Progress Report - January 28, 2025

Hello, everyone!

I apologize for this update being late - as I was prepping to write this post Monday evening, InsideIncognita jumpscared me with the first draft of her Batcat story. I was immediately sold and jumped into SFM to build a quick mood-piece that pulled a few scenes from her draft.

I wanted to make sure that it was all in-line with what she had in mind before I shared it, though. And so I decided to wait until we managed to discuss this evening and get her all-clear on it.

With that being said, here is the moodpiece that I put together.

 I'm not sure why Innie was so nervous and anxious about her story not being any good, because what she delivered is pure gold-trimmed platinum. Adapting it to a video is going to be an interesting process, especially since she has a lot of internal thoughts and grappling with complicated feelings in the text. To say nothing of adapting it into a relatively short video, considering how the draft she submitted is split into five individual scenes.

We'll be spending some time over the next two weeks processing the draft and distilling it down into a viable screenplay. Hopefully, come February 12, I'll have something concrete to share in that capacity, and the project will have been locked in with most of its preproduction done.

On the Overbreed front, progress is churning along steadily. I mentioned last week how I've given over to organic writing, and how I was concerned about that organic writing getting away from me for the sake of pacing. Well, it got away from me, though not in the place I expected it to - and it's absolutely not a bad thing.

The face-fucking section has been fluctuating around in my head as I write it, but I think I've finally gotten it pinned down. It's ending up being about twice as long as I had originally intended it to be, but importantly it's keeping at a brisk pace.

I will hopefully have the face-fucking section done by next week, and then move onto the final section of the Sombra sequence. The timing works out well, too, since recall how I mentioned some weeks ago that, to make up for the unintentional week-burn that was my working on the brothel game design, I have decided to take a week out of February and continue working on Overbreed.

If the stars align, then that will mean that I round off the Sombra sequence right as the revised Overbreed schedule concludes. And if I end up missing it by a few days, then I will go a bit over-schedule just to wrap it up. I stated this at the start of the year, how the schedule isn't a strict start-and-stop period, and how depending on how close I get the Sombra sequence to finished, I may end up taking a few days beyond the schedule to finish it up.

For posterity, here is what I am seeing for the high-level schedule over the next few months. Note that right now it's too early for me to feel confident making projections for the Batcat project's production schedule - I want to get it adapted to a screenplay, edited down, and adapted to a screenplay before I make any such predictions.

February 12 - Switch from Overbreed to Batcat. Sombra sequence blocking is hopefully finished by this point.

Early April - Batcat project is hopefully released. Take April to get the Frozen audio installed (not lip-synced) and male outfits attached, and to finish the brothel game design and finally restart the Saturday streams.

May - Spend May continuing Blender transition efforts. Where the last Blender efforts were focused on figuring out simulations (to varying degrees of success), this effort will be spent working bottom-up. I want to get the basics down for building projects in Blender: implementing SFM-style IK rigs, finding or building some basic extensions for animating in Blender because Blender's native animating interface is frustratingly clunky and mind-numbingly obtuse, figuring out how the hell to replicate SFM's shot/clip system in Blender, and getting audio playing back in realtime in Blender. The goal is to set up the infrastructure to be able to build rudimentary animated projects, from start to finish, in Blender. They won't look particularly good and won't have the fancy simulations at this point, but we gotta set up the fundamentals before we can get the bells and whistles in place.

June - More Overbreed. Hopefully the Sombra sequence is done at this point, and so I will focus June on building the smaller pieces - the Zarya sequence and the various narrative interstitials. The solo Mercy sequence is also rather long (about half the runtime of the Sombra sequence, judging from the current storyboard - though again, as I mention every time I mention this sequence, I want to rewrite the sequence and overall shore it up and make it more interesting), and so it will be held off for a later Overbreed sprint.

July - Whatever the July short video is.

And that's about as far as I am willing to project right now. Hopefully, by the time the July short video is finished, I won't have any awkward baggage trailing behind and mucking things up. Hopefully the Frozen video will be ready for a quick lip-sync pass and finally get its garbage-quality render and source-file release, the brothel game will have been steadily under development for a few weeks and won't need any off-stream work done (because all of that design work had already been done), and I will be in a position where I can bring everything together to start building videos in Blender.

All of that is hopeful though. We won't know till we get there.

At any rate, that's all for now! Until next week, everyone!