Progress Report - March 7, 2023 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

A week of "missed it by that much"

I apologize for not posting last week. I had every intention to - specifically, to make the progress report post alongside the release of the Autorelease system, which was originally slated to be released on Monday. But then it wasn't quite ready by end of day Monday, so then Tuesday! But then it had last-minute bugs that had the potential to crash the entire infrastructure, so Wednesday? Wednesday finally saw it ready for release, but I somehow ended up spending honest-to-god like 6 hours just packaging and releasing things before the system went live so that people would have content to download, so Thursday..? Thursday finally properly saw the public release of the system (YAY!), but pushing updates to fix problems that were reported to me revealed a catastrophic error that I couldn't let go unresolved (you can read about that catastrophic error here, by the way), which is what Friday was spent on.

By this time, it's now Friday evening, and I figured I might as well just wait till Monday.

Then Monday, yesterday, came around and I was all ready to make the post. Lots of stuff to share. But then at the last minute I decided to add more stuff onto the post, which took more time to make, and before you know it it's 3AM and I need to call it a night and finish things the next morning (today). Calling it was a good decision too, because it took me nearly 4 hours today to finally get that stuff actually done for today's post.

But here we are! Yay!

The Autorelease system is live!

So, as you probably picked up from that whole section, my primary focus last week was the autorelease system. Honestly it's more a content management system right now (my web developer once exclaimed in confusion "you're basically making nuget from scratch", which if you know anything about Visual Studio development you'd be familiar with; similarly, if you're familiar at all with Linux then you probably know about the package manager systems that most distros come with. Same thing.) which... yeah, it really is.

But the important thing is, it's released, it works, it's manageably performant on my end. This allows me to quickly make changes to models and push updates without having to do the song and ritual involved in classical releases, and release little random models I put together on a whim, which I do fairly often. Very useful for me, and useful for people who use my models. No longer do I have to hem and haw about the effort involved in releasing a model - I just click a button and away it goes.

There's a few minor issues I need to tweak with the system, notably how the download manager doesn't seem to actually be sorting releases by date like it's supposed to. But that's not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things, I can find the time to fix it somewhere in my schedule.

Amusingly, I considered releasing updates to the download manager through the download manager, but ultimately decided against it. The whole system has a lot of assumptions baked into it, namely that it's all designed around the idea of uploading from my SFM and installing into your SFM. I'd have to unravel a lot of assumptions to get it to support non-SFM uploads, and that's really just not worth the effort.

It would be a great shitpost, though.

Claire/Jill is back in production!

Yes, it's been delayed far too long now, but Claire/Jill is once again my major focus. I posted a 27-second preview of new polished animation the other day on my Twitter. Feel free to check it out.

You may recall that Claire/Jill was my primary focus some months back, but I burned out hard on it. More specifically, I burned out hard on developing the auto-jitter tool, which I was developing alongside Claire/Jill. The intent was noble, and the concept was sound: a huge chunk of the detail work I am now doing for Claire/Jill is highly systemic, monotonous, and mathematical - the perfect recipe for automation.

The problem wasn't that I couldn't get it to automate. Truth be told I actually got the system working in far less time, with far less trouble, than I expected. The problem was that I couldn't get it to work well. The animations came out looking weird, it was prone to strange edge-case bugs, and sometimes it just liked to party hard. That's to say nothing of the fact that it behaved rather unpredictably - two animations jittered with the same exact values would come out radically different, with one barely moving at all and the other basically exploding in place.

In the end, I just became frustrated with the auto-jitter tool. I had gotten it to 90%, but I was just hitting my head against the wall trying to get that last 10%. And because I was testing it extensively on Claire/Jill, I became frustrated with the project by proxy, to the point I just couldn't bear to look at it. The frustration threw me into a depressive episode, and - as I so often do - I dug myself out of that episode by burying my head in software engineering, which is how the autoreleaser was born.

BUT! The Autoreleaser is done, and I am returning my focus to Claire/Jill. And I am leaving the auto-jitter behind because  ̶i̶t̶s̶ ̶f̶r̶i̶e̶n̶d̶s̶ ̶d̶o̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶d̶a̶n̶c̶e̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶y̶'̶r̶e̶ ̶n̶o̶ ̶f̶r̶i̶e̶n̶d̶s̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶m̶i̶n̶e̶ I don't want a repeat of last time. So I'm just going to buckle down, knuckle up, and detail the damn project by hand. All 15-some-odd minutes of it that remain to be worked on.

If I had done that in the first place, it would've been released months ago. But it is what it is, and we are where we are. We can't go back and fix our mistakes. All we can do is learn from them.

Primordium's title sequence has been rendered out in 4k!

This past Saturday's stream saw us get the title sequence for Primordium all finalized and ready for the final render. I then spent the next 2 days rendering out all of the final high-quality 4k renders, including rerendering all of the text animations in 4k. They were originally 720p images, upscaled to 1080p in all of the previous work-in-progress renders. They're much crisper now, properly exported out and animated in 4k.

The sound design for the title sequence is mostly finished. Sound designer is extremely pleased with his original composition for the sequence, though he does want to fiddle with the mix a bit and kick some of the higher frequencies lower in the mix, so they're not so distracting. And he and I both decided that the voices should be removed from the preview, and more emphasis placed on sound effects.

With those points in mind, you can watch the full title sequence in compressed 4k by clicking here! It's also attached to this post. I am extremely pleased with the result, and when the first episode of Primordium is done and released, with this at its forefront, you all should be sure to shower my sound designer in tons of praise for his amazing composition and overall skill and attention given to the sequence.

