Phazon Addendum B - Progress Report #4 - PAB Being Put On Hold (Patreon)

Hey all.

So you may have noticed this is a few days late. And you may have noticed I don’t have an actual image for this post. You may have also noticed that I’ve made this post public for everyone to read.

The reason for that is simple:

I am shelving Phazon Addendum B for a few months.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone whose been following these Progress Reports for the past few weeks. This past month has been nothing but technical difficulties. It’s taken me 20+ days to accomplish what should have reasonably taken, at most, 5. Realistically, probably 3.

With the sheer number of hours I’ve lost to work having to be scrapped and redone because something went wrong beyond my control, I likely could have built 5 models entirely from scratch, including full outfit with bodygroups and bodymorph support. Instead, I’ve gotten a grand total of one model with two outfits with no bodygroups and no bodymorph, and two additional outfits that also have neither of those things. Literally the equivalent of two Wednesday streams. And it’s taken me twenty fucking days to get that far.

All said and done, we are now 27 days into production, and I have… the sex scenes drafted out. And not even completed yet – Samus doesn’t even have her bodygrouped Zero Suit made yet. That’s it. I don’t even have the session files for the non-sex sequences made so far. And seeing as I currently have 4.5 minutes worth of non-sex audio recorded so far (that’s missing all of Milly’s audio, for reasons described below), the fact that I have burned literally half of the budgeted time and haven’t even started on narrative animation is not boding well for an August 1 release. Not good at all.

As if PAB being a massive stressor wasn’t enough on its own, this is how my month has gone:

1. The on-stream Harley video is taking longer than I had wanted, waiting on my Harley voice actress. This is absolutely not her fault, and I do not blame her in any capacity. What all she has done is fantastic, and quality like that takes time. I understand that. It doesn’t change the fact that we’ve now had nearly a half-dozen streams of just sitting on our hands unable to work on Harley in any capacity now.

2. The Leliana on-stream mini-video, which I had put together to quickly bide time while waiting for Harley, is on indefinite hiatus. This is due to Milly having pressing family matters come up that demand her attention – I won’t divulge details out of respect for her privacy, just that they are such that I explicitly told her to take as much time as she needs to get everything sorted out. I don’t expect that to happen any time soon.

3. The Femshep on-stream mini-video, which I had put together to quickly bide time while waiting for Leliana (sensing a pattern here?), is being left wholesale on the cutting-room floor. I simply can’t think of good dialogue to accompany the animation we had put together (unlike Leliana, which I think has dialogue that works quite well with the animation), and rather than continue to stress for it beyond the full fucking week that I have stressed over it already, I just decided to drop the axe and cut it wholesale. So it’s not being done at all.

4. The DOAFantasy DazV5 models as released (Prototype 2) have some enigmatic and inconsistent mesh errors on them, which result in outfits not working properly between them. The blue cop outfit I had made for Hitomi highlighted this issue, as the characters’ backs pop out in their entirety on half of the DOAFantasy ladies. Further examination has shown that some of the ladies have their meshes slightly distorted from one another, which would only cause further issues. Compound this with longstanding issues they’ve had of inconsistent neck-sizes and lengths, as well as inconsistent head-bone positions and rotations, making outfits entirely incompatible above the chest, and I just decided to scrap Prototype 2 wholesale. Prototype 3 is a complete rebuild of the DOAFantasy ladies, from the ground up. Their bodies are 100% incompatible with Prototype 2, and their faceposing similarly has to be completely remade. This is a MASSIVE endeavor, that took over a year’s worth of streams last time around. And this time around, I am expanding the scope to include effectively every Dead or Alive lady, as well as include all of their canon shapes in addition to the DOAFantasy body.

5. Despite having a whopping 180 models to my credit, as per my SFMLab profile, I have an exceptionally small number of models available to me. The most populous IP I have, Dead or Alive, is currently defunct as I grind through the DOAFantasy rebuild I just detailed above. Outside of them, I have a grand total of EIGHT DazV5 models that are fully functional and ready to be used. And one of those 8 models is Samus, whom I think you all can understand why I’m not exactly keen on doing things with right now.

