Progress Report - August 30, 2023 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

I apologize for dropping off the face of the Earth for the past month.

Where I've Been

As I noted in my last Progress Report, on July 25th I went back to spend a few weeks with my folks, to help my mother as she recovered from open-heart surgery. At the time, we expected the recovery to only take a week or two, and for me to be back by mid-August.

It turns out, open-heart surgery has a 6-to-8 week recovery period. The only reason why I am back now is because I am a groomsman to a friend's wedding on September 2nd. Were it not for that, I would likely be still with my folks till at least mid-September.

While I was with my family, I was unable to really work on any of my normal work. Instead, I had a lot of time to think about things. And one of those things I thought about is how I've neglected my other passions for the past ten years, as I focused on making the steamy nasty content you all have come to expect from me (for better or for worse).

What I've Done

Ever since I started animating back in 2013, one of the things I always wanted to do was make music videos. Specifically, I wanted to make a music video for the 13.5-minute epic Deliverance by Opeth. Ten years have passed, and I haven't made a single music video, let alone that one.

During my time away, I made a decision to not neglect my passions anymore. And so, I started putting together a music video. Granted, it's not Opeth yet, but Linkin Park is just as valid. Anyone whose watched my streams knows well the joke I make that I am "legally obligated to sing along to" certain songs, and that many of those songs happen to be "emo" nu-metal from the early 2000s.

Some people might consider that cringe. But I don't care. I love bands like Linkin Park, Breaking Benjamin, and Three Days Grace. Like so many other millennials who grew up in the early 2000s, adolescence was a confused and angst-riddled time for me. And like so many other millennials who grew up in the early 2000s, bands like Linkin Park served as an outlet for my confusion and angst, helping me put words to the feelings I didn't understand at the time, and most importantly helped me feel seen and understood.

I've talked a few times over the years about my flirting relationship with depression. It comes and goes in waves. Most days I'm okay, some days I'm not. And over the past 15 or so years, a handful of days got damn close to pitch black for me. Bands like Linkin Park helped save me from those darkest days, like they've helped so many others.

And as a millennial who grew up in the early 2000s, Life is Strange and its focus on early-2000s nostalgia connected to me in a lot of ways. To say it has been extremely impactful for me is an understatement. I won't bore you with the details, just know that there is a lot of very personal reasons why the characters resonate so strongly with me - especially Chloe, the troubled, traumatized youth who may be one of the most polarizing characters I've ever seen in media.

And so I don't think it's really any surprise to find me marrying this game that is about (among many other things) confused angry teens coping with trauma in unhealthy ways with a song about being confused, angry, and coping with trauma in unhealthy ways.

In case you somehow missed it, I have been spending the past few days putting together a music video for Linkin Park's Breaking the Habit, with Chloe from Life is Strange. You can watch the early work-in-progress video of it here.  I am hoping to have the final version done in a week or so.

Where We're Going

Before we go any further, I want to make one thing extremely, unambiguously clear:

I am still making the wonderful nasty smut you've all come to expect from me.

It's really easy to read all this and the amount of effort I've put into this music video and come away from this thinking I am saying I am walking away from making porn. That is absolutely not the case.

Don't think of this recent revelation of mine as a replacement, but rather an addition. I will be exploring my passions like music videos in addition to the usual smut that I normally make. Yeah, that means specific things you want me to make are going to take longer to get around to. That's just the nature of the beast. I can't add more hours to the day.

Broadly speaking, my schedule is unchanged. The Frozen project is still the current on-stream project. We will be taking a break to explore a shorter video once the Frozen project is ready to get audio recorded (which should be in less than a half-dozen more streams, if all goes well).

Overbreed Episode 1 is my primary off-stream focus, with an estimated 45-to-60 minute runtime. Blue Star Episode 4 is the next off-stream focus after OBE1 is done. The schedule is up in the air after that because both of those videos are fucking huge projects.

The Chloe & Max minivid is still in production hell. My Max voice is hoping to get the last of her audio recorded by the end of this week. It's been... a really bad past few weeks for her. She's been absolutely torn up over all the delays she's been having on the project, and has just been overall feeling miserable about it. I've had to comfort her several times with the reality that, even if she could get all the audio to me in a day, I still couldn't do anything with it because I was with my folks.

Now that I am back at my apartment, and her schedule is clearing up, hopefully the stars will continue their provident alignment and she'll be able to get her audio finished and sent to me, and we can finally get this minivid put together and released.

Life is Strange Projects

Epilogue

As you all well know by now, Life is Strange has really impacted me in ways that I honestly can't articulate. And you all have seen how verbose of a writer I am, so I feel like my saying that I can't articulate my feelings is really saying something.

