Progress Report, Plans, Changes for 2024 (Patreon)

Hello everyone, happy new year, good continuation, and welcome to the first report of 2024, where I'll be delineating some of the plans for 2024 and a bit of a roadmap, some changes, as well as elaborating on the projects in the works and their status. Enjoy a naked variant of the distinctly more SFW variant I'll be using for a new banner in the near future - I've shipped it off to the artist in question, so just waiting to get it back.

But I digress. I'll start off listing, in no particular order, the projects and their status in question:

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Title: Blitzballs
Engine: Blender (Formerly SFM)
Starring: Lulu from Final Fantasy X
Status: In Queue

Blitzballs is something that I've wanted to do since the SFM days, and which has lost out to other projects in terms of community polls and the likes. It's a heavily gang bang oriented piece which was stuck in the paradoxical position of SFM as a program having a hard time with multiple models without crashing and Blender having such demanding models that my old GPU could not handle it. With my new setup this project should be viable these days, and is simply waiting its turn in the queue.

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Title: Continued Negotiations
Engine: Blender
Starring: Liara and Miranda from Mass Effect
Status: On Hold, pending rework

Continued Negotiations is the by far largest project I have in the plans. Its scope, sheer amount of spoken lines and scenes means it'll be a monumental undertaking both in terms of work, time and budget. Before I can begin reworking the old scenes in earnest, I require two things to occur: the full release of Rigid's new Mass Effect lineup, and mastery of fluid dynamics in Blender. The former is, from my understanding, in the works, where we already have an early version of a very lovely Miranda model, and I've tentatively began my journey with the latter. This will probably be my magnum opus once it's finished, so I don't want to be held back by any technical limitations.

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Title: Local Customs (Formerly "Planetfall")
Engine: Blender (Formerly SFM)
Starring: Ashley Williams and Ivy Valentine, from Mass Effect and Soul Calibur
Status: Cancelled, reworked into Ivy solo piece

Local Customs stems from a, by now, really old community vote during a period I was transitioning between SFM and Blender. The poll results between the top contenders were close enough that I deemed that they both ought to be featured, and I went ahead and did what I've since learned is a mistake: announcing it before having formulated a proper plan for it. I've tried tackling this project multiple times, rewriting the script, trying to limit its scope to a short, but nothing has really worked owing to its really far removed, strange crossover nature. Add to this the weird quirks and issues of the Ashley model that has arisen with each Blender update since, and I am forced to conclude that it is time that I announce that I am pulling the plug on this project. Some assets and setups for it have instead been pilfered for and utilized in the current on-going Ivy project. Should Rigid release a new Ashley model with his new lineup, it's not impossible that she'll see something of her own down the line as a manner of compensation.

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Title: Breaking the Lineage
Engine: SFM
Starring: Cassie Cage from Mortal Kombat X
Status: Uncertain/Cancelled, but facing something similar in Blender

Breaking the Lineage is probably the oldest project to still be under consideration. The Corrupted Shinnok model lacked crucial rigging in SFM, and against my own gut feeling I began trying to animate the matter years ago. Fighting against the constraints of lacking a workable IK (and a very janky FK on that) eventually proved futile, with an immense amount of hours going into it only to realize that the very first scene was somewhat close to completion. I was ready to cancel this project outright when, out of nowhere, a very nice MKX version of Cassie (which I personally prefer over her later iterations) was released for Blender. Thus, while Breaking the Lineage is effectively no more, I want to make clear that I fully intend to make a project in Blender featuring MKX Cassie, and with the amount of male models we've gotten from the franchise just over the last year or so, things are looking bright on that side. This all said, it's not a huge priority at the moment, but will become relevant soon enough.

