Progress Report (Patreon)

Sorry I've been a bit silent guys. I admit I've been sort of avoiding looking to closely at the Patreon Page, since every time I do I get hit with another wave of depression. That asshole that leaked the latest build has caused roughly a 25% drop in total Patronage. And I'm forced to confront that fact again every time the main page loads. At this point, if it doesn't recover within the next month, I'm genuinely looking at having to find another day job again within a month or so. Which is depressing beyond words, given that I'd only just reached the point I was able to quit the last one (with a little risk and a lot of hope) in January.

That said, just because I've been a little less chatty, doesn't mean I haven't been working hard on all the content. First off, before the progress report proper, for those of you who haven't checked or don't have access to the specific polls...

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Focus Poll Winner: Arianna (38%)

Mixed Media Poll Winner: The Virtual Trap (75%)

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I didn't do a specific poll results post, since both were straight votes with no weighing. So anyone that voted in them could already see the results. Frankly, I'm happy that The Virtual Trap won, but less so that Arianna did. There's nothing wrong with Arianna having won, and I'm pleased people still like her route despite it being the most divisive overall. It's just that her Week 6 content is by far the most complicated of the solo girls. So I admit I'd hoped just a tiny little bit that she wouldn't win. Still, it's not the end of the world, and I do know what I'm planning for her. It's just going to be more work than any of the other solo routes would have been.

Now, on to the Progress Reporting bits!

Left Hand Magic

This is going a bit more slowly than I'd hoped. That isn't to say I haven't made progress. Revina's Event 5 is done already. I'd just...also hoped to be done with the Arianna/Talia threesome Event 5 by roughly today. And I'm most certainly not. The stills for day 1 are done, and the first of the events three animations is about 70% rendered (it's ongoing right now). But that's well short of where I'd hope to be. In this case, the cause of that was simple raw render times that I couldn't get around.

The final animation of the Revina set ran a full 28 hours of render time. Virtually all of the Threesome Route stills have run a minimum of an hour (all 10 of them). And the first animation of the Threesome Route is currently on hour 17 of it's rendering -_-. There's a reason I was really hoping to upgrade to a GTX 4090 graphics card this year. And this is that reason. Unfortunately, with my current series of crisises still looming, that upgrade has become a pipe dream. Leaving me stuck suffering through unpredictably long render times.

Mind you, I'm still 100% confident (barring some new disaster) that the threesome route will get done. I'm just less and less happy about how much beyond that I'm likely to have time for. I was hoping to get through the majority of Arianna's week 6 stuff. Now, I think I'll be lucky to get through maybe half of it. The first three days worth, at best. We'll see. Some of it should be doable. Enough to match this build's size to the last two, at least.

MMS: The Virtual Trap

This, on the other hand, is going swimmingly. I've got 9 renders done already, with at least one more slated to get done today. Which is extremely good progress for having gotten a slightly late start on the renders. Unless something goes tits up again, there shouldn't be any issue with this getting done on time. And, having just typed that, I had a random fit of paranoia that made me backup all the renders. So...yeah ;-). This should be out on time without any major issues.

Other Stuff:

The last set of wallpapers I'm planning to do officially will get done when I have a spare moment or ten from rendering. It's essentially just a matter of doing the typsetting/archiving. So it's really just a case of when one of the PCs isn't busy chewing through renders.

A short story. This is actually looking fairly plausible. By some miracle or another, I've managed to catch my fanfiction Patreon up completely after it suffered from the same delays as everything here did. That means I have some freed up writing time while renders are going. I'm not sure what story I'll do. But there's a good chance I'll squeeze one in this month, despite early fears I wouldn't be able to...