Progress Report - June 14, 2022 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

June Minivid

So I was all geared up and ready to kick this post off by saying that the June minivid's final render is done, and is getting final touches in post-production. And that would have been true, the render was done...

Except I accidentally fucked up and dumped the entire render into the aether. 🤦‍♂️

My main PC has SFM installed onto its E drive, which is where it renders to. My render PC, however, has SFM installed onto its D drive. My render PC does not have an E drive.

When I transfer project files from my main PC to my render PC, the filepaths go with it. Which means that the project files try to render out to my E drive, even on my render PC.

Nominally, I change the drive letter before rendering, and all is well. Well, this time, I forgot to do so. And SFM doesn't do any checks or give any errors if you try to write to non-existent folders. Or, in this case, non-existent drives. It just chugs along, generating animation frames, and quietly discarding them without a care in the world.

And so I spent 2 days waiting for the 2160p render to finish, only to get absolutely nothing out of it. I was, uhh, not a happy camper when I realized that this afternoon.

In the aftermath of that fiasco, I've managed to set up a symlink on my render machine, that will redirect any attempts to render anything onto the E drive over to the D drive, where it belongs. That was nowhere near as painless an endeavor as it sounds, though, and ultimately required me to shave off a few MB from one of my hard-drives and create a new partition assigned to the E:/ drive letter, and then recreate the folder structure I wish to symlink.

So now my render machine has a worthless 100MB E:/, just so I could create a symlink and send any renders going to the E:/ over to the D:/ instead.

The end result, though, is now it won't matter if I forget to change the render path in the future. Regardless of a render targets the D:/ like it should, or the E:/ by mistake, they will always end up on the D:/. So I don't have to worry about this ever happening again in the future.

So, the Leliana minivid is delayed two days more than it should have, because I was a big dumb-dumb. But a consequence of my being a big dumb-dumb is I reacted by being a big smart-smart, and now it is technically impossible for me to ever dumb-dumb like this again.

On-Stream Projects

Some decent progress has been made with the on-stream projects. You may recall the What Happens On Illium poster that was attached to last week's Progress Report, and how it had a bunch of placeholder art alongside its bottom. I've made a few posters to replace that placeholder art and better represent the ideas for it - namely hooker Femshep, stripper Kasumi, and futa stallion Jack.

As On Illium bakes, we've decided to spin up a much simpler and shorter on-stream project, with Marie. I think the project's title in the pitch poster sufficiently sums up the synopsis of that project, so I won't waste much time explaining it.

As has become tradition now, my Saturday animation streams are being split between two projects - the aforementioned Marie video, and our longstanding Frozen project. Earlier today, I finished up and posted the narrative animation for the Frozen video over on Twitter. It is fully voiced by the wonderful MimiHung, who will hopefully be returning to voice the sisters in all their lewd action once the video is ready for her.

Off-Stream Projects

With the June minivid finally done (sans the rendering, sound design finalizing, post-production, and rigmarole involved in uploading it of course), I am finally able to return my attentions to Overbreed.

My immediate goal right now is to get Overbreed Episode 0, the exposition dump and preview of lewdness to come, done and dusted. It is intentionally designed to be a light project, and so I am expecting it to not take me longer than a month to get it done.

As such, I am not anticipating doing another minivid for August. Seeing as it's currently June 13, and I am anticipating a month to get Overbreed Episode 0 done, that'd put the projected finish date at mid-July. Then throw in a 2-week buffer for things going wrong, and that'd put Episode 0 squarely within a minivid release date.

So rather than kill myself by splitting my attention and rushing a minivid and rushing Overbreed Episode 0, I am going to instead just take my time to do Episode 0 right, and have its release take the place of the August minivid. Minivids will return in October, though what the October minivid will be, I haven't the faintest clue. Probably something Borderlands or DOA, possibly something Valve (Left 4 Dead / Portal / Half-Life) or even Nier (I might recycle the on-stream project idea for 2B).

Then once Episode 0 is done and hopefully released in August, over a year after Overbreed's initial announcement, I can finally return to Overbreed Episode 1, and focus on getting it done.

Then thinking much more long-term, after Overbreed Episode 1 is done, we finally return to Blue Star Episode 4. Whether or not Rabbit.Hole will return after BSE4, I honestly can't say. We'll have to see what public reception to Overbreed is - in my mind, its effectively taken the place of Rabbit.Hole, being a much grander-in-scope project that hits on pretty much every idea I can possibly think of to do in Overwatch. The only thing Rabbit.Hole has over Overbreed is its focus on Dva's descent into depravity. Overbreed is an epic tale, where Rabbit.Hole is a character focus. There's something to be said for character studies.

I'm not going to even bother projecting any farther than that. I expect both Overbreed Episode 1 and Blue Star Episode 4 to end up being similar in runtime, if not exceeding the runtime of, Blue Star Episode 3. Which is to say, I'm expecting both of them to be 20+ minute videos. Those take a long fucking time to produce.

So we'll cross what bridges are further past Blue Star Episode 4 once we actually get to them.

Reviewing my schedule holistically, that vacation of course put a dent in my plans, and I don't appreciate the Leliana video taking a week longer than I expected (after the vacation pushed it back a week more than I would have liked). I wanted to release Leliana on June 1 (all minivids target the start of their release month), but with the vacation I pushed back my expectation to June 8. That expectation was made under the assumption I'd get the bulk of the remaining work done while I was on vacation, though, and none of that happened. And so the 2 weeks of half-days I anticipated spending during vacation turned into 1 week of full-days after I got back. Hence Leliana being a week farther behind that I wanted.

But all things considered, we're cruising right along. Given the circumstances, things are going just about as well as they possibly could. I'm not going to complain about the state of things. Truthfully, I'm rather pleased with how it's all gone. Chuffed, even.

Hopefully the Leliana video will be out on early access before next Monday's Progress Report. And if not, well, it'll make for an interesting Progress Report story!

That's all I have for now, everyone. Until next week!