Progress Report - May 3, 2023 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

I apologize for this week's Progress Report being a few days late. On Sunday, I made the decision to put together the Life is Strange ladies, and I wanted to get these posters ready for the Progress Report. I hyperfocused on them between Sunday and now, but 3 full character models plus some props is still a lot of work. I like to think I work fast when it comes to model work, but anyone whose watched the modeling streams knows that an average character model with outfit can take me about 10 hours to put together, and that panned out pretty clean putting these ladies together.

Claire/Jill and Frozen

Before I get into the weeds though, let's quickly go over the other stuff. The big thing is the Claire/Jill detailing pass is done. I posted a teaser of the last few seconds of the film over on Twitter, which you can see be clicking here. It is still work-in-progress, but the detailing pass is definitely a huge chunk of work done.

I mentioned last week that the next pass is the expression pass (or the upper-face-animation pass, if you want to be boring and technical), followed by the camera choreography pass, the lighting pass, the modeling pass, and finally the jiggle-bake pass. All of those should go pretty quickly, and I am currently eyeballing May 15 as being when the 4k render starts. Assuming all goes well then, and assuming the 4k render takes 5 days to do, then I am tentatively eyeballing May 20, 2023 as a release date for the Claire/Jill video.

I do want to stress that is tentative. As always, I won't hard commit to a date until I have the finished product sitting in my hands ready to go live. But, I am hopeful.

The Frozen on-stream project is also getting into its final stages of animation blocking, with only a few major sequences left to go. At the rate it's going, I think it may be ready for voicing when July rolls around. That means there's going to be a very... impactful decision that's going to have to be made, regarding scheduling. But that's a conversation we needn't have now, so let's not have it now.

With that being said, let's talk about the very homoerotic blue-haired elephant in the room: the Life is Strange ladies.

Life is Strange - Why Now?

Right up top, let's hit the two questions you probably have on your mind:

Yes, I have a project in mind for them. No, it is not displacing my existing work schedule in any capacity.

With that out of the way, let's talk motivations a bit. As I am sure you all are aware, I'm not a trend chaser. I never have been. If I were, I'd be the worst trend-chaser in the world, consistently being years - sometimes nearly a decade - behind. My projects are always internally motivated, born from some idea that rattles around in my head that demands I birth it into the world. Generally, these ideas are born around the games that I play and enjoy, such as Mass Effect and Borderlands. For someone so internally motivated, I don't think that's a big surprise.

And as I am a slow trend-chaser, I am also a slow game-player. I am extremely cheap and often wait for games to fall into that steep 75%-discount territory to get games. And sometimes I just need a long time before I feel I am ready to play a given game.

Life is Strange is one of the latter cases. The game originally came out in 2015, and at the time, I was still very much into high-octane shooters. Doom 2016 came out the next year and I was all over that shit. Slower, more emotionally driven games like Life is Strange weren't really my cup of tea. I respected them, but I didn't play them. Mass Effect was about as slow as I would go at the time.

In recent years though, I've lost the appetite for such high-octane games. I'm turning 30 this year, and I can feel it. I can't keep up with the young'uns like I used to. And frankly, they tend to give me more stress than enjoyment - I play games to escape stress, so the math just doesn't work out to play games that give me more stress than they relieve.

Instead, I've found that games that are more contemplative and focus on characters, narratives, and emotions are where I find my zen, they're where I vibe. Given the content I make, and its focus on narrative and character, I don't think that surprises anyone. Indeed, I suspect the bigger surprise is that it took me this long to get around to this point.

When you stop and think about it, Mass Effect and Life is Strange aren't that different. The biggest difference is one of them interrupts the character-driven plot with combat arenas.

All of which is to say, the reason why I only now got around to playing Life is Strange is because I only now felt that I was emotionally mature enough for it, ready to play the game on its terms and judge it by its own criteria.

And I won't lie to you guys and gals:

I cried. A lot. A lot.

I don't cry when it comes to media. Books, movies, series, games. It takes a lot to move me. And Life is Strange, on many occasions, just straight fucking broke me. I saw a lot of my friends in these characters, and it all just made me appreciate and love them more than I already do. It's easy to take for granted everything that goes right in our lives, and it's not until things go wrong that we realize just how much we really had.

