Progress Report - October 24, 2023 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

Last week, I noted how I was having a rough week and how it was frustrating me. This week, I decided to do something about it.

Namely, I decided to explicitly write out a daily schedule for myself to adhere to. A big part of this schedule is because my sleep schedule has been slipping again, as you all know it tends to do. And for reasons beyond my comprehension, the later I get up, the worse I feel emotionally throughout the day.

I'm simultaneously an early bird and a night owl. An early bird because the earlier I get up, the more chipper I am and the more upbeat and productive I am. And a night owl because I hate going to bed and stay up until ungodly hours of the night (day? with how late I stay up these words mean nothing).

If my body had its way, I'd be going to bed at 5am and waking up at 8am. Which is obviously untenable. Something has to give, and unfortunately it tends to be the early bird that gets tossed in the wood chipper. Meaning I stay up late, get up late, and just feel miserable and unproductive throughout the day.

Over the previous week, I think there were more days where I got up past noon than I did before it. Small wonder I was having a rough and unproductive week.

As of right now, here is what my revised schedule is looking for. This is for Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, which are the days I stream Life is Strange over on my SFW social media I made in response to your guys' poll a few weeks ago. Tuesdays, you can replace the Stream section with store-and-chores (Tuesday is my "get shit done" day); Thursdays are my day off; and Sundays you can replace that Stream section with another work chunk. Maybe more Overbreed, maybe other projects. Might just make it a wildcard work block.

Believe it or not, going to bed by 3AM is uncharacteristically early for me, compared to how it's been lately.

This schedule isn't final, and is prone to change a bit. I would like to slowly shift the schedule back a few hours, such that I am getting up around 8AM and going to bed around midnight. But, as of right now, 11AM to 3AM is my target. I'm getting the 11AM pretty solid, been getting up around 10:30AM the past few days. The 3AM... well, enough nights of only getting 5 hours of sleep should sort that out.

I am hoping to spin this schedule into effect later this week, because while I've been getting up according to this new schedule for a few days now, I actually haven't been using the work time as allotted.

Instead, I've been using that time to sit down and learn more Unreal Engine 5! If this post's image wasn't suggestive enough of that.

Indeed, last week's Progress Report I made special note of how I haven't even found the energy to learn more Unreal, and how that in particular made me sad. Well, as I started this post with, I took that fact and did something about it. If not learning Unreal was making me feel sad, then how do we reduce the feeling sad? By learning Unreal!

I've been tweeting my progress over the past few days, and so far I am extremely pleased with how things are going! I've finally sat down and figured out how to animate in Unreal Engine 5 (which, remember, was the original goal). Thankfully, UE5's Sequencer works pretty much exactly like Source Filmmaker's Graph Editor, which means that pretty much all of my decade of experience in the SFM can transfer seamlessly over to UE5. There are a few quality-of-life features missing, and a few functions that I leveraged immensely in SFM that UE5 doesn't seem to have, and those will definitely cause a bit of friction. But by and large, I'd say 90% of my skillset transfers over.

And that is to say nothing of all the new features that UE5 provides that SFM didn't. I haven't even started fiddling with animation layers yet, which will in theory massively speed up the ability to detail animations, as I can just have some generic noise animations that I layer on top of core animations to get detailed, noisy final animations - a process I have to arduously do manually by hand currently.

If I can figure out how to get physically-simulated hair working, then that will also allow for both better-looking hair animation that properly reacts to gravity, but also has actual collisions with the world and character, so that the hair won't clip into faces all the time. Imagine actually being able to animate a character with long hair flowing over their shoulders, instead of through their shoulders!

UE5 also seems to support seamlessly changing locks mid-animation. This is particularly relevant whenever it comes to characters manipulating objects. For example, in Rabbit.Hole Episode 1, the shot where DVa picks up her Mech toy, wiggles in front of the camera, and then puts it back down? That is split into 3 shots - before picking up the toy, holding the toy, after putting down the toy - with the hand animation meticulously tailored to look seamless between the shots. This is because in SFM you can't animate locks, they're either on or off in a shot. And so picking the toy up - locking the toy to the hand - and then putting it down - unlocking the toy from the hand - has to be done in separate shots in SFM. But in UE5, if I read the documentation correctly, that can all be done in a single seamless animation.

That would mean especially tricky sequences, like characters handing things off to each other, which are an extremely laborious task in SFM, could be done trivially simply in UE5. Or more topically, this unfinished animation of Max licking cum off Chloe's face, which is an absolute mess of lock shenanigans and hard-baked animations, could be done with a trivially simple swapping of the cum being locked to Chloe's face to instead be locked to Max's tongue, the moment her tongue touches it.

Overall, I am extremely excited to learn the depths of UE5's animation system. At the moment, it's taking priority to Overbreed for me, at least until I feel like I've learned enough of the basics to have a solid foundation under my feet. I still need to learn how to make full cinematics for example, with fixed camera angles the player has no control over. That is next on my agenda. And I still want to explore animation layers as well.

But so far my experiments with animating in UE5 and integrating those animations into gameplay logic have been a smashing success. I won't lie, I get more and more excited at the prospect of building a full lewd game in UE5 on-stream with you guys. The way the Frozen project is going, we're only a few weekends away from starting that.

So yeah! That's where we are right now! I am in a much better mood now, I have a schedule to try and corral my poor undiagnosed-ADHD brain with, I'm making great progress on the UE5 stuff. I am hoping to get back onto working on Overbreed sometime before the week is out. For the next few days I'm going to continue focusing on Unreal.

We'll see how all that turns out. I'm optimistic, though!

Until next week, everyone!