Progress Report - March 27, 2023 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

Last week, I finally made the decision to actually keep a daily log of the work I get done. As hard as it may be to believe, but sitting back in my chair racking my brain trying to remember what I did while desperately scrolling through the Discord to read conversations I had where I discussed my work is not, actually, a particularly efficient way to write up these summaries.

So, let's just get straight to the details.

Tuesday and Wednesday

saw me get another 2 minutes of detailing done on Claire/Jill, bringing us past the midway-point. The first 13 minutes of the 22-minute video have now been detailed.

Wednesday also saw me somehow end up spending five hours on a shitpost comic. You may have seen it on Twitter, but for posterity, here is that comic.

The vast majority of those 5 hours were spent fitting the outfits to the DOAFantasy body, and then meticulously kitbashing the characters together in Source Filmmaker for the comic. It was a grueling experience, but one that I only need to do once.

I fully intended to leave well enough alone, especially after the initial "this shitpost will take 15 minutes" turned into literally half my damn day. I intended to get more Claire/Jill done on Wednesday. That didn't happen.

But then the comic generated a helluva lot more buzz than I expected, and I had people coming out of the woodworks clamoring for a follow-up. So, that leads us into Thursday.

Thursdays

are my day off, but that doesn't mean I can't pursue things I want to pursue. And I wanted to pursue this Bimbo Effect idea. And so I did. In fact, I pursued it so hard, I ended up with a five-act story. You can read the five-act outline here. It was originally written as a low-level screenplay, but I realized how big the scope was beginning, so I zoomed out to the high-level outline. That's why the very beginning is kinda clunky.

In addition to all this writing, I also quickly cobbled together a proof-of-concept of 7 unique ways for Shepard to titfuck each of the ladies. This was also posted to Twitter, and again, for posterity:

When I work on it next (probably this upcoming Thursday), I intend to take the scissors to it and trim it down, and possibly start storyboarding it. As of right now, I am considering completely cutting the second act, and just quickly bridge act 1 to act 3 with a "Shepard sure loved fucking that stripper's tits. Her birthday is coming up, we should surprise her!", ideally with some lampshading that they intend to hire the stripper for an orgy or something, just to hard-left-turn into the ladies all bimbofying themselves for Shepard's satisfaction.

Admittedly, acts 4 and 5 are a bit much. I, uhh, got a bit distracted while writing it all out, and I just sort of let my imagination take the wheel and threw all inhibitions to the wind. For right now, I am considering a potential project only being 1 and 3 - acts 4 and 5 can be saved for a later follow-up, if the first one does well.

All of which leads to that damned eternal question of finding the time for this. I am absolutely not budging on Claire/Jill being my focused offline project right now, and similarly I am not budging on a new on-stream project until we at least finish blocking out all of the Frozen project, and get it ready to enter the churn.

Once Claire/Jill is out the door and Frozen is in the churn, though? Who knows. It could be an on-stream project, if people want to do it. By it's nature, it has a high density of unique animations, and those are always fun to put together. The Primordium title sequence consists of 15 animations, 14 of which were put together in a single long stream. It was exhilarating.

If we don't elect to do it as an on-stream project, then it'll probably get downcycled into a comic or something. I don't want to toss the idea entirely, but my off-stream schedule is packed tight with Claire/Jill, Overbreed Episode 1, and Blue Star Episode 4. That's a long queue of long projects.

Friday

was especially momentous, as I spent it focusing on Artemis and Medusa, my spiritual successor to the beautifully sassy blonde bounty-hunter voiced by the esteemed InsideIncognita. Part of my Thursday relaxation ritual is watching films with friends, and during a shower scene where a character's sick back tats are shown off, a friend jokingly asked what Artemis was getting some sick back tats of her own.

Turns out, it was going to be the next day.

I pulled some Greek quotes and associated symbolisms off the Wikipedia's page on Artemis, then spent entirely too much time kitbashing together images, designs, and vectors to put this together. I'm quite chuffed with the result, if I'm being honest.

You know what else I am chuffed with?

The fact that I finally publicly revealed Artemis and Medusa to the world. 

You all here have known about them for months. But the wider audience have been oblivious to all our machinations. But now my plans have been laid bare - and they have been exceptionally well-received. People are pretty excited to see what kind of hijinks they get into, and people have been particularly warm to the idea of Artemis being effectively Samus in a new coat of paint.

I won't lie when I say I was nervous about that.

Their reveal was heralded by this shitpost image, a recreation of the Starfire/Raven meme.