At this point, I am going to move into spoilers for Life is Strange and its prequel, Before the Storm. So if you have any interest in those games at all, and don't like being spoilered, you should skip on down to the conclusion at the bottom of this post. The spoilers are pretty pertinent to my plans. I'll summarize in broad-strokes in the conclusion, for those who skip these sections.

Life is Strange - Epilogue?

When it came for the final decision in Life is Strange, I was torn between choosing my own utilitarian ethics, or to play the decision true to the protagonist of the game, Max.

For the uninitiated, the final decision is to either go back in time and let Chloe die, which saves the town of Arcadia Bay from a supernatural storm supposedly formed by the unnatural manipulation of time that saved Chloe's life; or to commit to your choice to save Chloe, and let Arcadia Bay be destroyed and its thousands of inhabitants be killed.

The utilitarian decision is simple, there is no way one life ever justifies the deaths of thousands. This is my natural predilection, and I went into the game knowing about this ending (the game is almost 10 years old and I don't try to avoid spoilers, so of course I knew) and expecting to take it.

But by the time you get to this decision, you as Max have saved Chloe's life countless times, have quite literally created and destroyed several alternate timelines, all to save Chloe. The depths of Max's love for Chloe quite literally transcend time itself. That can be a romantic love or a platonic love, but either way, that bond is stronger than even the love of family.

And in the face of that, I just couldn't do it. It made no sense for Max to go through so much pain saving Chloe again and again and again, just to undo it all and let her die alone and unloved. And so I chose to save Chloe, and let Arcadia Bay and its inhabitants be decimated.

The reason I tell you all this isn't to try and justify my decision. It's to give you the pretense of proper emotional context when I tell you that, after all of this, the game gives you absolutely no epilogue.

After all of these characters' pain and suffering and their unrepentant, time-transcending love for another, we get... nothing. Absolutely no closure whatsoever.

I'm not asking for too much. I just want to know that these characters will finally be happy, that their wounds will finally have time and room to heal.

But we're given absolutely nothing.

Well, among all the other things I am and do, I am a fan fiction writer. The spaces between canon that the official developers leave is where I thrive. And so if the game itself won't give me my happy ending, then I will write my own damn happy ending. With blackjack. And hookers.

And so that was the initial kernel of my Life is Strange project idea: I want to make my own epilogue, showing Chloe and Max moving on from Arcadia Bay and indulging in a happy, healthy, sex-filled relationship.

And since Chloe spends the entire game pining for Rachel, her missing possibly-romantic partner whose fate is a key component of the game, and whom Chloe constantly brings up that Max would have loved just as much as her, it only seemed natural to me to find some way to contrive bringing Rachel into the max, and the three of them can live can live happily ever after with lots of steamy sex between them.

It's the perfect epilogue I could have asked for.

Life is Strange - Flaws In a Perfect Pattern

But there was a nagging problem permeating this idea. The prequel game, Before the Storm, focuses on when Chloe first met Rachel, and explores their firecracker relationship. It's a beautiful piece and honestly I think I enjoyed it more than Life is Strange proper - which, make no mistake, I very much enjoyed.

There were a lot of questions I had it didn't address, and a few bits of lore that it overrode, which is to be expected when a prequel is handled by a different developer than the base game. But, more than anything, it only further reinforced the nagging problem underneath the surface.

For context, Chloe's love for Rachel is immensely, immeasurably deep. Probably as deep as Max's love for Chloe. If Chloe had the ability to manipulate time like Max could, I have no doubt in my mind Chloe would have torn the world in half in her attempts to save Rachel from her fate.

But there's a lot of subtext in the games, both Life is Stranger proper and Before the Storm, that suggests that Rachel wasn't the paragon angel that Chloe esteemed her to be. A lot of characters in both games warn Max and Chloe that Rachel wasn't a good person. That she was fake. She had no personality of her own, she had no allegiances. She was a snake, a manipulator, an emotional abuser.

