Progress Report - January 7, 2025

Hello, everyone!

It's the first Progress Report of the new year, and it's started out fairly strong on my end. I hope it's started strong on your end, too!

I say "fairly strong" because, well, you may have noticed this Progress Report being made on Tuesday, rather than the scheduled Monday. And that's because Monday ended up being a particularly bad day for my executive function.

Other than that though, the rest of the new year has been going strong!

As I mentioned last week, January's primary focus is on Overbreed. My goal is to get the Sombra sequence finished by month's end. As the first rolled around, I double-checked my notes, and it turns out the Sombra sequence is actually a lot closer to completion than I had originally anticipated.

As of time of writing, there are only two major sections left to build: the next round of face-fucking, and then the piledriver that finally leads into Mercy's climax. Each of them have a few stages to them, such as Mercy stepping up through a few different positions of face-fucking as she desperately struggles (without success) to get off, and then piledriver shifting from anal to vaginal for the finale.

But broad strokes, there's only those two sections left. As of right now, the runtime for the Sombra sequence is at 28:44. With the two remaining sections to do, I suspect the final runtime for this sequence will clock in a bit shy of the 35-minute mark. So my previous projects putting it somewhere in the 40-to-45 minute range were a bit off - I thought I had more left to do than I actually did when I made those projections.

While the bulk of my attention has been put on Overbreed this past week, I have also been spending some time in the evenings figuring out the next on-stream Unreal Engine game project. I've mentioned a few of the ideas previously, such as the sci-fi idea I was exploring. I've also mentioned how I was having some issues with the design details on those ideas.

In the time interim, I have decided to peel back the ambitions a bit and just focus on the central thesis: big-tiddy brothel sim. I've got some solid ideas on the game design, and I am feeling pretty good about it all.

You all know I like mood posters, to sort of hammer down the vibes of a project, and this is no exception. You all also know I am terrible at names, and this is also no exception. The title is absolutely a placeholder - it's far too generic to be effectively searched for.

 The nice thing about this particular iteration of the idea is that I have managed to salvage, like, 90% of the plans I had for Slut Squad. Which is fantastic, because I really liked a lot of those plans. Honestly, the biggest difference between Slut Squad and Bimbo Brothel is that, in Slut Squad, your ladies went to the clients - in Bimbo Brothel, the clients go to your ladies!

When it comes to the design process itself, I have taken to using the Obsidian Editor for organizing my notes. It allows you to create an offline "wiki" for a project, complete with page-linking and citation-style footnotes. It has been extremely useful for stream-of-consciousness writing - the ability to just quickly put down footnotes or create links to new pages on the spot is very powerful, and it's much easier to organize than having all of the notes in a single text file.

With the enhanced note-taking capabilities that Obsidian provides in hand, I have also taken an approach to game-design which I call "playthrough drafting". Put simply, I write out a detailed description of exactly what a playthrough of the game looks like, from the moment the player first presses "new game" up till the end-credits roll. And as I stumble into describing systems and mechanics with nuance, I spin them off to a blank page and then just keep writing.

Whenever I get stuck or tired writing the playthrough, I jump back through the pages I spun off while writing, and backfill them out. As the backfilled pages describe hitherto unmentioned systems and mechanics, then I similarly spin them off and keep the stream-of-consciousness writing.

Over time, everything just fills in and falls into place, and it allows me to organize my thoughts in the frame of reference of a unified gameplay experience, as opposed to a collection of free-floating and disconnected ideas. So far, it has been working exceptionally well.

Once I have a solid foundation and have all of the major systems written out, I have plans to publish the wiki in whatever state it is, leave it open to public review, and get peoples' opinions on what is written and suggestions of things to add or change. It'll probably be a while before it's fully finished, but I am hoping to have it at a shareable and workable state by this Saturday - and so, hopefully, next Monday will see the wiki published for review.

And just to be clear, since I've had a few people confused by it when I brought this up on Twitter - the Bimbo Brothel game will be worked on only on Saturdays, and the entire construction process (outside of designing obviously) will be done entirely on-stream, goofs and all. If you were around for the Slut Squad streams, then it'll be the same exact thing. Same thing, different game.

I'm personally super excited, both with how close this Sombra sequence is to getting finished (with the blocking, anyways), and with finally returning to the Saturday streams. I can't tell you all how stressful those five months working on Pharmmetra was, and how badly I just wanted to take Saturdays off to stream fun stuff instead. But between Pharmmetra falling so far behind schedule, and not having a game design for us to actually work on (because Pharmmetra was falling so far behind schedule, leaving me no time to put together said game design), I simply couldn't afford to do it. And it was soul-crushing.

I really love the Saturday streams, and my soul is singing at the prospect of finally returning to them.

With all of that being said, that's all for now! I am hoping to have at least half of the face-fucking sequence done by next week, as well as the Bimbo Brothel game design workable and reviewable. Let's see how that goes!

Until next week, everyone!