Progress Report (Patreon)

Alright, everyone, sorry for the silence up until now. Frankly, I've been focusing on trying to catch everything up since the loss of the SSD I spoke about in my last post. Thankfully, the SSD was all that was wrong with the laptop, and I had it back up in running within two days of the SSD dying. So far, the only things I've discovered were lost were the first five renders of Cara Loft 3. Even the code repository that I thought might have been lost ended up being backed up on another drive (bless you past self, for being paranoid about data loss). Through putting in some extra hours and more than a little luck, I've actually mostly caught up. That said, there are going to be some side effects of the lost renders and time. I'll talk about those in each section, however.

Left Hand Magic

This, of course, is the big one. Thankfully, it was also the least disrupted by the SSD loss. I did lose some time to the laptop issue, but not so much that I lost too much ground here. That said, the lost time does mean I'm more on track for my backup plan for the month rather than what I really wanted.

Additionally, while I lost nothing as far as code goes for Left Hand Magic, I will be facing some issues getting Renpy reinstalled. Well, less Renpy and more the irritating support components for Renpy. Renpy requires very specific installations of an outdated Java SDK, along with an equally specific installation of certain python libraries and other supporting elements. It's a pain to get it all right, particularly for Android Builds. And, unfortunately, the drive/installation that had all of that working right was the one that crashed and burned. I'll be spending at least a day when it comes to the code part of the project getting everything back in working order.

The net result of this is that I've officially shifted to the stance that I'm only going to get 3 of the weekend events done. Trix's renders/animations are, of course, already done. And I'm in the home stretch for the Revina/Trix threesome events. I have two of it's animations, as well as the vast majority of it's still renders, done. I'll be doing Arianna's route as well, but won't then try to squeeze in Revina's Route. Instead, I'll shift straight to programming to make sure I have enough time to sort out the Renpy/Python/Java issues. If I end up finishing early, I will then backtrack to clean up a few old animations I'm not happy with.

This still gives us another 9 animation build (possibly with some replacements for a couple of old animations as well), and effectively about six game-days worth of content. Roughly the same size as last month, honestly. Not huge, but not small either. Given the hardware failure that added insult to injury this month, as it were, I'll count that as a win.

Cara Loft 3

This is the good news, actually! With some extra elbow grease and the benefits of a clean install of windows (that actually helped boost overall render speed!) I've managed to catch this up completely to where it should be. Doing so has had a bit of a cost, in that I both don't have the Wallpapers done yet and...haven't done anything with the short story. That said, I ended up choosing to prioritize getting this fixed because it affects both of the higher tiers and their rewards.

Obviously, if I hadn't been able to get it done, it would have meant no MMS reward for the Royalty Tier Folks. But that would have also meant that none of the previous exclusives moved down to the Upper Class tier, either. Since I rather suspect the MMS is the main selling point of both those tiers, I felt I really needed to get it back on track. Based on current progress, I'm expecting to deliver it at roughly the usual time, despite the loss of renders and time.

Short Story

This...unfortunately is where I stole the time to get the MMS fixed from. I should have already gotten most of the next Starship Promise entry done. Maybe even published it already. But with the SSD loss forcing me to prioritize, I sacrificed any work on this to get the MMS back on track. That doesn't necessarily mean I won't get to it. But it does mean there's a possibility it will get delayed. If it does, then the plan to deal with that is to shift the story into next month. If I do that, than I will cancel the secondary story next month (same as I did this month), and instead do both Starship Promise and whatever wins next month's Story Poll. A less than ideal fix, but one that will make the least overall impact.

It's also still completely possible I might be able to get Starship Promise worked in around everything by the end of the month. This is more a warning and honest assessment of how things stand. To be frank, a lot of it's going to depend on my mental state after today...as I have an appointment in four hours(ish) to find out just how bad the medical/dental stuff I found out about last month actually is.

I'm doing my best not to freak out about that at the moment, as a worst-case scenario could include needing to remove a possibly cancerous cyst. And, well...depending on what is said at that meeting I might not exactly be in the mood to write sexy stuff while I get some sort of plan worked out. I deliberately set all the other stuff up so that only Rendering projects are really ongoing for the next few days, knowing that I might not be in the best mental space. Those (rendering) are mostly fire and forget once I do the posing, which is itself time consuming but sort of zen most of the time. Normally, I work on other stuff when renders are ongoing. Like writing. But the whole reason I canceled the second short for this month preemptively was because I knew I might need a few days of not crunching every moment to deal with that.

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So, yeah. That's the state of things. Wish me luck (or pray if that's a thing for you) that I get good news instead of bad today? Otherwise, you all know where everything is now, for the moment. Depending on how the day goes, I might be back quickly or...not so much so if I'm dealing with anxiety attacks again. We'll see?

*Edit: To my chagrin my meeting earlier in the day ended up being 'well, we need more information first'...hopefully they won't leave me hanging too long :-(. Wasn't their fault, but still agonizing.