December Planning!

Alright. First thing's first. Yes, I've been working in the last couple of days on the remaining short story from last month (The Long Haul). It's largely done, but currently a little shorter than I consider acceptable. I'll probably try to extend a couple bits of it tonight, then edit and publish it tomorrow. A bit late, obviously. But not too horribly so.

Now, for the primary point of this post! As you all should be aware, given how often I put reminders up about it, there was a poll. That poll, which did thankfully see about 1/3rd of you voting (a pretty high turnout for any poll here), was to figure out what to do about December. Last year, December was a freaking nightmare. One which led to the single longest delay this Patreon has ever experienced...and that delay continued to haunt us for half of the following year in some form or another. 

Obviously, I did not want a repeat of that miserable experience. So last month I put up the aforementioned poll, presenting three options for how to deal with the fact that the Holidays inevitably shorten the amount of time I have to work with content during the month. I admit, I'm actually a bit startled by how complete of a victory what I felt was the most unlikely option took. 

As you can see if you look at the poll, the option to make a short CYOA adventure game, completely unrelated to Left Hand Magic or Haven's Port, handily won. It took 60% of the vote all on it's own. So even the combined fans of the other two options were outvoted. So...that's what the plan is! This month, I will be very temporarily putting aside Left Hand Magic and Haven's Port. Instead, as a sort of Holiday Special, I will be making a COYA style escape game. Left Hand Magic will return in January, with a full sized build (Barring any sort of major disaster or such beyond my control).

I don't have a lot of details about the game yet. I do know that, sadly, my attempt to make AI Art work for it was ultimately a failure. I could and did make some pretty awesome AI Art. I might even share some of it as a bit of an extra throughout the month. It's sort of fun to play around with! Unfortunately, as the trained models currently exist...I couldn't get any of the Rule34/Hentai capable neural nets to produce anything more hardcore than rope bondage and latex bodysuits. Even when I explicitly fed it images of chastity belts, pillories, or other bondage items...it just wasn't capable of recognizing what I wanted. Someday, it might be. Currently, it's not quite there yet :-(.

Right now, I'm expecting to use simple renders for the game. Less complex than what I make for HP or LHM...and possibly in a more anime/cartoon style. That's something I'm still trying to figure out. I'm playing with both a few figures and a few style converters, to see if I can make something work well enough to give us a more hand-drawn/stylized look. Currently, I'm not promising that. But I am looking into it...again. I'm planning to spend the entire weekend mapping out the game, what I need to do, and how to best do it. So I should have some more solid answers for you come Monday.

Aside from that, this month should be fairly normal for the other rewards. I'll probably post the polls on Sunday, since the short should be up tomorrow. And then, hopefully on Monday, I'll post a few sample bits and and an outline of what our little COYA game will be like!