Progress Report - August 28, 2020 (Patreon)

Hey all.

So I didn't quite make the Thursday date for the progress report, but I actually have a valid excuse for it. I technically didn't make the Friday date either, since it's currently 1:41AM as I am writing this sentence on Saturday morning, but I haven't gone to bed yet, so I'm still saying it's Friday.

So what all got done this past week?

Liziverse

A fair bit, actually! If the next section hadn't occurred, I might have actually make a significant amount of progress on Liziverse this week.

I managed to lip-sync the entire office sequence, which is about 2.5 minutes of footage, all in one day. I got the whole render off to my sound designer, who after fighting with getting the right version of Premiere, has been able to get the entire project loading correctly, freeing him up to work on it.

We don't have a timeframe right now, which works just as well. My new "try not to stress myself into an aneurysm" approach means that sometimes things distract me from the intended plan, which pairs nicely with the fact that he's balancing university and a retail job on top of doing sound design. So to say that both of our schedules are a bit on the chaotic side would be a fair assessment.

I suspect that I will be able to get the rest of the lip-sync done this week, though, provided no other distractions come up. Then maybe I can finally finish the scenebuild for the office sequence and light it. There's a reason I've never shown a lit screenshot of the office - there are no lights to show!

Once the lip-sync is done, then it's just detailing. So the Liziverse train is steadily rolling toward the finish line. It's taking about 3 times longer than I wanted it to, but I'm fine with that. This whole "not stressing about everything" thing is still new and feels a bit weird, but I'm getting used to it.

Rachel & The Psychomorph

So this is what distracted me from getting more work done on Liziverse. Well, one of the things, anyways. If you look at the bottom-left image for this post, you’ll see Ninja Gaiden’s Rachel getting the dicking of her life by a rather large friendly fellow.

That friendly fellow is Chaos from Final Fantasy XIV. And he’s the reason why a third of my week got diverted away from working on Liziverse.

I’ve posted images of him and Rachel some weeks previous, and I have since returned to the idea several times, and made several more prototype images, like the aforementioned. I have described this before when I discussed the change of production style and the focus on Overbreed: when a project idea sticks around in my head for weeks at a time, then I consider it worth investigating further. And so that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.

Up till this time though, all of the images I made with Chaos were done without an IK script. If you know anything about working in SFM (or really any 3d posing program), then you likely know just much of a challenge that is. For those of you who don’t have that experience, it’s basically the equivalent of walking along the highway rather than driving—you can do it, but it takes a lot longer and it leaves you exhausted from the effort.

So I set out to spend an hour or two to clean up his rigging and get him an IK rig made for SFM. What ended up happening is I ended up spending 15 straight hours on Thursday basically rerigging him from head to toe (literally head to toe; I rerigged his head and neck, his entire spine, his feet, and his toes! I also rerigged his hands and arms… all four of them…). Then maybe another 4 or 6 hours today building, debugging, and testing his IK rig. He has a lot of bones that need to be managed in those scripts, and he’s actually fairly nonconventional compared to standard human bipeds, so there was a good chunk of winging it—and I don’t just mean the literal wings that the script has to manage!

While working on the model for Chaos, I was also working out the potential story between him and Rachel. Here’s what I have, in an extreme nutshell: Rachel—who is canonically a monster/demon/fiend hunter in Ninja Gaiden—takes on a contract to bring in a notoriously elusive demon. What makes this demon so difficult to bring in is that he is what is known as a psychomorph: he changes his appearance and demeanor based on the subconscious thoughts and desires of the target of his attention, and manipulates them into leaving him alone.

Explained through visual storytelling, Rachel was told by various other bounty hunters of the forms that he’s taken when they tried and fail to bring him in—a beautiful woman, a literal prince charming, a worthy combatant, a literal room of treasure.

All of this is in service to set up that the demon’s form is controlled by the person he is interacting with—so that when Rachel encounters him herself, and he takes on the form of a nearly-8-foot-tall brute with four hulking arms and a cock bordering on two feet in length, it’s because deep in Rachel’s subconscious she’s craving having her internal organs replaced with dick by the hands of a massive muscle-daddy.

And that’s exactly what happens.

I haven’t quite settled on an ending yet, but right now I am leaning toward having it such that, after Rachel gets her fill of him (which isn’t a tall order, given his dick is as long as her torso is tall), she manipulates his psychomorphic properties to will him into the form of a whelp of a demon that she easily captures and turns in for her bounty. Something to even more strongly reinforce that his brutish form was entirely at her whim, and she was always in absolute control of the situation.

Overbreed

And of course, what week would be complete without more high-level Overbreed brainstorming?

This week, I mostly focused on three things: weaving a sex sequence that explores the dynamic between Tracer and Widowmaker; putting together a lesbian sequence between Pharah and Symmetra that serves the dual purpose of expressing their same-sex relationship while also establishing their straight-sex kinks for their futa encounters; and tightening up the Mercy x DVa sequence.

