon)

Hey all!

So I'm going to quickly address the Rachel/Chaos project, just to get it out of the way. The long and short of it is this: The Rachel/Chaos project is being shelved indefinitely.

There's a few reasons for it, but the primary reason is that the voice talent that I had cast for Rachel has been having an extremely difficult time with her schedule this year. We've been constantly rescheduling an off-the-record one-hour voice-coaching effort since January 27 - that's 4 and a half months of constant rescheduling.

I absolutely do not fault her at all for this. She has a full-time day job, as well as a husband and toddler to manage at home. Any one of those things would be a full-time effort for someone, and she's been trying to juggle the both of those and voice-acting all at the same time. It's a task that even Hercules would struggle with. Voice-acting, especially lewd voice-acting, has always been more of a passion project for her, a side-gig she did because she enjoyed it. And when schedules get crunched, side-gigs are the first to go. I wouldn't ask her to shuffle her schedule any other way.

But, after a lot of introspection, I think this has been having unintended side-effects of impacting my motivation on the project. I get trapped in a cycle of feeling like the project isn't progressing, and when it is progressing, it's all pointless because the voice actress won't be available to record for it anyways. Say what you will about it, but the pressure of having voice talent waiting on me, either to get them material to work with, or to see their work in a finished product, is a powerful driving force for me. And with her being indefinitely indisposed, I don't have that fire under my ass and kicking me along.

As a consequence, I've now started and finished two full projects during the time Rachaos was "in production"--the DVa comic, and this project. And I also finished a third project in the Marie on-stream video while Rachaos was "in production."

The worst of it all is that, in under four weeks, I managed to get the entirety of Femiranda written, blocked, animated, mocapped, voiced, lip-synced, polished, and edited. In six months, I haven't even finished the sex sequences for Rachaos. I honestly think I've spent more time working on other projects than I have the project that was "in production".

And so, after much reflection and deep consternation (and a healthy dose of self-hatred, but I've come to terms with that - don't worry about me in that capacity), I have decided to put Rachaos on battery power. I'm not pulling the plug on it yet, because I really do like the idea and I think it has a lot of merit, and my other voices have already contributed chunks to it, and I have written chunks of the larger DOAFantasy cinematic universe around it as canon. But I am putting it on ice, and shipping it back to the back of the shop.

Hopefully the voice actress will be able to clear her schedule in the future and we can return to it. But I have gone through the painful process of accepting that she may never be available to work again. Like I said, she has a job and a family, and doesn't need the voice-acting beside; it is entirely possible that she will decide to simply move on from it, have it be a passing chapter in the book that is her life.

That means recasting a few fair characters that she has voiced in the past and I have plans for in the future, including a few big projects that have anticipated follow-ups. And it means casting characters for future projects I had previously pegged her for voicing and so didn't need to cast.

I am sorry to disappoint people, I know a fair few were eagerly looking forward to Rachaos. Count me among one of them - I know in my heart it would have been a beautiful piece, and would have been a wonderful cumulation of both the pillars on which my work is built and the extremes that I normally have to restrain myself from pursuing - an entirely meta justification to literally go as crazy and over-the-top as I wanted, and have it be entirely bound by a logical lack of logic. Opportunities like that simply don't present themselves, and it's one I won't give up for a fight. But I have to, and will, let it go for now.

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Onto Femiranda!

As the post image suggests, the project is done! At least, on my end it is done. It's fully rendered in beautiful 4k, put together in Resolve with color correction and watermarking and what little VFX there is, and ready to be rendered and uploaded.

In a bizarre twist of events, I actually managed to fully finish the project before my sound designer finished his treatment of the soundscape. Normally I get the rough cut of the video to him at least 3 weeks before the final render is done, but seeing as this project in its entirety was built in little more than 3 weeks, that wasn't the case here.

Indeed, he barely even had a full week between my sending him an early build to work with, and me pushing a test export of the final build out of Resolve.

He's given me an early draft of the soundscape, and it's come out absolutely phenomenally, but there were a few things he needed to tweak, add, and remove. As such, it's not quite ready for release. He was originally aiming to compose some original music in the vein of the original Mass Effect soundtrack, but time constraints have convinced him against it in the end. If he had more time between him finishing the soundscape and him waiting for me to finish the video, he'd do it, but since he's now the bottleneck, he doesn't want to take any more time than he has to.

All things being equal, I am hoping for a Monday June 14 early-access 1080p release, with a public and 2160p exclusive release on Friday June 18.

I am also strongly considering a slightly edited bonus cut, available to only the 1080p and 2160p tiers - split-screen is a driving design of the project (and is actually what the entire project was built around, the split-screen idea is what motivated writing a project in the first place), and part of that is that I already have the lewd sequences fully animated. But then between a half and three-quarters of the animations are tossed out by the split-screen, and focus is taken away by the other half.