One character describes her as a social chameleon, able to seamlessly blend into any group, to become everyone's friends, to extract from them what she wants, and then slink away back into the shadows just as quietly as she came out of them.

Most all of the characters who give these warnings aren't exactly reputable sources themselves. They are either straight antagonists, or even at best people who were in a position to be envious of and bitter toward Rachel, herself being a very popular, intelligent, and respected person that everyone wanted to be like. And so Chloe just rejects them out of hand, refusing to believe any of it about Rachel. Rachel is Chloe's angel, as she herself states. She wouldn't let anyone drive nails through Rachel's wings.

But throughout the course of the games, there is evidence provided that suggest that there might be truth to these warnings. Rachel is a stage actor, and a damn good one at that. She spontaneously makes up lies to cover for her and Chloe getting into mischief, and is able to effortlessly sell those lies. Her own father is the district attorney, and so she is exposed to the double-faced reality of the lawyering world at home on a daily basis. At one point, she even doubts herself and flat asks Chloe if she's fake, because when she looks inside to find who she is, all she sees are the faces she puts on for other people. When she opens her eyes and really looks, she can't find herself.

The two most damning pieces for me, though, are split between the first game and the prequel. In Life is Stranger proper, it is learned that Rachel lied to Chloe about their relationship, potentially for years. She told Chloe that she had no relationship with their drug dealer - but it is revealed that the two of them had a very intimate, very personal relationship, that spanned a long time. Rachel lied to Chloe's face about it, and it was such that the drug dealer is actually willing to let his grudges go if it means that they can possibly save Rachel, the only person he's genuinely loved in a long time. Rachel's naysayers claim that her relationship with the drug-dealer was just as fake as her relationship with Chloe, and that she was only exploiting him to get cheaper drugs. There is no evidence one way or the other for this, and of course, Chloe rejects it out of hand - even as she stares down the fact that Rachel lied to her about him.

And then in Before the Storm, a major plot element is uncovering the mystery behind Rachel's birth mother. It is learned that Rachel's birth mother was once an extremely popular, intelligent, and respected person that everyone wanted to be like. But over the course of her relationship with Rachel's father, it became apparent that her mother was an addict, a fact she hid through smiles and lies and convinced everyone she was perfect. She would get by for a time, but as her life became mundane, she would slip back into her (implied) heroin addiction, every time orbiting closer and closer to self-destruction, at one point inviting drug dealers into the very house where a baby Rachel was sleeping, all to satisfy her addiction. All to keep her numb to the world. To keep her content. To stop her from craving something more from life than what she already had.

To me, I think the developers of Before the Storm (who, again, are different developers from Life is Strange) were very clearly trying to draw a parallel between Rachel and her mother her. They both convinced the world they were perfect paragons, angels gracing the Earth; but they were hiding a deeper, darker self with an elaborate web of lies and deceptions. They were both chasing more from the world, and exploiting the trust others put in them to get them.

This is the flaw in the pattern, the problem that has been nagging at me regarding the idea of my perfect epilogue:

I don't think Rachel is a good person. And I don't like giving good people good send-offs.

To be perfectly clear, I don't think Rachel is a malicious person. I don't think she goes out of her way to hurt people. But I do think she is a high-functioning sociopath, and above all else, I think she is a stimulation junkie. I think she is either completely incapable of empathizing with others, or else her empathy is easily overwritten by the need for new experiences - such that she is willing to lie, cheat, manipulate, and use those who love her in order to get her fix.

I think all those nasty things that others were saying about Rachel were true. And I think the fact she lied to Chloe about her relationship with their drug dealer, and the parallels made between herself and her mother, are evidence of that.

I think that, even if her love for Chloe was sincere, it also had an expiration date. She was going to grow tired of Chloe, and move on to a new toy, someone else she can play with, until she grows tired of them as well. And I think that she was just going to continue doing this indefinitely, uncaring about the damage she leaves in her wake. Uncaring about how this would emotionally devastate Chloe, whose love for her is absolute yet unreciprocated.

Life is Strange - Contention, Flow, and Echoes

I don't think it will surprise you all to hear that I've been thinking about this a lot.