The tattoos on the girls' butts are allegedly the astrological signs for each other. Which is to say, Artemis has the astrological sign for Medusa on her ass; and Medusa has the astrological sign for Artemis on her ass.

Because, you know, they're life partners who uniquely survived the trauma of being test subjects in an ethically-dubious supersoldier program that was an embarrasingly hilarious failure. Apparently that's just the kind of thing that you bond over. And get ass tattoos of each other over. I guess.

To say I'm excited to not only finally have these two shown to the world, but received so well by the public, would be dramatically underselling it.

As an aside, every time I pose Medusa, I appreciate more and more the decision to make her suit tentacle things prehensile. They give her more limbs to hug Artemis with, and it's just adorable.

Saturday,

of course, was a stream day. And what a stream day it was - we got the final Primordium Episode 1 sequence fully complete and ready for 4k render! We shifted gears back over to the Frozen project, and made some big strides there, too. There was a planned sequence for that project that I've dreaded for months. This past Saturday, we got to that sequence. And after taking a few breathers, and just breaking it down to one small piece at a time, we were able to make it manageable. And I have to say, it's turning out better than I ever could have hoped for.

Sunday

was spent rendering out that final sequence of Primordium Episode 1. It ran for literally the full 24 hours of Sunday.

During that time, I couldn't get any work done in SFM. Can't render and animate at the same time. But I was able to work in 3dsmax, and so I spent all of Sunday putting together another original character.

You all remember Viv and Cass, my shy futa and Casanova roommates in the creatively-titled Fumates project? If not, here's the relevant gif introducing them.

I didn't mention it in that post, but Fumates was always written with three main characters in mind. Internally, these characters were referred to as Futa, Roommate, and Girlfriend. I'm terrible with names.

Futa became Viv, and I'm sure you could guess that Roommate became Cass.

Well, I spent Sunday putting together Girlfriend, who now formally has the name of Sophia (though she goes by Sophie, drops the "a" at the end; and has it shortened to just Soph). And boy howdy have I had fun building and writing her while unable to do anything else due to the render.

If I were to describe Sophie in one word, she's an inked-up bad-ass militant leftist bitch. And if you were to tell her that's not one word, she'd probably call you an entitled rich white liberal, regardless of if you were actually entitled, rich, white, or liberal.

She's an anarcho-syndicalist who unironically has a passage from Das Kapital tattooed on her arm, and she absolutely does not believe in the concept of pacifism. There's three things that she loves above all else: sex, guns, and politics. And the exact pecking order changes on a day-to-day basis. They're all neck-and-neck with each other.

Sophie is an extremely interesting character for me to introduce to the Fumates universe. I've long pegged Girlfriend as being a goth and/or punk character, to complement Futa being a shy nerd (Girlfriend is Futa's girlfriend, to be clear) and Roommate being a suspiciously-wealthy layabout. While thinking about my plans for the pilot of Fumates, I found myself in a bit of a conundrum.

The plan for Fumates has always been for it to be a slice-of-life story. Not everything has to be about saving the world. But at the same time, there is a piece of writing advice that has stuck with me for nigh a decade now, that I always ask myself: "Is the story you're telling the most interesting time in your character's life? If not, then why the fuck aren't you telling us that story instead?"

Fumates needed an inciting incident. Something that breaks the status quo, that shakes up the otherwise mundane and rote rituals of their lives. The idea slowly manifested itself to me: how about Viv first meeting Girlfriend (or, more precisely, the character who would eventually become her girlfriend).

From there, the flood gates opened. It all started with a simple idea that I won't lie I just absolutely melt over how adorable I find it: Viv taking the bus home from work (she doesn't have a car), minding her own business, with the woman behind her casually playing with Viv's hair. Viv tries to ignore it, but eventually, she turns around and asks "I'm sorry, is there a problem here?"

To which the woman replies, "only that you're distractingly cute." Which immediately sends Viv blushing as bright red as her hair, as she becomes a bottom generating a new password when you send them "Hi, cutie~" . The ideas were flowing now. The woman follows up with a simple "you single?" Which has Viv start stammering out a long answer of "Well, that's uhh, really a rather complicated answer. You see, I--" before the woman just cuts her off with a chill "Cool. Me too."

Oh yeah. I've got a direction for this character now.

I'll spare you the brainstorming bonanza that spawned from there, and just share the SparkNotes conclusions. Firstly, Sophie absolutely loves to tease Viv, even long before they ever become a unit. She loves to make Viv blush, and garners immense amusement from Viv's program_not_responding.exe reactions to her upfront sexual advances. And I do mean upfront - an encounter I've already pegged for the first episode of Fumates involves Sophie texting Viv her address and simply saying "here's my place, 8pm sharp, snap my choker" before walking off, not even giving Viv a chance to respond.