And so, this exclusive alternate cut would replace the split-screen shots with full-screen lewd views. There'd be no change to runtime, no "bonus content" or "cut content". Just a rearrangement of existing content, for a more focused and fappable viewing experience. Again, this alternate cut would be Patreon exclusive - no public version of this "focused cut" will be made available.

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Moving on from Femiranda, in the wake of Rachaos being iced, that means I have no active project right now. Right now, I am figuring out what my options are.

The first and obvious choice is Overbreed, and that is certainly a frontrunner. The problem with that choice is that I am torn between Episode 1 as I have had it planned, and "Episode 0" - a sort of precursor episode that sets up the worldbuilding.

In a nutshell, because Blizzard are fucking hacks when it comes to writing games these days, I have to basically do their job for them and take the schizophrenic cumshot they call Overwatch lore and bind it all up into a single cohesive story, filling in plot-holes the size of small countries with original writing, all while also engineering and explaining changes to make the fanon goings-ons make sense in the world that the writer (me) actually cares about.

DancesWithWolves and I have got it mostly figured out, but there's a lot of original work that's gone into it. To the point that pretty much everything but the character designs and names and the cores of their personalities (for the characters that even have that, anyways) is all original work. And then Overbreed itself doesn't really focus so much on backfilling all of this, as my writing preference for large stories is one of throwing the viewer balls-deep into a world and immediately running forward, expecting the viewer to do the legwork to figure out the nuances of how the world works.

The problem with that approach is that Overbreed's episodes are already pretty lengthy, with each episode progressing an overarching plot, having their own subplot, and a separate Memento-style plot. It doesn't leave a whole lot of room for also sitting the viewer down and reading a tourists' brochure explaining the fucking history of the Overwatch world.

So that's what Episode 0 is designed to do. The problem, of course, is how to make that engaging. Not just from a storywriting perspective, because info-dumps are fucking cringe, but from a lewd perspective. Let's be honest here, as much as I know you all love and cherish my deep and expertly interwoven prose, at the end of the day we're all here for one thing: watching our favorite waifus fucc and succ.

So the solution I came up with for Episode 0 is to have a character explaining the thesis of Overbreed in an appeal to the characters' unique history that needs to be addressed. Nice and simple.

Oh, and this voice-over is juxtaposed with a montage of all 13 ladies fucking and sucking their brains out, in a foreshadowing of events that will transpire through the 6-part miniseries proper.

So yeah, as you can imagine, that last little itty-bitty detail really complicates matters. It mostly boils down to two problems: the fact I'd have to build 13 fucking new character models (technically 10.5; DVa and Sombra are already made, and Mercy is mostly built though needs to be updated since the DazV5 standard has moved quite a bit underneath her), and the problem of voices for all of them.

Even though most of them wouldn't have any dialogue, the idea of completely silent sex scenes underneath the voice-over doesn't sit well with me. At the least they should be moaning and groaning as they get their asses, pussies, and throats stuffed with fat, throbbing dicks.

Right now I am contemplating different ways of faking it. Either going the cringe route and using in-game pain sounds (oof.wav), or having what voice actresses actually have speaking roles just faking it by making sounds and then pitch-shifting to at least get close to the characters' ranges. Because I really don't want to cast 13 simultaneous voices, for a project where 95% of them won't even have speaking lines.

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But that is only one option. It is the option I know I should do (be it Episode 0 or Episode 1), but damn me if it isn't daunting. Especially since the voice actress for Rachel was also going to be a main character in Overbreed, and with the recent decision to recast her roles, it means yet another character to cast that I previously didn't have to worry about.

A different option I am considering is a Rebecca Chambers project. I have, for years now, been writing up a rather elaborate and extensive cinematic universe focused on Rebecca and Sherry Birkin, which I creatively call the Sherbeccaverse. DancesWithWolves and I spent a fair bit of time today exploring a prelude project that would serve to set that up. The material we have is juicy, I'm not going to lie. It'd be a lot of fun to put together, and I think you all would like it.

But, I won't deny the fact that the only reason I ran to figuring out alternatives is because the 13-voice conundrum for Overbreed Episode 0 terrifies me. As I sit here writing this out, I have come to realize I need to sit down and seriously tackle that conundrum. Overbreed is the right choice. I just have to convince myself I can do it.

But Rebecca, I think, is going to be my fall-back.

I think that's all for now. This post has gone on far longer than I originally intended it to when I first sat down to write it. As of this writing, and including the entirety of this sentence, this post is currently sitting at 2200 words exactly. It is, of course, now over, but by adding the word "exactly" the previous sentence, it made it land on exactly 2200 words, and I am rather impressed by that.

I am now just rambling, so I am going to end this post.

That's all for now, everyone! Hopefully a release on Monday, and we'll see what I have to report next Friday!