I really respect the developers of both games for bringing all of this up, and yet never bringing any attention to it. Every piece of evidence I've brought up is never mentioned explicitly, it's never underlined, there are never any judgment calls made. The only assertions the games ever explicitly make is that Chloe is blindly in love with Rachel. Any judgments on Rachel's character are purely up to the player to make.

It takes a strong, confident writing team to be so bold, to have so much raw material in a complex character dynamic, and to leave it all as a smoldering powder keg.

I've been talking about all of this to a few friends who are adjacent to the lewd-art scene and are also huge fans of Life is Strange and have opinions on the Chloe/Rachel dynamic, and similarly want to see a happy ending for all the protagonists involved.

And over the course of talking to them, I've slowly convinced myself first that I do want to make a proper epilogue to Life is Strange (for about a week it was floating in the awkward limbo of "do I / don't I").

And over the course of my sitting down and really processing Rachel as a character and my own opinions on giving bad characters good endings, I think I've made my mind up on what form, exactly, I want to explore this epilogue in.

One of those friends I talked to, in response to my sharing my ideas for an epilogue, responded with the statement "my guy you have to make this a game, like a visual novel. It's the only proper way to do it." And I think he's right.

I think I want to explore taking my ideas, both the ones I already have written out, and the ones that would spring from exploring this project further, and I want to adapt them into another swing at the visual novel approach.

You all probably remember the Futashep visual novel, and how I quietly and reluctantly pulled the plug on it because it just became too convoluted to manage. I have been vocal about how I have some ideas on how to mitigate that, and that I've been wanting to take another crack at a visual novel for some time now, but I couldn't figure out a solid story to build it off.

I think this Life is Strange epilogue is exactly what I need. It's mostly linear, rather than the crazy branches-upon-branches that the Futashep VN devolved into; it's heavy on narrative and dialogue, which I personally think was the Futashep VN's biggest strength; and it has enough wiggle room for some mechanical creativity.

I've been putting some particular focus on that last bit. The base Life is Strange had a very simple dialogue mechanic: characters exchange dialogue, and then you're provided a handful of responses, with many of the choices having short-term and long-term outcomes associated with them. Very clean, very utilitarian, very Mass Effect.

Before the Storm added a mechanic to the dialogue system, which they dubbed "backtalk" - certain dialogue responses would initiate a minigame, where characters exchange banter, and the responses you give would award points either to you or to your verbal opponent, depending on how strong of an argument they were. Whoever got the most points would win the argument, and outcomes would fall out as appropriate. It was a simple mechanic, but I appreciated it.

Toward that end, I have three new mechanics of my own in mind for this epilogue fan game. The first of these mechanics I call "contention".

I am imagining this game as focusing on the ramifications of Rachel's manipulative personality. All throughout the game, Rachel and Max (controlled by the player) will get into contentions with one another: Rachel will haver her mind made up on a decision, and the player will either have to agree with Rachel, or argue against her. Rachel's decisions will trend toward themes of escalation, be that adventurous escalation, criminal escalation, or sexual escalation, reflecting the stim-junkie personality I've pegged her as having. Always looking for something more.

If the player disagrees with Rachel, then it comes down to Chloe to be the tie-breaker. Initially, Chloe is blindly in love with Rachel and will be very strongly biased to agreeing with her, regardless of what she says. The player can argue Chloe down, but at the expense of Chloe building up resentment for Max.

The kicker of the contention system is that eventually an inflection point is hit: Rachel insists on doing something that unequivocally crosses the line, even for Chloe. This is when she begins to realize that maybe Rachel isn't her angel, and suddenly the weight of all that resentment the player built gets inverted. If the player constantly argued against Rachel, then Chloe is more likely to agree with her in the future, seeing Max as having been the voice of reason she ignored all along; and if the player had agreed with Rachel, then Chloe suddenly begins to distrust the both of you.

It is through this contention mechanism that the game's major antagonism comes from. Where both Life is Strange and Before the Storm had external motivators, this fan game's motivator is purely internal, with the conflict being driven from within the group dynamic itself.