6. My quiet efforts to try and salvage the Surrosluts animation, 10+ minutes of fully finished and dubbed animation that I had dropped over $1000 on, are increasingly pointing to the tragic reality I won’t be able to save any of it. Milly being unavailable (see previous Leliana section) means that I can’t get any new Lisa lines recorded, and as much as I love InsideIncognita and think she does a fantastic job, I think that if I have to listen to Tina’s exaggerated Southern drawl (which Innie replicates far too perfectly), then I am going to end up stabbing a fork straight through my eye. All of which means that keeping either Lisa or Tina, let alone both, isn’t looking to be in the cards right now.

7. My attempts to reset my sleep schedule have failed spectacularly within a record-breaking 48 hours of the reset. I am going to bed around 4AM and getting up around 11AM, which is terrible for me because I am a morning person, in the sense that if I get up at 8AM then I can get probably twice as much work done in a day than if I get up at 11AM, because 8AM-me is incredibly energetic whereas 11AM-me is quite lethargic in comparison. But getting up at 8AM isn’t feasible when I go to bed at 4AM.

8. I had this entire Patreon post written out, and then Patreon bugged the fuck out, blanked the page, and lost the entire post. The last draft saved was literally just me typing in the name of the post, before writing the post itself. Thanks for that, Patreon.

So yeah. That’s been my month. To say it’s been stressful is an understatement. And with everything else that I have been dealing with, staring down the barrel of trying to get PAB done to a level of quality I am satisfied with in half the time I scheduled for it is bringing me to a level of despair that I haven’t felt since the year I did model commissions and seriously contemplated committing suicide.

With all of that said, I hope you can understand why I am deciding to put Phazon Addendum B on ice for the time being, just for the sake of my mental health.

I don’t know what I will do in its place. The way I see it, I have three major choices:

1. I pick another project to allocate 2 months to, and I push the entire schedule for 2020 back a full month. This isn’t a terrible decision, because I actually have December as a buffer month with nothing scheduled. So I could get away with this, without having anything roll over into 2021. The problem is, I don’t know what project to do in its place – the next planned video, BatCat, has Milly in a major role. And, again, she’s unavailable for an indeterminate amount of time right now. Plus, I was eyeballing quietly swapping BatCat out and replacing it with the resurrected Surrosluts project, but because of all the issues with that I described previously (and those aren’t even the biggest issues with Surrosluts Resurrected right now; I won’t go into any more detail there though), I don’t think that’s viable either.

2. I come up with a new half-length project that I can complete in one month with near-zero preproduction (the “preproduction” would be the space between now, June 27, and July 1; EG 3 whole days). That’s 3 days to come up with an idea, write the screenplay, get the voices cast and greenlit, and get all of the model-work done. And then I get 31 days to make the entire video, to release on August 1.

3. I just don’t release a video on August 1. I take July and August to prepare for future projects, whatever they may be, and just don’t release anything on August. This echoes the 6-month hiatus between releases that happened as a result of Surrosluts’ delays and cancellation, between No Gods, No Kings and Rabbit.Hole Episode 3. That 6-month hiatus made me feel absolutely fucking terrible, and I don’t want to do it again. But I might have to.

None of these options are particularly great. Between them, I think option 1 is the most likely; option 2 would be ideal, if I could confidently pull it off; and option 3 is the absolute worst-case-scenario I want to avoid.

So this is where things are right now.

I’m sorry to disappoint you all, but please believe me when I say that no matter how disappointed you may be, it pales in comparison to how disappointed I am. I explicitly wrote Phazon Addendum B to be easier, faster, and less stressful than Rabbit.Hole Episode 3 was. I purposely scaled it down, reduced the number of actors and locations, simplified the story, and made the sex scene a lot easier to animate. And yet, in just one week of PAB production, I encountered more complications and stress than the entire two-month production of RHE3. I think it fair to say my plan of making PAB be a “stress-free vacation project” backfired pretty thoroughly.

I don’t know where things are going from here. I’ll keep you all posted, though. I’ll try to post next Thursday.

Until then, take care, everyone.