Progress Report - February 8, 2022 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

Apologies for the minor delay on the post. I had a late night, trying to get stuff done before bed. Didn't have the time to write this post. But I do now! Hence where we are!

My original plans to have all of the work on the upcoming minivids done by Monday got a bit sidetracked pretty much right out the gate. Some of the sidetracking was positive, some of it... less so.

Starting with the bad, Thursday night I developed cold sores on the corner of my mouth. I've never had them before, and at the time I had no idea what they were - just that they were nasty, painful, and I've read about them being caused by herpes, which caused much confusion. Decided Friday morning, when they didn't get any better and they made eating extremely painful, that I needed to get them checked out.

So pretty much all of Friday was spent dealing with those, with a total of over 5 hours spent between waiting in the walk-in clinic waiting room, waiting to see a clinician, and then waiting at the pharmacy. The clinician took one look at them and basically immediately went "yep those are cold sores, virtually nothing else clusters like that" and put me on some antivirals to deal with the virus itself, and some lidocaine to swap on and numb the affected corner so I can eat.

After some looking into it, it appears that, while cold sores are indeed caused by a herpes virus, they're not caused by the same herpes virus that people (or at least I) think of when they hear the name. It turns out that herpes is an entire family of viruses, of varying degrees of severity and commonality. The herpes that causes cold sores is extremely common, and extremely nonthreatening. I'm still not sure how exactly I got it, but it's nothing to be worried about. Just inconvenient whenever it flares and forms cold sores, which hopefully won't be often at all. For many people, it never flares more than once in their life.

They really picked the worst place to be, because the corner of the mouth stretches whenever your mouth opens, and the stretching irritates the sores. And your mouth opens a lot during the day, especially for important things like eating. The lidocaine works a charm, though. Even if it is weird not being able to feel a quarter of my face.

They're healing well, and this morning I think is the first time where I could probably go without the lidocaine. Though I am still going to use it, just to be on the safe side. The other day, I tried eating when the lidocaine wore off and, well, let's just say that was an adventure I'd rather not repeat!

Moving onto the good, the major reason why the minivids got derailed this past week is that my Harley voice was extremely prompt. Like, I expected the process of getting audio to take 2 or so weeks. SultryLamp and I got it completely hammered out before the weekend was over.

So the Harley minivid is now 100% voiced, and ready to be sent over to my sound designer to work his magic. That took up the bulk of the week. It wasn't what I had planned, but I certainly won't complain about it!

Since Harley is so close to completion, she's going to be the March Minivid. So if you're a fan of sexy crazy, then you've something to look forward to next month!

I still want to get all three of the next minivid batch prepped and at least to the recording phase, before I shift gears back to Overbreed. In that capacity, I have the Leliana Minivid animated and written. I just need to do a one-over of the story, make sure I'm happy with it, before starting to look into getting it voiced. Hopefully Milly will be up to the task, whose voiced her historically for me, but last we spoke she was pretty busy with Life(TM) stuff, so I'm not hanging my entire life on that.

That leaves the Frozen Minivid, which only has a high-level draft figured out. No animation done yet, and no actual dialogue committed to paper. I'd like to get to starting that tonight, but we'll see.

Beyond the minivids, I've been working on a few other things!

Real quick, I put together a turntable animation comparing StealthClobber's iconic 2016 Jack (from Mass Effect) to Wolves' amazing 2021 Jack. You can click here to see the video. 

And then, over the past few days, I have been working on converting the Futashep interactive comic into a visual novel! This was done for myriad reasons, but the big two are that it makes development much easier on me (there's so much rigmarole involved in publishing the comics; the VN is explicitly designed to operate like a screenplay) and it allows players to explore all available options, rather than be locked into the tyranny of the majority.

The majority of the work went into writing the engine itself. That's right, this nocturnal burrowing mammal wrote their own visual novel engine, from the ground up. No prefabs, no libraries. Just straight vanilla Javascript.

Amazingly, it only took two days to get everything you see here. Once the engine was written, porting the existing comic over only took a few hours. That's why it was around 5am before I went to bed last night - porting 5 sessions of comic over all in one sitting isn't a quick task, especially since I don't have any testing tools designed yet so making sure everything at the end of the run worked correctly was... exciting.

With any luck, I'll be working on Overbreed again before the weekend! And then I'll be rowing that boat up till the end of the month, sans a wedding I am groomsman for on the 22nd, and possibly a few days of recovery from the Covid booster shot on the 15th. The last two shots I only had a tender arm for a few days, so I'm hoping for nothing more than a threepeat in that capacity.

I think that's all for now! Until next week, everyone!