Bi-Weekly Report #19

Last time it felt like time flew. This time feels like it's been an eternity.

I've been so busy. I took a few days for Christmas, but barring that I've been posting schedules for each week over on Discord, doing my best to stick to them, and cranking shit out on several fronts. Even that little Christmas break saw me doing some fun stuff with Slime Forest's profile setup.

Let's send this dogshit year off with a bang. I have such sights to show you.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

I am reviving KTC streams and sketches. I am not sure why I stopped?? Burnout??? Panicked depression??? That second one feels right. This year has involved so, so much flailing. Just a ton of throwing shit at the wall. Not a lot of that has worked out well, though, so let's jump back to the classics.

I started with the Christmas orgy sketch. Just like old times! I'm thinking we'll do another for the new year. A part two, if you will. We'll see if Lourdes evades getting drug into things a second time! Who can say (besides her owner)?

Who knows, maybe I'll bring back the spinning wheel of destiny sometime too. That led to the whole PWYW sketch model I've been doing, and that's like the one new thing this year that's really consistently thrown me any sort of bone.

If you want in on that action, you know what to do. The Committee tier is waiting!

ANIMATION

Hey, we ain't had this tab in a while. Welcome back, darling. We've missed you.

I've been trying to make Sundays a consistent day to work on that big giant absurd haunted house orgy YCH project, and we have finally, finally reached the point where I'm transitioning from roughing in all the characters to actually animating something. I am less than thrilled that it took me two months to get there, and I am looking at my rhythms and schedule to try and figure out a second day of the week I can set aside for it so I can finish this bitch sometime before 2030.

That said, a lot of my projects between planning and sale and now have been playing around and experimenting with different aspects of Clip Studio's animation workflow, and I specifically did a lot of that in preparation for managing this beast. Predominantly, the employment of isolated parts of the animation being imported as file objects is going to save my goddamned life. The WIP I slapped up on Discord last night (but not here, because Patreon will scream and yell and cry at me if you see a boob outside of the paywall) is the first piece of that process, taking the trio on the second floor and isolating them into their own space where I can edit and alter them and their layers without creating a giant nightmare on my main timeline. I'll be able to

pop them back in and employ them in whatever parts or order I want on the main piece, which I just thought to actually test the other night, so that's going to help a lot. Thanks, past me!

GAME DEV

"I need to make a thing that lets you type a name and make a new profile so all of this has an actual point."

That was me two weeks ago. What a sweet, naive fool. She could never have known what was about to happen.

Oh, I did it, mind. There is a window wherein you can type in a name and create a profile, as prophesied. That part was really easy, I am thrilled to say. I even threw in a signal emitter on the Data Manager that other nodes can listen for and react to, which is pretty useful.

No, the foolish thing was thinking I'd stop there.

Instead, I developed a short-term, 250-line hyperfixation.

... I can explain.

It all started with one little idea, one tiny rabbit hole that ensnared me entirely: I wanted to have a profanity filter on the name entry.

Your profile name is also what gets submitted to leaderboards, after all, so I wanted to ensure nobody playing got blindsided by an unwanted f-bomb or "Trump2028". After all, the game is flirty, not dirty. But I didn't really have any idea how to do that outside of elaborate if-else trees.

So, I wound up learning a lot about regex very quickly. Handy! With that, I can not only omit any unwanted dire filth (lesser filth is fine), but also limit which characters are supported so as to not have the boards cluttered up with random nonsense and attempts at launching rouge code. Neato!

But what should I do if someone ignores all my very helpful warnings and directions on the name entry? What if they just insist on being "CuntyFuck88" over and over again? Well, that's easy:

Choose their name for them.

This took on several forms over the process, but ultimately what happened is pretty straight-forward: I built a random name generator. Neat!

Then I... kept building it.

And kept building it.

And....

Okay. So. I decided that was a lot of work to only make available as a punishment, so I did two significant things. First, I added a button to let you pick a random name on purpose, so you too could be randomly assigned [hits button] "Freaky Steve." There's something like 100,000 possible combinations of adjective and noun, and that's before we get to all the little bells and whistles I did like random pluralization, random adverb chance and pools, what it decides to fill spaces with (if anything), and whether or not the thing ends on a random number between 2 and 99. By this power, you can be assigned such treasures as "veryunderwhelmingrat" or "sticky-kitten-25"

It's my masterpiece, is what I'm saying.

