November Thanks & December Plans (Patreon)

I want to thank everyone for your support for November rolling into December!

I'm not going to lie when I say that, even after doing this for around a year now, I still find it surreal that 400+ people like my work enough to actually throw money at me to continue making it.

And while I do get pretty down whenever I see people shamelessly lambast me and my supporters (sneered questions like "Why the hell does anyone support such a mediocre asshat" are pretty prevalent), and especially down when I see communities I support talk down about my work, like when the SFMLab chat celebrated my Tumblr account being deleted, I always just have to step back and remind myself: even if there's a lot of people who don't like my work, there's at least four hundred people that do. And not just like my work in a casual way, but like my work enough to quite literally put their money where their likes are.

It's all of you people that inspire me to cut through all of the hate and unwarranted criticisms, and the downer feelings they elicit. So I just wanted you all to know that it is, quite literally, because of all of you I still do this. Not even from a monetary standpoint, though it is because of your financial support I am able to do such extravagant narratives with full voice-acting and cooperative animating - if it weren't for your moral support, I probably would have submitted to all the trash-talking and given up long ago.

So with that being said, let's talk December!

Well, as you may or may not know, I am currently back home with the folks until the New Year.

That means that my schedule is extremely irregular, between spending time with my folks, and spending time with my friends who still live in my home town and I haven't seen for 6-to-12 months now.

This schedule is excaberated by the fact that one such friend is currently in between jobs, meaning he has a lot of free time. Which consequently means he spends that free time with me. Don't get me wrong, I love spending my time indulging with friends, but entertaining company for 14 hours can be draining - and it makes it really hard for me to make any time for SFM stuff.

But, regardless, I manage to scrap together a few hours a week!

I don't have anything super permanent, but I do have two animation projects currently in development. Between these two projects, I will actually be utilizing all three of my major voice actresses: Milly Stern (Jack), Incognita (Liara), and Candy (Rebecca Chambers). And they will all be picking up character debuts for my blog, with Honoka, Samus Aran, and Marie Rose respectively. Additionally, everyone's favorite male voice will return with Ivan, voicing yet another new character, and a new male voice will also be introduced with these animations.

In total, these two animations will have a total of five voices spread across them, with five character debuts and one actor debut.

Beyond animations, I also plan to release the new Femshep sometime this month. I fitted her gloves earlier today and built her alternate skingroups, so all that's left is rigging her hair and applying Bodymorph.

Also on the model-release train, I am hoping to get all five models for those two animations released: the new DazV2 Honoka & Marie Rose, the two male characters, and the new Hiveship-era Samus Aran / Sarah Bryant model.

On the down-low, without any real visual elements to represent them, I will also be working on things related to Hiveship during my month vacation. I want to lock down the details of the plot, which continue to shift and slide a fair bit, start writing out a proper draft, and start sorting out all of the voices I'll need for it.

As I've said before, I plan to go full ham on Hiveship, and a consequence of that is a lot of bit roles. No matter how small, though, they need to be voiced, to give a sense of completion to the scene.

There are also some more technical things for me to solve regarding Hiveship, such as rigging the ship external, building some good space-scapes for shots with it, finalizing the dimensional-tear effect (which is coming out to look really freaking cool... hoping to have some dev videos of it in the coming weeks!), and figuring out if I want to try to source some decent Space Pirate models or just cop out and use Metroids in the beginning sequences that establish Samus Aran as a bad-ass bounty-hunter.

Depending on how all of the above goes, I may even try putting together a teaser trailer for Hiveship - an official teaser, not the related-but-not-related Samus piece that I plan to put together this month with Incognita. But that's up in the air.

So, those are my plans for this month. We'll see if my schedule actually permits it, though.

Regardless of how December goes, though, I just want to say this one more time, at the risk of sounding like a broken record:

Thank you, everyone!