Progress Report - June 26, 2025 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone.

As you probably noticed, this post is a fair bit later than the usual scheduled Monday updates. And you probably also noticed that the video hasn't come out yet.

I'll be blunt. I failed to reach the goals that I had set out last week. And then I let that failure get to me, and just further exacerbate itself in a self-defeating spiral.

Batcat Update

As I had finished up the detailing pass early last week, I had that all-too-familiar sense of "this animation is actually garbage, no one will like this, I've wasted everyone's time on this project" wash over me, as I couldn't help but focus on the gap between what the animation ended up being versus what the animation could have been in my mind's eye, becoming blind to what the animation actually was.

That sent me spiraling down a depressive episode that strongly discouraged me from working further on the video. I couldn't even bring myself to start the emotive animation pass. And then as Friday came and passed, which I had aspirations to have finished the final pass, I saw how I hadn't even started it due to that depressive episode, and it just broke me.

I spent the entire weekend just wallowing in misery, despising myself and hating myself for failing to get the animation ready to render by Friday. It wasn't until Monday that I finally pulled myself back together and came to terms with it all:

Yeah, it sucks that I didn't get the video done when I wanted to. But sitting around crying and feeling miserable about what happened doesn't go back in time and undo it. And hating myself to the point of crippling paralysis doesn't get the video done, either.

So on Monday, I finally started the emotive pass I intended to start and finish last week. And seeing how much of a difference it makes, how much better it all looks, how much closer it brings the animation to what I had envisioned it to look like, inspired me to overcome that depressive episode and to buckle down and get it all done.

It turns out there is a lot more emotive animation I plan to do than I originally anticipated, such that even if I hadn't had that depressive episode strike, I likely still wouldn't have gotten it done by Friday. But I am feeling very fulfilled in doing it.

This is, of course, not a new story to anyone whose been around for any amount of time. It seems like every other video project I do runs through this cycle: production goes really well, I only have one or two detail passes left, I get excited that the final render is just about ready to begin, I suddenly come to hate the project and feel like it's been a waste of time, I fall into a depressive slump that stalls all work on the project, the projected render date I had excitedly put out comes and goes, I spiral into a cycle of self-hatred which just further stalls work, I eventually come to terms with the reality of the situation and the inexorable forward march of time, I pick up the pieces and put myself back together, and we move ever onward to pastures green.

They say that art is suffering, and it appears that this is my particular Tartarus. But the primordial need to create burns brighter than the fires of this personal Hell.

I'm not going to put any dates on the project going forward. I know I say that every time, too. Maybe one day I'll learn from it for good. For now, though, we will just keep on keeping on the way we always do: weekly updates as things progress, and the video will be done when it's done.

Why Such A Delayed Post

The reason why this post took till Thursday to post, instead of the normal Monday, is rather mundane.

As I explained above, it wasn't until Monday that I even pulled myself together. So I had spent all of Monday just working and trying to catch up for the weekend that was lost to moping.

Tuesday was my birthday, so I didn't do any work there.

And then Wednesday, I actually had written most of this post up on Wednesday, but then I got distracted by life things. I had a group of friends who used my birthday on Tuesday to reach out and reconnect after they've been busy with being new parents, and they've been wanting to make up for lost time with me by being a lot more active and engaged. This included getting games to play together, but to install them I needed to clear out my hard-drives. So I fell down a rabbit-hole of hunting down and deleting a terabyte worth of shit off the drives, and along the ways, I found some old Corsair storyboards.

I ended up needing to spend way more time than I expected getting them ready to share on Bluesky, linked above. The main thing was I needed to re-encode them to push a targeted frame to the top, so it would thumbnail in an interesting way. Bluesky doesn't allow arbitrary thumbnails, it just takes the first frame of the video.

Which now leads us here, to Thursday. Where the post is finally getting made.

Hopefully next Monday's Progress Report will get us back on track.

Other Things

Just a real quick update on other things I've been doing.

Demonseed has currently stalled. While I have a lot of episodes written, I think 40+ at this point, they're... not very written, if that makes sense. Each one is a single bullet-point. Not even a sentence. They just describe the sex in that episode.

That entire story I have planned out is not actually tied to the sex scenes all that tightly, and that is causing a lot of friction. So I am putting the sex scenes together as per the bullet-point list, and then writing out the actual dialogue on the fly. And it turns out, getting the dialogue to move from sex position to sex position can be difficult. What was originally meant to be episode 2, for example, ended up getting pushed off to episode 4, because the dialogue just kept pulling in later episodes' sex positions as part of their organic flow.

So I've currently put Demonseed on pause, as I need to sit down and completely reevaluate my process for it. I need to actually write it all out proper.

Rover Wanderer Nomad Vagabond has been stalled for a while, not for any writing reason, but just because I'm unhappy with how Suki turned out. I got a few comments saying her tattoos were campy and it honestly just really deflated me. Now when I look at her, the tattoos just stand out as looking really amateur-ish and try-hard, which is not the aesthetic I want for her.

I need to reach out to an artist with experience designing tattoos for characters and work with them to build a tattoo set that I am actually proud of. But that is way outside the time allotment for a Micro right now. Once Batcat is out and I take my month+ to do all the other stuff I've repeatedly explained, I can do it.

A Short Love Story, the Marie/Honoka series, has also been stalled for a while. Also writing issues, this time a sort of general lack of real direction. I know roughly what I want the story to be, but I don't have anything planned out specifically. I have actually had the second episode animated for weeks now, but I just don't like it. I want to scrap it and rewrite it, but again, just haven't had the time.

And then finally and most recently, I had another bought of insomnia strike me hard a few nights ago, as yet another lewd Life is Strange idea took my sleep hostage.

I ended up getting up and posing about half of the below orgy (Kate, Courtney, Dana, Juliet, and Brooke were all posed in a single sitting as I was unable to sleep). The rest of the orgy was posed over the following few evenings before bed.

The orgy was part of a larger Micro series idea that I had come to mind and I have been writing out. I currently have 6 episodes written out--and this time, I mean properly written out, with full paragraph descriptions of each episode including both the major plot beats and the integration with sex. And I have a few more episodes in mind before the insomnia-driven thoughts peter out. I have an end goal of the project in mind (hint it's the orgy), as well as some vague notions of how to get there. But vague notions do not episodes make, and so I need to sit down and write a concrete path to get there.

After seeing how much time Demonseed took only for it to peter out, I think I am going to keep this strictly to the realm of writing until the project is fully written out and ready for production proper. I'm not especially bothered by that, despite my general itch to get some more Micros made and just break the glacial ice on this fucking production schedule, because I know from the last time I did a Life is Strange project that the wonderful Dorn, whom voiced Max for me last time, isn't available during the summers.

So it won't be until mid-September at the earliest that I could even get this made. Which gives me plenty of time to comfortably sit back and write it out, whilst I explore other Micro projects.

That being said, during the very early iterations of this insomnia-driven idea, I had put together a Kate prototype. Once I sat down and actually wrote out the idea, that specific prototype fell out, so I posted it on Bluesky. It has done surprisingly well, one of the best-received posts I've made there (about as well as one of the Short Love Story release posts). I'm not sure if it's just because I shook off the old audience moving to Twitter or what, but I've noticed that my Life is Strange posts have been doing pretty consistently well over on Bluesky. Which is a far cry from my Twitter and Patreon audiences telling me to fuck off with the Life is Strange stuff a year or so back.

So yeah. That's where we are.

I'm disappointed more progress hasn't been made, but I'm not going to let it stop me from making progress regardless.

That's all for now. Until next week, everyone!