And yeah, there are some quality of life bonuses on there; the ability to skip tutorials will be visible if anyone on your machine has played through them all (which right now is easy as there still aren't any), and the mysterious stars unlock will work in a pretty similar way if I ever get those going.

And the confirmation button is a pun. This is my A-Game, if ever anything was.

But what, you may be asking, about the original intention of the random generation? What if someone keeps ignoring warnings to not be a bastard?

Well... then I make it do this. And I hide the close button. And you get what you get when you hit OK. Because I'm rotten and mean and evil like that.

Anyway, I've been thinking about a narrative through-line for this whole thing. Something simple but charming to bring it all together. A little goal for you to work towards beyond "score go up" (though this is 100% a game made for the people who like making score go up). We'll see what comes of that, because it would entail designing... a fourth slime lady.

WRITING

Yeah! Yeah let's bring back ALL the headers!!!!

I dropped Chapter 11 on here shortly after the last report. It wasn't met with much, probably because it's been ten thousand years since Chapter 10 and 11 is sort of a lot of world-building and depression-tier character stuff. What can I say? They ain't all tits and quips.

To make up for that, Chapter 12 is in the midst of revisions and editing as we speak, and is long as hell because I feel like breaking it in half for the sake of meeting some semi-standardized word count would be a crime against everything happening in it. Some things are finally coming to a proper head with Lyssie, and the chapter effectively marks the halfway mark of what I'm trying to accomplish with the first book, serving as a sort of closure point for the first act. I could, in theory, call this the end of the first book, but not in good conscience. It's a satisfying little narrative chunk, but still not a complete display of what this thing is going to be. That... is what the second act is for.

As a teaser for that second act, I'll just say that there's going to be a strong narrative through-line on both halves of the story's timelines. While Lyselle faces the aftermath of Chapter 12 and what follows in the present, she'll be recalling the events that transpired during her first significant stop with Nidrah, and we'll get a nice look at some of the things that make both women tick. I hope you'll look forward to it!

On the public release front, I'll probably try and get that up to Chapter 6 once 12 is out for patrons. Thank you for your patience while I've been off drafting all the bits and bobs!

COMMISSIONS

I'm telling you, time dilated. I don't know how else to explain all this. Check it:

Completed:

• PWYW x3

• Christmas Vale full render AF for Lys (plus nudie alt!)

• Mark and Cupid full render for Rowlet (plus a very sticky alt)

In Progress:

• Ottercat definitely not drowning Crysis
  I genuinely cannot remember if this one moved or not??? It's still close, I just had CHRISTMAS DEADLINES

• Haunted House YCH
  The first group to be worked on was decided via picker wheel to be the ones way upstairs in the corner visible through a hole in the ceiling. Classy! This group includes Ezo, which means I've gotten some early tentacle practice in before the main event downstairs, as she wound up being the first party to actually be blessed with the gift of movement and life by merit of being in front of everyone else. I also fleshed out the "foreground" elements of the corner, meaning the hole itself and all the detritus hanging out of it. This does not move, because I cannot gently skew the hanging carpet via motion tween in Clip Studio mostly, which is all I really wanted to do with it. So that kinda bums me out, but whatever. It's nice. It's purple and dusty. Very spooky.

• Sweater Trio YCH Results
  This has been queued up to happen after TalonPaw's AF piece.
  Oh. You best believe I've been organizing that shit. That last report made me upset, y'all.

• Rabbit Ass
  Yeah.

Upcoming:

• Talonpaw surprise partner AF

• Lourdes trading card for Nikki

• Photobomb Christmas piece for Kaz (sorry bb the paid deadlines beat the love-you deadlines)

• Foxgirl Jo for Aist

• Animated Paizuri for Rowlet

• A ref sheet!!!????? Yup!