Sophie would never use the world, but she irrefutably, undeniably, unquestionably has a huge crush on Viv. She loves every little thing about the goober, and wants to spend the rest of her life with Viv. In the end, Viv feels the same way, but in the moment she's just so overwhelmed that she can't properly parse her feelings.

That is going to be a big part of the first step of their arc, just Viv getting a handle on her feelings. She's a hopeless romantic, emphasis on the "hopeless" - she's used to getting rejected at every opportunity, for the odd date to never make it past the first. Having someone be interested in her is a totally foreign concept, and she doesn't know how to cope with it. Especially when that someone is as upfront and, for lack of a better phrase, aggressively into her.

Which leads neatly into the next major point that fell out of this writing-and-working session: Sophie pushes Viv, and she pushes Viv hard, but she never crosses lines. By that I mean, Viv is a very cautious and careful personality. She has a meticulously crafted and maintained bubble of safety, and she is deathly afraid to explore outside it. She's not happy about the idea of spending the rest of her life alone jerking off to porn till the wee hours of the morning, but she's too afraid of failure to dare try to change it.

Sophie doesn't pop her bubble, but instead she grabs Viv by the arm and slowly but firmly pulls her out of it. She sees the Viv needs to grow as a person, and is rather aggressive in helping her do so, but she also respects Viv's limits. She pushes Viv up to the breaking point, but then she holds her and helps her back down from the edge. You don't become a power lifter in a day, after all. Or, maybe a more accurate metaphor for Sophie is you don't become a marksman in a day.

Yep, next point is guns. Sophie loves guns. She loves guns. She has a collection that startles and frankly concerns Viv, who is your run-of-the-mill Democrat-voting liberal. She considers herself left-wing, but that's in the narrow view of mainstream American politics - in reality, she's left-of-center at most, with a bit of mixing in with right-of-center ideas. When confronted by an actual, hardcore socialist like Sophie, she struggles to even comprehend what's in front of her.

Viv hates guns. She's terrified of them, and she sees no reason why anyone should ever need to own a gun, let alone the... several dozen... that Sophie has. Sophie respectfully disagrees. She isn't your run-of-the-mill peaceful-protest throw-soup-at-a-painting leftist. She's a straight-up be-bi-do-crime masks-and-molotovs blow-up-pipelines anarchist. She sees the world as veering violently to the right, and believes with all her heart that the day die-hard leftists like her surrender their guns is the day that the fascists will put her up against the wall.

If you ask her how you stop a Nazi, she'll tell you how you don't. You don't stop a Nazi with words. You stop a Nazi with bullets. We learned that in the 1940s, and apparently we forgot the lesson in the 80 years since. But Sophie's more than willing to tutor any Nazi punk who needs a refresher.

I don't think it will come as a surprise to learn that, between her extreme politics, her aggressive activism, and her sizeable gun collection, Sophie is absolutely on a watch list. She gets in trouble with the law regularly, and a recurring theme in her story is going to be either her trying to recruit Viv into trouble, or Viv trying to bail her out of trouble.

The last major point for Sophie at the moment is that she knows just how to push Viv's buttons, and her favorite buttons to push are the ones that finally push Viv over the horny edge.

Recall that Viv is a bundle of contradictions: she has a huge breeding kink and likes to fantasize about being a modern Genghis Khan knocking up every woman she comes across, but she wears condoms religiously and is petrified of the thought of actually getting a woman pregnant. She loves the idea of topping a woman and pounding her into a squirming ahegao mess of sex and drool, but she's so timid and anxious that she needs a solid 15 minutes to psyche herself up for a 30-second phone call.

Well, Sophie likes to tease Viv in such a way that she just can't control herself any more, and her timid anxiety gives way to her primal urge to dominate. She loves gentle Viv caressing her and asking if she's enjoying herself. She LOVES rough Viv pinning her down, pulling her hair, and ramming her pussy raw while blowing twelve wrapped loads in a one-futanari trainbang.

In an image, this is their relationship dynamic:

And when Sophie is feeling especially naughty, and wants to really get Viv going, then she'll say the magic words and muse aloud that she can't remember if she took her birth control or not, meaning that it'd be super dangerous if the condoms broke - Viv might just get her pregnant and make her a mommy.

Recall that Viv's libido exceeds her physical stamina, and that if she's into it enough, she can literally fuck herself unconscious. Well, Sophie's experienced that first-hand more than once, after reciting that particular invocation. Sophie will admit that it is definitely a unique experience, to feel someone go limp unconscious on top of you while blowing a load balls-deep in your pussy.

