Progress Report - June 18, 2021 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

It's been a week! Of course, the Mass Effect short Fraternization released to early access on Monday, to resoundingly positive feedback (and making almost exactly twice its production cost in new + upgraded pledges - wow! I consider just breaking even to be a resounding success!). And then in the days interim, I've been working on a handful of smaller projects as I collect my notes for the next project.

I discussed my thoughts in last week's Progress Report, but I am locking it in now: Overbreed will be my next project. Over the past 2 weeks, Wolves, Ordagon, and I have been furiously workshopping Episode 0 and how exactly it would work.

In the end, we decided earlier today that Episode 0 isn't really necessary, and is certainly more effort than it's worth. Not even counting the logistical nightmare of building and animating 13 character models and getting voices for all of them, but we just couldn't find a way to really marry all of the worldbuilding and relationship setup we wanted to accomplish with sequences of 13 ladies fucking in various ways.

And so, we've returned our sights and focus on Episode 1. We finally migrated form the high-level (just brainstorming) down to the mid-level (outlining). It's early days, we still have to hash out a end-to-end flow of the episode, but it's promising. I am hoping by the end of the week to have the mid-level done and to be started working on the low-level (screenplay, ready to be sent to voice talent).

In the meantime, I have finally dusted off the Mercy model I started building back in December 2020 (not to be confused with the Mercy model I started building back in March 2020, which I then lost track of and so I rebuilt her from scratch until finding her in again in March 2021, but by that point the December 2020 build was higher-quality anyways) and am setting out to finish her.

The first order of business was updating her to the latest DazV5.5 standard (V5.5.2). She was originally built on DazV5.0, before texture-pooling, extended genital flexes (definitely gonna need those), improved genital deforming, and corrected rigging and bone orientations. That went suspiciously smoothly, and she is now fully complaint to the DazV5.5 standard, with a whopping 20MB of unique textures (opposed to the 170MB of unique textures she'd have before). All of which means that I have Sombra, Mercy, and Zarya (not yet built) all in a single project file and have them, altogether, consume 140MB of memory (80MB for the base, +20MB x 3 for each of them), whereas before the texture pooling they would have taken 510MB of memory by themselves.

With that done, the next and current task is the outfitting. I've got pretty much all of the outfit variants done - just need to make a rear-access cut of Mercy's leggings for the cold-open action of Zarya railing her. The rigging should (should) be trivially straightforward, as should be getting her into Source and ready for action.

Then I just have to build Zarya quickly (she won't need much in the way of bodygroups variants right now, thank god), and then figure out the logistical nightmare that will be how to best expose Sombra's outfit, for Mercy to adequately fuck the ever-loving shit out of her.

That should more or less cover all of the asset preproduction required. As I work on these models, I will be working on the writing side of things, hammering out the mid-level and low-level stuff. Once the screenplay and assets are both done, then animation production will begin and I start reaching out for voices. As it stands right now, I am going to need at least 4 voices, with a possible 5th depending on how some of my as-yet-unwritten ideas pan out. If 5 voices are used, I think that will beat the previous record for most voices in a project (4 voices in Rabbit.Hole Episode 3)!

Unfortunately beyond that point everything is just too hazy to predict. Without even a mid-level to guide me, I can't even hazard a guess as to what kind of hurdles there will be to overcome. I have some general ideas of things I'd like to do, but until they're committed to metaphorical stone in the form of a locked-in screenplay, they're just too fluid for me to really plan around.

I won't know more until the screenplay is locked in and production begins in earnest. So until then, you guys are just gonna have to ride the ambiguity train with me. Hopefully next week I will have some exciting news on that front. If not, I should at least have some Zarya and Sombra to share with you all.

That's all I have for now! As a final note, the Fraternization short goes public and 2160p exclusive tomorrow afternoon! If you've been waiting out, you won't have to wait much longer!

Until next time, everyone!