I've been put a lot of thought into the Epilogue project over the past few weeks (and honestly for several weeks before I left), and the more I work on it and the more it becomes a strain to realize my vision with the setup, the more I begin to think I might end up overhauling what I've done.

The whole ethos beyond the current project was "move fast and break things," with me focusing on just the writing and not getting bogged down in the mechanics. But as things progress, I find exactly that happening: getting bogged down in the mechanics.

The big thing is that the prerendered approach of building the scenes in SFM and then stitching the pictures together in-browser is just really unwieldy. Things that would be simple in a 3d engine, like swapping out the snowglobe with the bobblehead, becomes a whole song-and-dance with the prerender system. And you can just straight-up forget the ability to freely walk around and interact with the world.

Then there's the problem of having to use SFM as middle-management software, where I have to first write down my ideas, then pose them in SFM, then transpose them into the game engine, and then write my ideas again. And if anything changes anywhere along that pipe, everything has to be done again. It's just really clunky.

I want to at least explore transposing Epilogue into a proper 3d engine, with the goal of cutting out the middle-management. I want to be able to directly pose my scenes in my game engine, rather than posing them in SFM and then recreating them in the game engine.

All things being equal, I would prefer to use Godot, being an open-source game engine which strongly aligns with my personal ideals. But Godot, at least last I checked, is not terribly robust with its 3d engine, largely focusing on 2d games. Unity is my runner-up of choice, for no reason other than the fact that it uses C# for its programming, which is my preferred language. Unreal is my last choice, because I can't stand C++ or visual programming (which are the two modes Unreal offers), and because my first impression of Unreal is that it's a lot more complicated and overwhelming in its interface than Unity, with a steeper learning curve.

However, after doing some preliminary research, it seems like Unreal is going to be the engine I explore first, for one simple reason: it has a built-in graph editor. Which means I can animate directly in Unreal. Compare to Unity or Godot, where you have to build all your animations in a third-party program like Blender or Maya, and then import and wire up those animations in the game engine. Aka exactly what I am trying to avoid.

If I go with Unity or Godot, then I have to make the animations in a third-party program. At which point, I might as well just animate them in Source Filmmaker and export the animations out. Which, again, defeats the purpose of looking at these game engines in the first place.

Whereas in Unreal, at least in theory, I can put the project together exactly like I currently do in SFM: create a new shot, pose and animate the characters in that shot, write out what the dialogue is. But then I can just immediately go to hooking up the game logic, without needing to render out of SFM and import into the game engine, because the posing and animating was done in the game engine.

I haven't committed any time or resources to it yet, because my time has been pretty constrained. But I likely will explore this after the music video is done, as a break away from working on Overbreed Episode 1. Might spend a stream exploring it, who knows.

Life is Streaking

I don't recall if I've ever discussed this project here. I think I did, though I don't know if I ever mentioned it by this name.

Long story short, a fellow creator on my Discord and I have been collaborating on writing an exhibitionism piece with Chloe, Rachel, and Steph. It's a fair ways out of left field from my usual work, though decidedly less than a Linkin Park music video, but it's an idea I absolutely love. We've storyboarded about 7 minutes of content so far, and I love every second of it.

I've been hesitant to really commit many resources to it in the past, because it's not the smut you all have come to expect of me. But with my recent revelation of following my passions, expectations be damned, I fully intend to return my attention to it. I'll be moonlighting it alongside Overbreed Episode 1, once the music video is done.

There is a lot of character drama in it that I was hesitant to include and strongly considered cutting. But, you know what? I like character drama. And so I'm keeping it. Again, expectations be damned. Here's a gif excerpt of it.

And just for shits and giggles, here's some of the character drama I was considering cutting, but am not going to now, because I like it.

After the Storm

Yeah so this one is a bit awkward. Epilogue originally began as an "After the Storm" thought experiment, following Chloe and Max in the immediate aftermath of the Sacrifice Arcadia Bay ending (which I find a far more interesting option narratively, to say nothing of my emotional attachment to the characters). It then got side-tracked with the idea of "what if Rachel was there too," and then exploring the ramifications of Rachel's personality and all the conflict it'd generate within the polycule.

In recent weeks, I've rebooted that idea, with two very explicit goals in mind. Goal one: No Rachel. I already fell down that rabbit-hole once. Goal two: No conflict. Chloe and Max have already had enough trauma to fill their lifetimes. I just want these two dorks to be happy.

The latter goal gave me many weeks of existential angst however. On the one hand, I don't want to see these dorks struggle and I just want to see them be happy. On the other hand, possibly the single most fundamental piece of writing advice out there is "stories need conflict." What is an aardvark to do?