• PWYW x1

Very busy doing work and taking work. WIPs keep being drug-out by just... taking me a while, lately. Nothing ever feels like one session anymore, even when it used to be. I need to figure out what's holding me back lately. I hope it's not just dopamine, but it's probably dopamine.

As a fun bonus, my VGen is now verified! I'm a real girl!

Commission Me Here | Here's the Queue

AND NOW FOR THE 2024 WRAP-UP

I'm not gonna sit here and pretend like everything is perfect. It's not. That'd be wrapping this shit year up with a lie, if we're being frank about it. But as a pair of weeks? Nailed it. I feel good about this one. Iunno.

Like, as a whole? This has been a rough month, and not just for us. Looking around social media right now, there's barely an artist I follow who tries to get by on this who hasn't opened up emergency commissions over the last week or so. I expected it, somewhat. People's budgets go to Christmas and family, we're all prepping for end of year, it's a month of budgets and business. But the pure extent to which it's been a struggle are something I was not at all prepared for, and once you start getting ominous warnings from the power company it stops being a simple bit of fuss and starts being proper frightening.

And honestly? That's kind of been 2024 in a nutshell. I lost my job in February. I lost UI a few months back. I've done a few apps when I can find something promising, but there's honestly not much around here that's gonna pay the bills any better than what I'm already doing, and I don't think my burnt out Autistic ass is gonna be able to "just do both" like I keep being told is my only way forward. Kaz's disability has progressed thanks to our drag-ass medical system and her breaking a foot at the turn of the year. Looking back at my goals for 2024, never mind my business plan when applying for assistance from the state, I met... very, very few of them. Slime Forest sure isn't anywhere near finished yet, and I haven't exactly launched into monthly animation releases since losing the financial support that allowed me to even attempt that for the short window I did. It's been a rough year of panhandling to parents and supporters and whoever else just to get by while nothing at all goes to plan. I'm honestly pretty exhausted with all of it, and it's not exactly done wonders for anyone's self-esteem in this house.

I am always grateful for the support we get. Truly. It makes a world of difference.

But at the same time, I did express a basic need we have to hit to even be getting by marginally well with this, and at present the Patreon's monthly payout still doesn't even cover rent. There just haven't been many new supporters, and most of the ones that show don't stick around because, ultimately, I am not good at running this thing as a product, nor can I particularly afford to when commissions are what keeps us afloat at all. I'm not saying I'm done, or quitting, or whatever. This shit is just what I do. I'm just saying I've failed. Maybe not as catastrophically as I could, but it still feels terrible to constantly be asking family for hundreds of dollars of support all the damned time. I am trying to fight to need it less, but at the end of the day I'm no miracle-worker, and we're still in a position where if one or two specific people had to tap out on here we'd be screwed. I hate being in that position, and I hate putting people supporting me in that position just as much. All of the flailing this year was me trying to find a way to get out of it and failing. Maybe I should have just stuck to my guns? That didn't seem to be working either, but I think I was perhaps just struck with my newfound raw amount of free time and shooting for the moon. The rocket just ran out of gas several months before I thought it would.

As is, I'm not sure what my goals for 2025 are. Financial stability? I've been chasing that with no real success for years. It'd be nice. I'd love to be able to be on the giving end, for a change.

Beyond that? I don't know. Finishing Slime Forest was meant to happen this last year, but it's just so rarely my focus since at the moment it's a time expense I rarely feel justified affording. Working on it was literally my holiday break. That doesn't bode particularly well, I guess.

I need to think on it all some more, it seems. Usually I've got some resolutions on-lock, but it seems like for years now every year has been a more dire test of my ability to just keep us afloat over here than the last, and if things keep heading that way, no amount of lofty dreaming is going to fix it. 2025 feels like the year of frustratingly literal do-or-die, at this point, and that's almost as frightening as what's about to happen in the country around me as the people who loudly want me and everyone like me to disappear take their seats of power. Is this "job" even going to be legal by this time next year? If not, what's even left for me?

... It's kind of a downer note to end such a victory lap of a couple weeks on, isn't it?

But it's what I'm thinking about.

I hope I can figure something out. Here's to hope.

• Sera