Progress Report - April 8, 2025

Hello, everyone!

I have decided to put this week's Progress Report in the Misc Bin tier, because it is as much a showcase of some writing efforts as it is a Progress Report in the traditional sense.

Batcat

The Batcat lewd scene has been fully blocked out and sent out for dubbing! The core scene clocks in at 3:29, with a few flourishes before and after that are too much of a headache to properly account for.

In total, the video is currently running +80, meaning that a particular shot that takes place at 4:02 in the storyboard takes place at 5:22 in the current build of the video. I am not quite sure how the video managed to stray so far from the storyboard, though I suspect it is largely due to flourishes and extensions of the lewd scene itself, to help it flow better without feeling too rushed.

My plan for this week is to put together the post-sex animation. I will definitely be able to get the rest of the studio apartment sequence finished, and I expect I will be able to get the exterior apartment sequence finished as well.

I will need to do a bit of model-work to pull that off, rebuilding the apartment structure in the storyboard into a proper model in 3dsmax. The structure shown in the storyboard is cludged together pretty coarsely in SFM, and while it looks okay in its current state, there is a lot of overlapping meshes to pull it off, which will result in a lot of flickering and lighting oddities if actually lit in a final video. So I need to build it properly in 3dsmax. It won't be difficult or take long, but it is work I need to do.

Whether or not I will be able to get the animation for Barbara's apartment done is up in the air currently. For now, let's assume I fall short on that. If I manage to pull it off, then that'll be fantastic. If not, it'll be within expectations.

Once I finish the Barbara apartment animation though, I will be just about at the point where I need audio to make forward progress. I can finish builds, light scenes, and fix outfit clipping issues of course, but that is all peanuts compared to the bulk behemoth of animating the dialogue scenes.

Innie is expecting to have the first batch of audio to me by Friday's end. I haven't heard back from Milly yet, though she did tell me on the first that she was planning to spend that week recording the non-dub audio for the video.

Character Cards

Beyond Batcat, over the past few weeks, I have been slowly assembling character cards for my various original characters and semi-original characters. Because I refuse to ever do things the easy way, instead of just pulling an existing wiki system off the shelf, I instead elected to roll my own terrible system for it. All because I wanted a very specific formatting.

I am far from finished writing everything out, but I figured there is no reason not to share what I have done so far. If you are interested in reading about the various characters and stories I've been casually writing in the background over the years, then you may want to keep an eye on this URL: https://files.lordaardvark.com/Patreon/CharacterCards/

I'll try to push updates to it alongside the weekly Progress Reports, though there will definitely be weeks where I don't get any writing done. If you're in the Misc Bin tier and not the Progress Reports, then you can keep track of when the Progress Reports are posted as a general litmus of when to check the page to see if it's been updated.

My goal with putting together these character cards is to eventually make the whole system public, and to use it as a backdrop for querying viewer interest. I want to one day make videos for all of my characters--I wrote them for a reason, after all; I want to see them in motion!--but if there is overwhelming interesting in one specific character or IP over others, then that will definitely influence the order in which those videos get made.

As an example, I am personally eyeballing a Parawhores video in the first wave of Micro experiments. But if it ends up that everyone just clamors over each other rabid for a Kaeleen video, while no one so much as spares a thought to Miya, then I would pivot my plans to coming up with a Kaeleen video instead. Again, I want to make videos for all of them eventually - the order doesn't matter much to me.

This actually segues cleanly into the next section of this post, which ironically my pointing out makes the segue terrible:

Micros

I've mentioned previously (at least, I think I've mentioned previously), my casual exploration of the idea of supplementing the existing video production schedule with what I call Micro videos, 60-second videos explicitly written and designed in such a way that I can assemble them from start to finish in less than a week's worth of work, excluding voice recording schedules.

The ideal for Micros is I spend 1 day writing, 1 day animating the core, 1 day building and lighting the scenes, 1 day lip-syncing the audio when it comes in, and 1 day editing the video. 5 days in total for a video production.

I have been exploring a handful of ideas, with one Micro actively in production (we'll get to that in a moment), and I think I have matured my thoughts on the whole process a bit. Firstly, I think I am going to loosen the 60-second restriction. I am going to aim to keep videos as short as possible, but I won't break my back over videos falling under the 60-second mark. If a video ends up being 90 seconds, then that is fine. I'd even tolerate 2 minutes, though that's definitely getting to the upper end of how long I want to spend on these video productions.

These decisions mostly come on the back of three of the Micro ideas I want to build: the aforementioned Parawhores video, a serialized follow-up to the Claire/Jill video, and an idea I am going to go into more detail in a separate section below.

I have a 60-second version of the Parawhores video I've shown previously that works, but I feel like it's a bit cramped. The original version, that flowed much better, was 70 seconds. I aggressively cut it down to under 60, but I feel like in retrospect--now that Bluesky lifted the strict 60-second restriction I was originally aiming for--that was a poor decision, and the video idea suffers for it. So I want to revisit the idea, restore some of the original ideas I had cut, and maybe expand it a bit more to better capture the spirit of the IP as a whole.

