Fischl x Slime - Progress Update (Patreon)

Hello! It's been a little while since our last update here. We saw your messages of support and concern and wanted to give an extra update on Fischl to talk about it a bit.

As mentioned in the last post we paused WIP posts and updates on Fischl several weeks ago to focus on our last push to finish the project. Our plan was to spend a couple strong weeks wrapping up then come back to you with the full animation instead of putting time into WIPs, wallpapers, and so on. We're very close to that point, but unsurprisingly Fischl never fails to exceed our expectations and our guesses at how long each part will take.

We're really grateful for all of your patience, your messages, and the participation in our almost daily work streams. Many of you kept up with the animation progress nearly every day these last 2 years and saw as we wrapped up that work last month and finally moved to the last big piece: the audio.

With so many full audio WIPs for Fischl we started out pretty optimistic that we could use a lot of what was already prepared over the last 2 years and just fill in some gaps. Of course it's never so simple in reality and ultimately every single scene needed voice work fully redone, and SFX for many of them. Between mic replacements and a failed audio interface the existing audio from these past 2 years just couldn't be matched up properly with newer recordings. In the end Rii has redone voicing for the whole project, including all of the WIPs. And about half of this was new stuff done after our last post where we optimistically were hoping just a couple weeks. We needed several rounds of retakes to cover everything, and may need at least 1 more for a few spots still.

We likely have just over 2 hours of voice tracks to edit in total for just 1 character. For comparison, Raiden x Yae had 2 voiced characters and was only about 10 minutes of total voice to edit. We took a screenshot of both of those audio projects so you can see the difference a little better. Raiden x Yae is 3 voice tracks and ~150 audio strips total while Fischl has hundreds of voice tracks and at least a few thousand audio strips all told. Those 70+ green strips just below the center are all of the old WIP sounds, each of them containing a few dozen more strips for voice tracks, sfx, and ambience. While Fischl is only about 6x longer, there are roughly 20x more audio strips to review, select, align, cut, edit, and blend. We're working way faster on audio for Fischl compared to previous projects, there's just so much more required this time that we couldn't foresee. A certain Kitsune hasn't even had time to interact with our discord for almost a full month now just to focus each and every day to finish the audio. We expected audio to be a bit simpler, but instead it parallels the massive amount of animation work many of you saw in our work streams.

We do wish we could give better estimates on some of these things, but honestly a lot of it we can still only guess at even with a few years under our belts. Especially with Fischl being orders of magnitude more complex, and almost as big as everything that came before it combined. It's been packed with learning experiences for us from beginning to end. We like to try to give updates on progress as best we can, but we'll try to be more careful about giving specific estimates in the future. While we try to give our best guesses with the information we have in the moment, we can't compromise on the vision or quality of our work because of arbitrary timelines. We only want to share our best with you and will continue trying to bring them to you as quickly as we can ❤️

We also mentioned about a month ago a friend joined us. Originally they helped out a bit with some rigging but have since jumped on rendering and some audio work with us too to speed things along more. A proper third member should help a lot with the work ahead! ❤️ ﾟ✧٩(｡◕ ꇴ ◕｡)۶✧*❤️ It's something we would have loved to have done sooner, but it's much more difficult than you might expect to find capable, willing, and motivated resources for this kind of thing that aren't already employed or doing their own thing. Let alone that share our creative vision. But slowly we're expanding and with it a lot of fun potential for the future! (づ｡◕‿‿◕｡)づ ❤️

Fischl is nearly done, so back to work for us and can't wait to see you soon with the release! (っˆڡˆς)❤️