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Title: The Convict
Engine: Blender
Starring: Jack from Mass Effect
Status: Facing Rework

This project was borne entirely on a whim, effectively in response to a massively positive reaction by the Discord crowd to me playing around with Jack's model and some Blue Sun mercenaries I had rigged. Being once again too quick to announce a project, I eventually realized the potential TOS breaking structure and troubling undertones of the project, and it's faced several rewrites since as well as a new model lineup of hers that also featured her ME2 appearance, making its core structure even more uncertain. I'm still looking to thread the needle on this one, somehow, but I am as of this moment unsure how exactly to accomplish the pairings in question without walking onto ground best not treaded. Still, I've wanted a Jack project for some time, so we will see how this one pans out in the end.

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Title: Demon Funds (combination of 20.000 Twitter follower celebration and Local Customs)
Engine: Blender
Starring: Ivy Valentine from Soul Calibur
Status: Actively In The Works, Current Priority

Ivy's current project stems originally from a 20.000 twitter follower celebration poll, and has since then faced several reworks, had another project folded into it, and eventually found its stride. This is the project I am currently putting most of my spare hours into whenever I'm not maintaining the usual update schedule, and it's been seeing steady progress where I've dedicated at least a day or two a week fully to it. While it's likely that I'll have to commission further voice work for the lizards, the script is since long finalized and all other VA stuff has been sorted, so all that remains otherwise is to animate it, which is also what I am doing. Presently the intro, which is heavy on custom animation, is about to have its lip sync tackled, with the project itself stretching into, last I made an approximation, slightly above 5 minutes of run length. The way I've worked on this one is going to be a model going forward with other projects as well, where I've found that I can usually report on some major progress having been made in the weekly reports while still maintaining a high degree of motivation. I hope you're looking forward to this one as much as I am folks - it's going to be a good one.

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Title: Laying Low (previously Underground Fundraising)
Engine: Blender
Starring: Tifa from Final Fantasy VII
Status: Script largely outlined, but requires more work. In the queue.

Unbeknownst to many, Tifa actually has her own project that's faced its own troubles for a while, particularly initially where I had some model and performance issues which forced me to rework the entire scene and script, but which has since mellowed out (and been largely alleviated by my new GPU). The last time I cast my eyes upon its script it had a really extensive outline featuring Tifa with a cameo appearance with Scarlet, and which I quite enjoyed, but which will also require a rather hefty budget and time allotment, though not to the extent of the gigantic task that is Continued Negotiations. Still, it's largely been delineated and will just require some polish once it's time to begin work on it, which I hope won't be too long.

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That's a wrap for the current projects and their status. If you have any questions pertaining to them, feel free to either ask them below in the comments, or send me a direct message about them, and I promise to answer to the best of my ability. Down below I'll delineate some bullet points for content changes that are coming up, some which impact some tiers more than others, but fundamentally has some impact on all of the regular update schedule and thus might still be interesting to read, as well as the roadmap and other announcements.

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$10 Tier: Voting and Cooldowns

The $10 tier recently had a poll pertaining to cooldown structures, and what became evident is that longer cooldowns had a slight edge in terms of results. Consulting backers and my own brain, I've thus concluded that:

Character cooldowns remain the same (6 polls)
Theme cooldowns are increased to 3 (up from 2)

This will ensure more partner variation for characters, while still keeping a rather hefty cooldown period (3 months) for any character that wins the polls in question. I am reluctant to increase character cooldowns even further as, while I think variation certainly is nice, some characters are also popular for a good reason. It's also worth noting that characters who come off cooldown do not automatically enter back into the polls - they need to be nominated once more. This is to further increase variety, so if you want your popular lady back on there, keep checking who is on cooldown and missing from the polls in question.

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$5/$10 Tier: Less Popular Ladies Vote

The Less Popular Ladies (LPL) vote over on the Discord is also facing some small rework, mainly in that a slight bleed-over from the $10 tier will occur with each occasion of it, with the first 3 slots of the LPL reserved for the absolute bottom performers in those polls. This will hopefully make people who want to nominate characters for the $10 tier polls but are reluctant to do so since they don't think they'll stand a chance at winning less sad about their characters performing poorly.

