Progress Report - Various

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Reminder - There is an ongoing poll about Protagonist Gender for Left Hand Magic. 

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Alright, with that reminder out of the way...progress reports!

Chastity Quest:

Chastity Quest is on schedule. I should have the remaining set of 5 scenes (one of the six I planned got merged into another) done tonight. That will just leave Editing, Testing, and the minor miscellaneous stuff like credits and a few new music choices. Currently, my projection is that I'll be uploading on the 30th, then release early on the 31st. So, pretty typical.

Comic:

Side Gig (Part 3) is going well. I've finished all the renders for it and will be starting on the writing tonight (I already have a solid outline). If all goes well, it will be done and posted sometime tomorrow. Later in the month than I'd hoped, but not too bad.

Short Story:

I'm going to be honest here...aside from general online, I haven't even started on this. I've simply been juggling too many things. Once Side Gig is done, I'll hopefully be able to put some time in on it. There is a possibility that it may overrun into next month, given that I'm (understandably I think, given this is the final update) giving Chastity Quest absolute priority.

Left Hand Magic:

I've been mostly in asset acquisition and research mode. I've only been able to spare a few minutes here and there, though those minutes have added up to a fair bit of effort in the last week. I've acquired the assets I want to use for each major character, as well as several of the major locations that are needed for the game. I'm still missing at least one major location (it's been surprisingly hard to find a decent mechanics shop asset), and I haven't settled on an asset for the MC. Given the extreme one-sidedness of the gender poll so far, I'm kinda assuming the MC is going to end up being female, so I'm poking around my options there. Though I won't do anything final until the poll ends. I may end up running another poll at the end of the current set as well, to give everyone the choice between 2-3 different MCs. Kinda like I did with hair color for Haven's Port, only more so, since part of the question this time is if I should make the character human or something more exotic...

Aside from asset stuff, I've also been putting what time I can into engine research...and been fighting anxiety/depression from the results T-T. It's looking more and more like I'm going to be forced to use Ren'py again, as at least two of the other engines I looked into don't support video playback, which is kinda critical for how I'm planning to handle animations. I'm intending to do animations in Daz3D/Blender, then export them as video clips that can be sped up or slowed down, and combined to make multiple angles/actions. This will give a smoother animation than I could get just using the internal animation system from most engines. 

Unfortunately, Ren'py seems to be one of the few VN style engines that supports video playback (VN Maker obviously does, but I will NEVER use it again. NEVER EVER). The fact remains that I hate Ren'py only slightly less than VN Maker, though. Less because there is anything wrong with the engine, and more because it's very code intensive (I hate coding) and the language it uses is Python. Since I maintain that Python was written by a sociopathic masochist, I really don't look forward to that. Seriously, even writing this paragraph fills me with dread. Ugh. If anyone can think of another alternative, don't hesitate to speak up. I've already checked out Sukia2 and Game Maker Studio (neither of which seem to support video playback) and I'm waiting for a response about the video playback thing for the Unreal Engine VN Framework. I've previously eliminated Tyrano Builder, but I may check in on it again to see if it still sucks harry donkey balls as far as the documentation/support goes...