Speaking of the first episode, that same stream also saw us make strides in the finalization of the episode. Right now, we are on course for getting it all finished on April 1 (which is a stream Saturday). A lot can still go wrong, so I'm not going to commit to that date. But I have it circled on my calendar with high hopes.

Not much more to say here, honestly. The whole project is going extremely well, all things considered. There's a few minor technical issues we're dealing with now, but we'll get them solved. I'm not bothered.

New original characters!

So these are characters that I've been writing out since June 2020. The gif scrolls way too fast, I know - you can download the images and read them at your leisure at the bottom of this post.

These two are part of an original IP where I've been harboring a lot of ideas. Over the years I've tried to smuggle some of those idea into other projects, and you've seen leaks of them, such as the Zoey hyperfuta "don't wake the roommate" images I made on Twitter some time ago, my pairings of DVa and Zarya, and also some Babs and Selina stuff. But these ideas really were all formed together as a unique cohesive IP, and they will never really exist properly outside of those specific conditions.

Well, this weekend I finally bit the bullet and committed to building the characters. Over the past several months I've been collecting about a dozen or so characters from various dead and obscure games, with the intention of recycling their faces into original characters (or, as I refer to them, "semi-OC" - semi because while the characters as written are fully original, their face meshes are technically recycled from other sources).

This particular IP has a very creative working title of Fumates, which is a portmanteau of Futanari Roommates. I bet you'd never be able to guess what the premise of the IP is.

The major reason why my attempts to smuggle the ideas into other IPs failed is because, at its core, Fumates is a contemporary slice-of-life. It doesn't take place in a zombie apocalypse, it doesn't revolve around heroes and villains, it doesn't have catsuited crooks and caped crusaders. It's just two futas living together in an apartment and the hijinks their opposing personalities and sex lives impose upon them.

Not everything has to be about saving the world, you know?

Viv and Cass here mark the fourth original IP of mine. The first is Fallen Throne of course, with Queen Nualia, her rebellious daughter Caldreth, and the Usurper Muheri, alongside the lovable illiterate goblin Trixa and the lovers-out-of-time referred to internally as Princess and Orc. I don't even know if I've discussed all of these characters before. If I haven't, then pretend I didn't mention them here.

After Fallen Throne comes Parawhores, with the big-tiddy goth girlfriend Miya, her hyperactive pastelpunk cohort whose allergic to uppercase letters tammy, and their sexually frustrated lesbian camerawoman Nataly. I promise proper releases and lore packets for Parawhores is still in the cards. In fact, I am considering spending time later this week focusing on them. No promises, but I am considering it.

Then of course comes Corsair, with Artemis and Medusa, swinging in as an in-place substitution for Samus, the Phazon hexology, and Hiveship. Corsair is itself part of a larger IP, Conscious Code. I don't know if I've discussed the larger scope before, and I have no intentions to now. So if I haven't, forget I mentioned this. I have plans for a proper introduction for Artemis and Medusa, with a video roughly sketched out. It's just a matter of finding time in the schedule to actually build it.

And now, in fourth place, comes Fumates. See above paragraphs for exploration.

I actually have two more potential IPs in mind. One of them is a lesbian couple, whose identifies I sort of forcibly drafted onto Babs and Selina but with a few changes to fit their characters at least somewhat. The major changes are that, in their original forms I am contemplating, one of them is a busty prostitute and the other a very confused bisexual who thirsts to be a turboslut like her fiancée but is too shy to actually fuck guys.

If the latter character sounds similar to Viv above, they were sort of the same character for a long period of time, before I decided on Viv as she is, and then split the incompatible aspects of her character (notably the before female rather than futanari) off into a new character. I need to workshop her more to differentiate her, but at the end of the day, I like shy girls with aspirations to be sluts, sue me.

The other potential IP I am considering is basically to Zelda as Artemis is to Samus, which is to say a a spiritual reincarnation of the character in an original universe. Where Artemis was largely made to separate from the minefield that is Nintendo IPs, with the freedom of putting her into an original IP being a side-benefit; this character (also internally referred to as Princess, not to be confused with Princess in Fallen Throne - I am bad at names), is almost precisely the opposite. The biggest reason for the creation is because as much as I love cute Zelda being an eager cum dumpster, the Legend of Zelda series is kind of extremely restrictive in what I can actually do with her narratively. Pretty much anything remotely interesting would be breaking canon and convention in ways far too extreme for what I am comfortable doing.

Splitting from the Nintendo IP is honestly barely even a consideration - the main reason for the split is I need a more populated and varied world for the Princess to be a slut with. She can't exactly be the wholesome jewel of the kingdom who moonlights as the village cum dumpster if there's no village for her to be the cum dumpster for. So, original fantasy IP it is.

Both of these potential IPs are still in the "saving bookmarks for possible character faces and outfits, and constantly deleting and rewriting notepad files drafting out ideas" phase. I'm not even certain they'll actually be separate IPs, or if they'll be merged into existing IPs. The lesbians might get merged into Fumates (there was one iteration of six characters all sharing an apartment, and they were at one time two of those six; I might revisit the idea of getting them to be another pair of characters that IP can visit and play with), and Princess might get merged into Fallen Throne (though that would get confusing with the other Princess in Fallen Throne, who fun fact originally also started life as a non-Zelda turboslut, but then caught a bad case of character-development-itus and oops is now stranded out of time with her lover).

So yeah. Lots of stuff going on, as always. April is looking to be a good month for releases. May just get Claire/Jill and Primordium at the same time. 30 minutes of video, all at once. That'd be something.

At any rate, that's all for now. Until next week, everyone!