Progress Report

Well, a bit passed time for a progress report! Sorry about that, it just slipped through the cracks by an extra day or so...again. I'm kinda bad about remembering...but I'm trying to be better about it! Anyway, mostly good news!

Haven's Port

This is going well. Currently, I have 10 scenes finished, with an 11th in progress. I'm currently predicting roughly 14 total scenes, possibly 15. Which might seem a bit smaller than usual...until you realize that 6 of those are going to be date scenes. Yeah, six. I decided to heck with it and I'm powering through to bring Louie and Fiona up to full spec with their date choices. Which means that each of them are getting an additional 3 dates in total. 

Moreover, one or two of those dates kinda...ran away on me. Specifically in that I think they might actually have the largest number of renders for a single 'scene' yet. Eleven and twelve renders each, for the two in question, if I'm remembering right. I'm not actually sure what the previous largest was, but if these aren't the new largest, they are certainly close. 

Anyway, the point is that despite the relatively low scene count, the actual content amount isn't going to be much (if any) shy of a full update. Not a bad result considering the Hard Reset of the deadline I'm sticking to this month. 

Mixed Media

Technically, this one is also going quite well. Less technically, I bit off a little bit more than I probably should have with this one. I wanted to make the 'finale' of this set a bit special, so it's a bit more involved than previous entries have been. Net result is I'm expecting to need around 19-22 renders. Which is a considerable bit larger than usual. Normally, it's only around 16-18. That said, so far I'm fairly on target with my usual goal of '2 render a day.' I almost never hit that perfectly, but I've only fallen behind by one render so far. Well, more like 1.5. Net result, I'm not expecting there to be much trouble here, it just won't be done quite as quickly as I'd hoped. I'd hoped to wrap it up completely by the 22nd or 23rd, to give me plenty of time to focus on the writing/programming for Haven's Port. Just in case, really. Unfortunately, it looks like renders won't be done until the 22nd or 23rd, instead of the whole thing. I don't think it's going to be a critical issue, but I'll keep everyone posted. 

Short Story

I've been having a very mild case of writer's block on this one. Nothing too horrible. More a case of me having trouble writing because of various minor life issues rearing their heads. I have a hard time writing anything when I'm down and a few things have had be a little bit that way. It's not exactly an unusual problem for me, though. Honestly, it's the number one reason short stories sometimes slip in any given month.

Worst case, it'll get delayed. Shorts getting delayed a few days past the end-of-month isn't something I'm worried about. It's the Game releases doing that that bother me. And, at any rate, it's far too early to say that's going to happen this time. There's still a much better chance of getting it done on time then not. Probably? Particularly as I have a bit of good stuff that should be happening and will probably cheer me up. On that note...

Good Stuff!

The good stuff is actually somewhat related to the Patreon. For a while now, my laptop (which I use for writing/coding, as well as the renders for the Comics/MMSes) has been getting more and more...flaky. It's aging and, frankly, I've put a hell of a lot of wear on it running so many renders through it. Heck, my render box desktop that now does all the game renders didn't actually exist back when I started Haven's Port, so all the early renders were on the poor little laptop too. 

Anyway, I've been hemming and hawing over purchasing a replacement for it for a few months. Technically, it's a bit more money than I really wanted to invest, given that I already had to buy a GPU upgrade to get a handle on animations for Left Hand Magic a few months ago. Ultimately, after a lot of thinking on it, I decided to go ahead and bite the bullet. In part, that's because I want to give the best possible chance of staying on top of things, after this month's hard rest. And the other part was that, frankly, I'm afraid of the old one kicking the bucket randomly. Which would be kinda crippling. 

Sooooo, all that long story short...I managed to get a good deal on an open box Alienware. I'd honestly have preferred to avoid anything Dell-related, since I had...issues with the current Dell. But Alienware hardware is supposed to be better than those issues. And the deal was a good one. I ended up getting what should have been an $1900+ laptop for around $1350. So long as the old laptop holds up for at least writing/coding. This will mean a lot for streamlining the dev process. And the new laptop is actually almost as powerful as the Desktop render box. Almost. Not quite. Laptops have limits. It should help a lot. Hopefully! And it arrives later today...supposedly! Shipping already got delayed once...