She'll also admit that Viv's pretty cute when she's hard, sweaty, and unconscious.

So yeah. I am absolutely in love with Sophie, and I welcome her with open arms to the Fumates family. I hope you all are even half as enthralled with her as I am. Cuz I suspect that, whether or not how you feel about her, you'll be seeing a lot of her from time to time.

Monday,

also known as today, actually surprised me. Recall that I got the Primordium render going Saturday night, all through Sunday.

The sequence that was rendering is 3.5 minutes long. The tavern sequence is 1.5 minutes long, and it took 23 hours on the dot to render. As such, I expected this sequence to take about 3 days to render. Rendering was the bulk of my plan for the week.

But somehow,  ̶P̶a̶l̶p̶a̶t̶i̶n̶e̶ ̶r̶e̶t̶u̶r̶n̶e̶d̶.̶ Sorry, I meant to say that the render only took 26 hours. Over twice as long a runtime, and yet it took basically the same amount of time. I should stop trying to predict render times.

So yeah, Primordium Episode 1's render finished a solid 2 days earlier than I had planned. And, more importantly, it's just... done.

Primordium Episode 1 is done.

On the video side of things, at least.

The audio is a different story. My sound designer's had a hectic few weeks, bouncing between Claire/Jill, the Primordium title sequence, and Primordium Episode 1 proper. Throw on top of that his standard university work and commissioned music work he does. Then throw on top of that him spending 2 weeks on the road touring with his band.

Long story short, Primordium is in the awkward position of the video being fully rendered before the audio is ready for it. Which puts me in a similarly awkward spot.

I've thought on it, and I have decided that I am not going to sit on the video for goodness knows how long waiting for him. I have a crappy sound design solution already made, used in the WIPs I've shared over the weeks, as a deterrent to discourage people from ripping the voice audio off the WIPs. Yes, it's a thing people do.

It's not a good sound solution, but it is by all means functional. It checks the basic boxes. It's serviceable.

The problem is, I don't want to release that version of the video to the public. And I don't think my sound designer is going to have things ready in the standard 5 days of early access.

So, we're going to do something different. We're going to use early access as its intended to be used - to give exclusive access to a pre-release version of the project.

Specifically, I am going to be releasing a special cut of the video that has a very annoying "UNFINISHED AUDIO" watermark across it, that will otherwise be the full final video minus the, ahem, unfinished audio. And it is going to be exclusive to the Early Access (and greater) tiers here on Patreon.

And unlike traditional releases, it's not going to be a precise 5 days of early access, before releasing to the public. It's going to stay in early access until the final audio version is done, which will then be released simultaneously in indefinitely-Patreon-exclusive 4k and publicly-available 720p. There will be no exclusive 1080p access to the final version - once it's ready, it goes out into the wild.

The trade-off there will be that, chances are, you lucky ducks in the Early Access+ tiers will have a far longer run of exclusivity than just 5 days. I'm not going to speculate how long it might end up being. All I will say is I'll be extremely surprised if it's less than 5 days.

The reason for the "UNFINISHED AUDIO" watermark is, by the way, because I know some of you are going to leak the video and reupload it. And more importantly, I know you're going to strip all context of the video. You're not going to title it "Primordium Episode 1 (Unfinished Early-Access Cut)". You're going to title it "witcher yenefer anal 6min lordardvark", misspelling both my name and Yennefer's. And you're not going to leave a comment describing how the video finished ahead of the audio and I didn't want to sit on an otherwise finished video for potentially months waiting for the audio to be finished.

And then people are going to find those reuploaded leaks, completely devoid of context, hear how bad the audio is, and then write me angry DMs on Twitter calling me a hack and a fraud for releasing a finished video with such bad audio, completely oblivious to the fact that the video isn't finished and that a version with better audio is coming.

And then when the better-audio version comes, people won't watch it, because by that time most everyone who wanted to see the video will have already seen the bad-audio earlier leak, and so the video will forever be remembered as having bad audio, even though that was always just a temporary stopgap while the better audio was produced.

Trust me. I've been around long enough. I know how this goes.

So, that's why the big-ass "UNFINISHED AUDIO" watermark, splayed right across the center of the image. You can crop out my watermark, which some of you do. But I'd like to see you crop that out.

You can't exactly strip out context that's blatantly spread across the center of the image. No matter how hard you try.

Expect to see that release up on my Films page in about 12 or so hours. And, of course, I will make a post about it here, too.

So yeah. That's all for this week. Until next week, everyone!