The first three episodes came into this extremely unbalanced: Episode 1 has 8 and 17 references, for a total of 25. Episode 3 had 23 references in just the DVa sequence, with none at all figured out for the lesbian sequence. And Episode 2 had only 6 and 10 references, for a total of 16—fewer than the Mercy x Sombra sequence in Episode 1 by itself!

Now, after this week’s tweaking, here’s the lay of the land in terms of reference counts: Episode 1 is unchanged, so it’s 8 + 17 = 25. Episode 2 is 6 + 18 currently, with I am imagining another 2 or 3 for the Tracer x Widow sequence, so let’s say 6 + 20 = 26. And Episode 3 is 15 + 19 = 34.

My goal is to have each episode have between 25 and 30 references between their two stories. Episodes 1 and 2 being on the lighter side of this spectrum is to be expected, because they serve to establish the futa dynamics by way of Mercy and Zarya having solo sequences, and there’s just not that much narrative or variety you can do with only 1 character by themselves.

That being said, Episode 3 is still a bit on the heavy side. I managed to trim 4 references out of the DVa sequence, but I think I want to try to trim another 4 out of I can. The Mercy x DVa sequence has the internal theme of being theatrical, so I am focusing on extreme positions like piledrivers and full nelsons, and exotic positions like splits and wheelbarrows / upside-down sex. That being said, I still have a personal vested interest in seeing DVa’s fat ass bounce a fair bit, and so a few “traditional” poses like doggystyle and bent-over made their way into the references.

Right now, I’m on the fence on if I want to cut those, or cut some of the facefucking—I have my eye on an internal drive that Mercy personally wants to fuck the girls’ faces (and especially cum down their throats), but the girls keep wanting her to knock them up. Mercy’s characterization (and indeed the primary driving factor of her encounters) is that of being extremely selfless, and so she puts their needs above her own wants—but she sneaks in a bit of facefucking when she can get away with it.

In the end, I’ll probably split the difference and remove some of the traditional poses, and some of the facefucking. After all, I can keep up the ongoing story thread of Mercy wanting to blow her load straight down the hatch without Mercy fucking DVa’s face three separate times… Just once is sufficient. I guess…

If I can remove 4 references from the DVa sequence, then that’d get Episode 3 down to 30 references total. I’d be satisfied with that, but I also want to take the scissors to the Symmetra x Pharah sequence that is shown in today’s poster (Symmetra always comes first in listing this, because she’s characterized in Overbreed as topping the shit out of Pharah—or, more accurately, Pharah is a genuine bottom bitch, so Symmetra ends up on top just out of necessity).

I’m not too sure what all I can cut from the lesbian sequence though, because it’s already a pretty tight ship. It sets up 4 important points:

1.) While Symmetra and Pharah are in a same-sex relationship, they are not lesbians—rather, they are both frustrated bisexuals who found hooking up with each other easier than playing and losing the dating lottery.

2.) Pharah is extremely submissive, particularly in the trait that she is very eager to pleasure her partner. She is a giver to the core, and is unashamedly willing to participate in any depravity asked of her, so long as her partner enjoys it.

3.) Symmetra has particular interest in fellatio, especially deepthroat. This comes back in Episode 4, with the huge-cock worship between Symmetra and Ana having a particular emphasis on Symmetra slobbering all over Ana’s dick.

4.) Similarly, Pharah has particular interest in anything anal, be it giving analingus or being anally penetrated. As with Symmetra, this is set-up for Episode 4, where she explicitly requests that Mercy fuck her ass only. Of course, this breaks down by the end, with Pharah changing her mind and wanting Mercy to put a bun in her oven; and, to keep up with the mini-plot I described earlier with DVa, with Mercy sneaking in fucking Pharah’s face once or twice.

I suspect that if I were to remove anything from the Symmetra x Pharah sequence, it’d be condensing the anal play with the double dildo, and removing some of the later double-dildo sequences. I want to bookend the sequence with them scissoring, and the cuddling-into-sex-again sequence near the beginning is important to me, because its purpose is to establish Pharah’s strong libido—or more accurately, her strong desire to pleasure her partner.

I don’t have anything to publish into the Overbreed Bible yet. Hopefully I’ll be able to finally finish off the Tracer x Widowmaker sequence this week, and finalize writing it out, and write out Episode 3 as well.

I’m not looking forward to Episode 4, though. Episode 2’s sequence between Tracer and Widow has evolved beyond the simple femdom to a tug-of-war between the two, constantly swapping whose on top. I love the dynamicism it prevents and I think it beautifully explores the competitive characterization I have for them, but it also muddies the water even further for Episode 4’s sequence where Widowmaker is the one with the dick. I’m going to have to think on it.