Progress Report - February 21, 2022 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

I wanted to get this posted last night, but I just wasn't quite ready to make this week's Progress Report then.

Overbreed

Right off the top, the post image! I've been slowly storyboarding out Overbreed Episode 1. I don't have the time to commit to fully animating it, but I can steal an hour here or there to work on storyboarding it all out, so that when I am finally ready to jump back on full tilt, I have a clear direction of what needs to be done.

The storyboard is currently 6:45, and is attached to the bottom of this post!

As a friendly reminder of where things are and where they're going with Overbreed Episode 1:

• OBE1 is composed of 3 primary sequences, creatively titled Sequence A [Zarya x Mercy], Sequence B [Mercy solo], and Sequence C [Mercy x Sombra].
  
• Sequence A is the shortest of the three sequences, followed by Sequence B, and then Sequence C is the longest.
  
• When I paused working on OBE1, I had gotten 12.5 minutes of Sequence C animated. This translates to approximately 1/3 of the reference storyboard, though it can't be directly converted to an approximate runtime since I had to detour a few times animating Sequence C. But I would be surprised if Sequence C clocked in under 20 minutes total, and feel like it'd probably be about 25 in the end.
  
• This storyboard represents Sequence A, and the narrative interstitial between Sequences A and B.
  
• Sequence A is about 3 minutes in this storyboard, which is about what I expected when I first wrote it out.
  
• The narrative interstitial is about 4 minutes, which is longer than what I originally anticipated, but with how long the whole video is going to be, I feel it's justified. And it flows better than as originally written, with OBE0 being released and doing a lot of the backstory heavy lifting.

So that's where Overbreed is as of right now.

And for posterity, my schedule plans are as such:

• Finish the autoreleaser (see below)
  
• Finish Claire/Jill (it's in the final polish stage now, with my sound designer finishing up the sound design)
  
• *Resume work on Overbreed Episode 1
  
• Build Blue Star Episode 4

The asterisk is due to the uncertain nature of the Frozen on-stream project. It's still in active development right now, and the next month is slated to be spent working on the Witcher project Primordium, but there is a very real possibility that the Frozen project will enter the churn while I am working on Overbreed Episode 0.

When it does enter the churn, then a decision will need to be made about when and where it is worked on: on-stream or off-stream, immediately or later. I don't know what the decision will be made, hence the asterisk.

Autoreleaser

The auto-releaser is quickly coming up on the finish line!

After spending a few weeks on the Uploader, which is far and away the most complex part, I managed to get it to the point where the past week or two was focused on the gallery part of the system.

The Uploader isn't quite finished, and has a few quality-of-life features I still need to add, but all of its core functionality is done, meaning I can technically use it right now. In fact, I've already used it to upload a few assets for download - assuming anyone can find where they are!

The Gallery by contrast is a much simpler system, but it's still fairly complicated in that it has a lot of UI functionality it needs to manage, to keep it slick and responsive. I'm not a UI designer, so it's a bit jank, but it too is fully functional at this point. You can navigate it and download assets off it, ready to be unpackaged and installed. In fact, I've already done that, too!

Finally, earlier today I started work on the Downloader. This is the simplest of the three systems yet, being an even more stripped down version of the Gallery. It functionally serves the same purpose, even fetching and processing the same exact data as the Gallery does, but with one key advantage:

The Downloader is able to interact with your local filesystem.

This means that, where the Gallery simply tells you what's available to download and where to download it, the Downloader tells you what you've already downloaded, and what has updates available since you last downloaded it.

The Downloader is designed to be a replacement of the Gallery system in all but aesthetics, providing a more convenient user experience, at the cost of having to be a standalone program you have to download and run yourself. The Gallery is much more lightweight, being a generic website available in any major browser, but it lacks the ability to tailor its experience to you as a specific user.

This week will be spent getting the downloader up and running. I've already gotten it fetching and processing the assets available for downloading off the Gallery page, and I've already got the metadata system in place from the Uploader's end to facilitate the Downloader keeping track of what assets are installed.

All that's left for me to do now is to actually hook the Downloader up to find and process that metadata, so it can correctly report back what assets you have downloaded and installed. Checking if something is out of date is trivial at that point.

Once that's done, two thirds of the Downloader's functionality is finished.

The most difficult part will be the actual downloading. I am hoping it won't be that difficult, but... we'll see. I'd like to also get it doubling as an installer, managing extracting and installing the downloads for you. Heck, if I can get that working, then I can easily spin it up to also double as an uninstaller - it'll have access to all the files it installs anyways, so it can easily just keep track of what files it installed, and then simply delete them for uninstalling.

Right now, the Downloader doesn't have support for downloading previous versions. There's no technical reason for that, all of that information is exposed to it. I just don't know what the best way to implement that in the UI would be, without it getting too cluttered and overcomplicated. The goal of the Downloader is to make it drop-dead simple to use.

Primordium

The Witcher on-stream project Primordium is coming along fantastically. Last Saturday's stream saw us update the ladies to use the newest nipple mesh, and we ended up fully reconstructing all three of their outfits to have complete pant mesh. This doesn't have any immediate impact on either Episode 1 or the title sequence, but it will allow for more freedom in future projects, since now the ladies can be properly topless.

Next Saturday's stream will see us finish up their outfits, making them fully and properly exposable and fully bodygroupable, which will have direct impacts on both  the title sequence and Episode 1.

From there, we polish up the title sequence and get it ready for a final 4k render. My sound designer has put together an absolutely fantastic soundtrack for it, which sounds ripped straight out of the Witcher despite being an 100% original composition (I can't overstate how excited he was when he realized he actually owns several of the unique instruments that gives the Witcher 3 soundtrack its unique sound). It will definitely be ready for installation by the time the title sequence's 4k render is done, meaning we can just immediately slap it together and be ready to go.

Assuming this projected schedule stays on track, then that will put the next Saturday stream on March 11. I expect 2 stream sessions to get Primordium Episode 1 fully polished and ready for its 4k render. Meaning that it could be between March 25 and April 1 that Primordium episode 1 will be ready for a full, proper release.

Future Primordium episodes, should we choose to pursue them, will have a lot less legwork involved. The ladies will be fully built, outfitted, and bodygrouped by that point; and the title sequence fully put together as well. Meaning that just the episodes themselves would need to be assembled.

Claire/Jill

With the auto-releaser quickly approaching completion and its debut, that means I will be returning my attention to Claire/Jill hopefully in the next week or so.

And work on Claire/Jill will be running parallel to Primordium, being worked on 5 days a week (since I no longer stream on Wednesdays) to Primordium's 1 day a week. Claire/Jill is much further along than Primordium, already having all of its animation and model-work put together, and currently in the animation-polishing phase.

Which means, if you're keeping track of your days, it is entirely possible that both Claire/Jill and Primordium Episode 1 may well release on the exact same day. Wouldn't that be something?

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