This contention mechanism, and Rachel's trending toward escalation, also plays intimately into the second mechanism I have in mind, which I am tentatively calling "flow state". This one is a lot murkier - while I have the general direction I want it to go nailed down, the exact edges are fuzzy. But the high-level idea is that the sex sequences (of which there will be many - it is me guys, you should expect this) utilize the dialogue system to control them.

And, importantly, in this imagining, Max is extremely sexually submissive. Like, she is about as sub bottom as you can get. Once she gets into the zone, the only things she wants to do is please her partner(s), and she's willing to do anything - or have anything done to her - if it means pleasing them.

And it is when Max "gets into the zone" that this mechanism comes into play. I said I tentatively call it "flow state", and it's tentative because I also refer to as "sub space", which is a very real BDSM term. There's a lot of literature on what sub space is, but the highest-level takeaway, which is certainly too reductive and I apologize to all the kinksters reading this, is that sub space is a kind of high that submissives can fall into when the adrenaline of kink-play mixes with the endorphins of sex.

Once Max enters her flow state / sub space, it becomes very important to keep her balanced. If she falls out of flow state, either because she was pushed too hard (at the player's behest) or because she was neglected too much (again, at the player's behest), then she crashes hard and the sex sequence ends early. To me, sex in porn games should always either be the mechanism itself or a reward - the loss state should be the deprivation of sex, which is something a lot of porn games get backwards that I don't like.

Most of the haze around this mechanism is around getting her into flow. Should she always start in flow? Should it be possible to edge the flow state? Should the player be able to keep the sex scene going indefinitely so long as they never push Max into the flow state, meaning she can never fall out of it and end the scene? I don't know, these are all questions I have to figure out.

The third mechanic relates to the fact that the narrative mechanism involved in getting Rachel into this story necessarily requires Max creating another alternate timeline. In Life is Strange, it is made acutely aware that Max has no memory of the changes she made, and this is something I intend to reflect. However, I intend to expand on the idea, where while she has no conscious memories of the new timeline, her body has physical memories of it, kind of like muscle memory but more all-encompassing.

An example of this is when Max comes back from her timeline-altering, she finds herself in the middle of a threesome with Chloe and Rachel. When she started her jump she was a virgin, but coming back, while she has no memories of having sex before, she can't help but notice that her body feels very comfortable with the two women currently getting their tongues all up inside her holes. As if they've done this before. A lot.

It is from this idea that the third mechanism of echoes comes into play. More generally, the idea of echoes is a way for the player to presently decide important things in the past, without needing to leverage Max's time-travel ability (which has timeline-altering ramifications). In effect, Max has an echo of this new timeline come back to her, which the player controls in real-time; upon completion of the echo, the decisions made are reflected in the current-time of the game. It allows the player to make retroactive decisions, without affecting any of their existing decisions - a capability that Max's time-travel mechanism doesn't support.

Life Is Strange - The Technical Side of A Creative Idea

Of course, all of this all well and good. I hope you all are as excited by this idea as I am. But excitement alone doesn't get projects done. That requires time. And time is something that has historically never been my ally.

As I am sure you're all aware, my schedule imploded recently with the merging of the on-stream and off-stream projects. Claire/Jill is a casualty of that, as well as the still-paused Overbreed, to say nothing of future projects like Blue Star and Rabbit.Hole.

Throwing another project, especially such an ambitious one as this, into the fire is frankly a terrible idea. I said up top that I am not committing major time resources to this project, and I mean it. I spent 4 days hyperfocusing on building the characters, and the intent always was to immediately take my foot off the gas once they're built.

My attention on this project is going to be split the same way as it was for the Futashep VN project: only a few hours a week, in the off hours before bed, and on my day off. Claire/Jill and my film schedule are my absolute main priority still.

All of which means that development of this project is going to be slow-going. But I have some ideas about that.

I mentioned earlier that the Futashep VN became very unruly. In that context, I brought up the convoluted story branching and the headache that was managing it all. I also brought up how I believe that, just by its nature, this Life is Strange epilogue wouldn't be nearly as complex.

