Progress Report

So...I know I've been terrible about Progress Reports this month. Sorry about that. I've been trying hard to actually repair some of the sanity damage that has accrued over the last six months or so. That hasn't been quite as effective as I'd like, since I'm still dealing with medical issues, but I'm doing at least some better.

Right, so...I've already gotten everything but the game out so far, this month. So this is basically just a long-winded report on how Left Hand Magic's build is going.

The short answer is 'honestly pretty okay for once.' I've completed all rendering, post-processing, and most of the coding (still need to catch the gallery up from last month and this month). I'll be starting in on the writing tonight. Which would be bad if I had as much to do as I have for the last few builds. Thankfully, that's not the case this time since it's a smaller build, new content wise. Which moves us into the longer answer...

As I discussed earlier this month, I spent the majority of the month wiping out the backlog of animations that needed fixing. There are total of seven animations I redid this time, instead of the trickle of two or three that I've been doing each month. This actually means that I've knocked out all but one animation that I plan to redo. That last animation is fighting me like crazy. I've redone the stupid thing five times and I'm still not happy with it.

The really frustrating thing is that it's not even a complex animation, it's the early under-the-desk blowjob you can give Talia in the prologue. It had a hitch in it that ended up causing me to scrap the entire animation and redo it, since it was from the super early period where I hadn't figured out how to make animations as smooth and the original wasn't really...fixable. But then the redone version kept having minor problems appear as if by magic. Which was aggravating as they wouldn't turn up until I was done rendering it and the blasted thing has a 20+ hour render time for reasons I can't figure out. The scene is simple enough if should be rendering in half that, but something is causing the scene to fall back to CPU instead of GPU rendering and I can't for the life of me figure out what.

Anyway, I may manage to squeeze another attempt at it in, since everything else is done rendering, but I'll honestly probably leave it for this build. The original animation isn't actually horrible looing, it just has a visible stutter in it's loop that I'd like to clean up.

Aside from all the redone animations, I also followed through on my promise to make at least some new content as well. I stuck with finishing out Week 4 of the Harem Route. Which means two events on Day 4, two for Day 5, plus a longish Weekend event. Five events total, with two new animations, so a pretty small build. But I did warn that such was going to be the case, with me focusing mostly on getting the old animations redone. Having those reanimations done should give me more time on future builds, and it was something that needed doing sooner or later.

Anyway, because of the relatively small amount of writing I need to do, I'm fairly confident I'll be able to knock it out tonight and tomorrow. Then an editing pass and the work on the gallery on the 30th, with testing and release on the 31st. As such, I'm fully expecting an on-time release, unless something goes wrong. Which is a major relief after we've had a couple of months with horrible crunch periods that still ended up with a few days of delay. It should set me up in a good position to make a much larger build in August...