The LPL is also having its nomination and voting extended, with nominations running from Thursday to Monday, and the vote being held from Tuesday to Saturday over on the Discord, each time the LPL comes up. Hopefully this gives more people the time to get their nominations in, and also to vote.

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Resolution upgrade:

All future animation work will be rendered at 1440p instead of the previous 1080p, bringing them up to par with our present wallpaper quality. This is in response to extensive feedback by backers, and with my new GPU the render times should not be impacted as heavily as they were before. It'll take some time getting used to and there's a chance I'll forget on occasion, with Blender defaulting to 1080p whenever you open up a new session file, but it'll become routine eventually, so please be patient with me on this.

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Less Archive (.rar etc) Extraction:

Owing to the sheer amount of people having trouble opening .rar files on their various devices, 2024 and onward means I am going to upload Scenarios and Projects in their basic MP4 formats instead. While this opens me up further to spurious reports on file hosting sites, the sheer amount of exit polls mentioning issues with opening archives, and the frequent questions I get on the matter (in spite of it being explained in my Patreon FAQ) has made me realize that it's a genuine issue of content delivery, which is never a good thing for creators to have. Loops will have to retain its archive structure owing to its multiple clips being bundled, but I'll make sure their compilation files are uploaded similarly to Scenarios and Projects - that is, without needing archive extraction.

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Roadmap in brief:

Priority 1:
Demon Funds (Ivy Project)

Priority 2:
The Convict Rework (Jack Project)
Laying Low (Tifa Project)

Priority 3:
Blitzballs (Lulu Project)
Breaking the Lineage Rework (Cassie Cage Project)

On Hold:
Continued Negotiations (Miranda and Liara Project)

The exact order in terms of priority numbers remains to be seen. For instance, I might come up with a really good idea for the Jack rewrite or I might go for the Tifa one once the Ivy project has been finalized. There's also a chance I'll finalize their scripts and have them put up to a vote. What I can say is that I will not be announcing any more projects until I've churned through the ones I already have distinct plans for, while keeping a steady pace by tackling one at a time in the manner I have the Ivy Project. This is partially for my own psychological well-being's sake, where having all this old work pile on top of me has been a big damper on motivation for working on it all (quite the paradox of the human mind), and also because I've had problems in the past with impulsively announcing projects that I later realize the difficulties of writing up a sensible script for, leading to this unfortunate circle of announcements, reworks and cancellations. We learn as long as we live, as the saying goes, and I am no exception to it.

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On Comics:

I've gotten no small amount of questions regarding comic work after the Wonder Woman comic finally reached its end. While it seemed rather well received, I'm actually genuinely curious as to people's feelings on the comic format overall, and while I am planning to make a more written text focused (with illustrative images) story style comic in the future, it is my intention to do a community poll on the matter where you'll effectively get to voice your yay or nay pertaining to the format itself. Keep your eyes peeled (what a weird saying that is) for the poll in question in the near future.

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On Scenarios:

Scenarios seem generally well received so far, and while it's entirely correlative their inclusion seems to have largely stabilized what previously was a slowly stagnating Patreon backer count. I'm all ears for feedback pertaining to these, which are meant to straddle the middle-ground between projects and loops, and whether people enjoy them or not. I might, as is my usual impulse, poll people on their general view of them just to gauge interest.

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In Conclusion:

2024 is looking pretty exciting overall, where my grasp of the Cycles engine is also increasing rapidly. Off the top of my head, I believe this Progress Report addresses most of the changes, queries and whatnot that I have gotten over the last year, which I want to clear up for 2024. While I have to rush off for now, I want to thank you, as always, for your continued support and for all of your kind words. Again, questions are very welcome and I'll do my best to answer them, so don't be shy, and it's highly likely I've missed something in my stress to get this one sorted, so if you have any queries, fire away :)

And take care of yourselves, and each other!
/DH