But another aspect of why the Futashep VN became so difficult to work on is the sheer production value that went into it. By the end of it, the new single sequences I was putting out were pushing 60 individual frames, with multiple fully built, lit, and composed animations. It was basically the work of a small video, for every chapter.

For this project, I am very pointedly aiming at not doing that. Specifically, I am considering the first draft of the game, the equivalent to the Futashep VN, to not be the final version of the game.

Instead, I am going to treat the VN aspect as less of a game, and more of an interactive storyboard. You all have seen my storyboards - basic, unlit, half-completed scenes, half-finished poses. All very rough, but enough to communicate the idea. That is the aesthetic I am aiming for right now.

Importantly, that means no animations. At most, it would just have two frames per "animation", just to show off the generate intended flow. Nothing polished, nothing fancy. Again, you've seen my storyboards. You know what these look like. This VN is going to be focusing much more on the "novel" part of the genre, rather than the "visual".

And I am going to be very careful to clearly note that the VN isn't a finished game unto itself, but is more of a prototype. The high-level goal, if it ever gets to this point, is to take the final story of the VN, and then adapt it properly into a fully fleshed out 3d game. Again, think of it less of a game and more of a storyboard. Just one that you can watch unravel in realtime, and you can impact the direction of.

And that is, indeed, the third point of difficulty that I want to address. Working on the Futashep VN, it became really unwieldy bouncing between my clunky third-party glorified-spread-sheet game editing tool, and actually playing the game itself. Every little change required getting out of the game, figuring out where in the graph the problem was, changing it, and then restarting the game and playing to get back to that point.

It was not very conducive to rapid prototyping, which is very much the approach I think this idea needs, if it has any chance of survival.

As such, I want to figure out a more complete "live editing" mechanism. You know how in the Futashep VN, you'd play to a point and then you would get grayed-out options, unavailable because I haven't implemented them yet? I want a system where, while I am playing the game, when I come across those grayed-out options, I can click on them, and literally write them out and import images and what-not all right there, right then, in the gameplay session, without needing to switch tools.

I want playing the game, and making the game, to be a seamless, equivalent experience. I want to be able to make the game while I am playing it. No clunky external editing tool necessary. Everything is just handled directly in the game itself.

I don't have such a tool right now, and frankly I don't know how I'd even start putting it together. So that will be the first order of business to figure out, writing a game engine that can double for both playing and for editing.

And then finally, I think - at least in the beginning - I am going to keep this project on the down-low. I won't go out of my way to gatekeep the prototypes or anything, but I won't be sharing much of it on Twitter, and will be keeping the updates and playable demos to these WIP posts.

Just because I don't want to disappoint a bunch of people on Twitter when development goes too slow or hits snags, or ends up getting canned because I worked myself into a technical quagmire like I did with the Futashep VN. I just don't want to disappoint people who expect more from this project than what I intended them to.

I am hoping that you all would at least be more willing to understand those complications, between your general commitment to supporting my work, and having the full context of what goes into them that I can't provide in 280-character Tweets.

Conclusion

Welcome back, everyone who skipped the majority of this post and all of the Life is Strange stuff!

To briefly summarize what all was just discussed, I am looking into making a new "visual novel" with the Life is Strange ladies, but it is going to be much less polished, much quicker and dirtier, and much more focusing on just hammering out story than making a playable, nice-looking experience.

And I put "visual novel" in quotes because it is not the final game, but is only a prototype for me to quickly put together ideas and tie everything together. The final game, if the prototype gets finished, would be properly made as a fully animated and interactable 3d game.

Don't expect this to happen though. Just, temper your expectations now. There's a huge chasm between this post and that happening, and I don't want to disappoint anyone.

Work on this project will only be done in my spare time and on my day off, and I am going to need some time to put together the tools for it - I don't want a separate game editor tool like I did with the Futashep VN, and instead want to be able to make the game directly as I play it, exploring previously-unwritten branches in realtime. Which means I need to figure out how to do that.

With all of that in mind, Claire/Jill remains my focus. Next week should see the expression pass done, as well as a large chunk of the camera choreography pass done. We'll just set our expectations there for now.

Until next week, everyone!