I thought on this a lot over the past few weeks, and I've stumbled upon a revelation. Conflict in story doesn't have to mean fighting, like how Rachel's toxic personality drags Chloe and Max into an unhealthy relationship in Epilogue. It just means solving problems.

And importantly, those problems don't have to be calamitous. Killing God with the power of friendship is a good and noble goal, but those aren't the only problems in the world. You know a problem I've personally dealt with that was much more existentially threatening to me than having to kill God?

Trying to find a working fucking toilet in a state park.

All of which comes back to After the Storm. After much pondering, I have come up with a perfect thesis for the story: Chloe and Max go on a roadtrip across the United States, hitting every state park, national park, and overall photogenic vista they find along the way. Max is building up a photography portfolio, and along the way she realizes Chloe serves as her muse - photographing nature in all its splendor is her goal, but photographing Chloe just being her candid self is her motivation. Through their adventures across the country, trying to make do as two young women with nothing to their names but the shirts on their backs and a truck that barely works, their relationship grows and deepens.

I've been internally referring to After the Storm as my saccharine project, so-called because the goal is for it to just be sickeningly sweet and wholesome. This project has one goal and one goal only: to show Chloe and Max being happy together and just enjoying living with each other. No murder mysteries, no town-destroying storms. Just two traumatized young women finding healing and happiness in each others' arms.

And exploring catharsis is a major theme I want to focus on. Trauma is a huge theme of Life is Strange, and Chloe has more of it than most characters in the game. I don't want to just write that away, either. I want to tackle it head-on. But not in a misery-porn sense, but rather in a therapeutic sense.

There is one specific sequence I have in mind, of Chloe and Max sleeping through a bad storm in the truck. Chloe is having nightmares about the storm that destroyed Arcadia Bay, focusing on her losing her mom, and her crying out in her sleep wakes up and concerns Max. To comfort Chloe, Max curls up beside her, hugging her tightly in a spooning cuddle. Chloe immediately calms down with Max's embrace, and they fall asleep together.

They wake up with Max still clinging to Chloe, and they have awkward chuckles and laugh it off, going through their day like it never happened. But when it's time to sleep through another night in the truck, Chloe wordlessly curls up next to Max, and the two fall asleep cuddling and spooning each other without a word being said.

That sort of shit right there is saccharine as shit. And it's exactly what I want to see. And so it's exactly what I am going to make. Because, and say it with me now, fuck expectations.

Upon much reflection on my ideas for After the Storm, I realized that the story as I imagine it is a romance story. I have never read a romance story in my life, and I am writing a romance story. That definitely says something about me and my connection to these characters. I don't know what it says, but it definitely says it.

I don't know where After the Storm will fit into my schedule. Right now, I am focusing predominantly on figuring out assets. The major aesthetic of After the Storm is massive beautiful outdoor vistas - the thesis is photographing nature, after all - and that is something that Source Filmmaker struggles with. I've been exploring grabbing a bunch of photogrammetric scans of nature assets, which is great for foreground stuff. But I've also been exploring generating terrain in Blender, and even using satellite data from NASA to recreate actual terrain from around the world.

Right now, I think the best approach will be using terrain generation as a base, then finding or making tools to allow me to carve roads into the terrain (because, again, road trip is the central thesis - need roads for a road trip!) and finding some way to systemically populate terrain with things like rocks and trees depending on the terrain map. I've found some very exciting tools that I think can provide a fantastic basis, such as this Blender addon:

TXA Landscape Bake to PBR and Export to Unreal 

There is also this paid addon for Blender, which I need to do more research into in to see what all it can actually do, and if it'd be worth the $300 license for what I want to do. $300 is pretty steep, but terrain generation is a huge problem, and if it can solve all my problems in a no-sweat solution then it may honestly be worth considering.

World Creator 2023 Tweet 

Once I've settled on a solution for the terrain problem, I will begin exploring how to properly work After the Storm into my schedule.

Summary

I've spent the past month helping my mom as she recovered from open-heart surgery. I'm back now. I am working on a Linkin Park music video. The Life is Strange minivid will hopefully get finished soon. I am going to focus more on non-porn passion projects. I am still making porn. The main schedule of Overbreed Episode 1 and then Blue Star Episode 4 with the Frozen project and minivids along the way is unchanged. I have an exhibitionism-focused Life is Strange project in the pipe. I am doing preproduction on a non-pornographic romance story with Chloe and Max.

The next Progress Report will be on September 11. Oh wow, that's awkward. But, that's the Monday after next.

Until then, take care everyone!