The Claire/Jill video, featured at the top of this section, follows a similar pattern. I had an original idea for it that ran a bit long and so I cut it, which resulted in the video only running about 45 seconds. I padded it out, but it feels a bit rushed and empty right now. I want to restore some of the sequences I cut, and throw in some dirty talk to help fill it out with personality.

Both of those video ideas, I am aiming for 75 seconds rather than 60 seconds now, though I am willing to let them run up to 90 seconds if I feel like it's important to the overall integrity and flow of the ideas.

Community Engagement?!

I'm an old-head. I don't like to think about it, but at the same time, I can't deny it.

Relevant to this conversation, I come from a period of the Internet where the idea of interactive comics was popular. For those unaware, their concept is pretty straightforward: the artist puts together a small span of an ongoing comic, wherein the characters of the story are faced with a decision. And instead of the artist making the decision, the choice is left to the viewers to decide, through a voting mechanism or a write-in mechanism or some sort. The artist then makes the next span of the comic based on the viewer input, repeating the cycle again.

The resulting interactive comic is thus a collaborative effort between the artist and their community, with the artist giving select control of the flow of the story to their community, and together they craft a unique story that flows in ways that neither would have considered on their own.

I was deeply invested in many interactive comics at the time, and I have always loved the idea of artist-community collaboration in general. If my open transparency with these Progress Reports over the years and my constant begging people to actually participate and engage with my projects hasn't given that away.

It is with this background that this particular idea, To Settle An Argument, comes into play. Originally beginning as a Micro idea wherein Jack and Miranda have a sex competition to determine once and for all who is the bigger slut, the thought soon expanded out to the idea of making it a spiritual successor to the interactive comics of ages past: an interactive Micro.

The mechanics would be much the same as interactive comics: I assemble a small (one might even say, Micro) video progressing the story, before leaving the outcome up to the community to decide. For this specific video, I imagine a structure where each decision is one of two types: either deciding who did win a particular competition, or who should win a particular competition.

For examples of each, pulling from the proof-of-concept poster that I shared on Bluesky (and consequently garnered the most engagement of any of my Bluesky posts to date): One of the competitions the ladies agree to is that a real slut deepthroats with enthusiasm. The two proceed to take different approaches to deepthroating a double dildo: Miranda goes for speed and depth, while Jack goes for energy and intensity. This would be an example of voting for who did win - the community votes on whose deepthroating technique they prefer and think deserves the point, and then the follow-up video reflects the guys that the two are performing for voicing that same opinion, before setting up the next competition.

Another competition the ladies agree to is that a real slut can effortlessly hold many loads in her mouth without swallowing. The bigger slut, then, can naturally hold more loads without swallowing. Since this is a pretty easily quantifiable numbers game, it is an example of voting for who should win - the community votes on who they think should swallow more loads, getting the win, and then the follow-up video shows that person winning before setting up the next competition.

I have a handful of competitions figured out, as well as a general progression, though I need to figure out more before I pull the trigger on the project. But as I mentioned earlier, this video got an overwhelmingly enthusiastic reception on Bluesky. I already rather liked the idea, and the reception convinced me that I want to pull the trigger on it.

Marie Micro

 As a final note for this week's Progress Report, I want to state that I have formally pulled the trigger on the Marie Micro, and have already gotten audio back for it - but it has run into technical problems which I have decided to put off until all of the audio is in.

I don't want to get into the weeds here, because it is a headache and absolutely ridiculous besides, so instead, I'll just give the rundown: I can't have Marie, Honoka, Helena, and the lad all in the project file at the same time and add audio. I can have Marie, Honoka, Helena, and the guy without sound, obviously. And I can have Marie, Honoka, Helena, or  the guy with sound, without problem.

But if any two of the characters exist anywhere in the entire project file, then SFM immediately crashes as soon as audio is installed.

As you can imagine, this causes a problem in a video where all four of them not only coexist in a project file, but are even on-screen at the same time, as this section's image demonstrates.

The only solution I have found to this problem is to split the project into 4 working files: one with only Marie and audio, one with only Helena with audio, one with only the guy with audio, and one with all of them but no audio. Honoka doesn't need a separate project file, because she doesn't actually have any lines in the project. Otherwise, it'd be a 5-way split.

I will then have to animate the audio for each character in their own separate project file, and then merge all of the animation together into the no-audio project file. Which is an absolute nightmare to manage, as I am sure you can imagine. And God help me if I have to adjust any timings to fit audio, because then I will have to perfectly reflect those changes across four separate project files, without being able to actually test them all and make sure they synchronize - that'd require the audio, which crashes SFM and is the reason for this split in the first place.

As such, while this Micro is under production and I do intend to finish it, it's going to be a headache to deal with. And after spending a full day just figuring out what causes it to crash and what doesn't, I have decided to not spend any more time on it until all of the audio comes in.

And you can bet your buns I have been constantly making sure that audio doesn't crash Batcat, in the wake of this issue. So far, so good, on that front.

That's all for now. Until next week, everyone!