OPINIONS WANTED - THOUGHTS ON ABANDON RELEASE AND SCHEDULE RESTRUCTURE (Patreon)

Hey everyone.

So up front, I made this post available for all Patrons because I want to maximize the eyes that get on this, and the voices heard that want to be heard. This is a pretty big thing, so I think everyone should have the opportunity to chip in here.

And in the spirit of being upfront, I'm just going to lay out in plain English what this post is about. The first two things are sort of symptoms of it, but the last point is really the major one:

1.) I am considering abandon-releasing the Batcat video.

2.) I am considering jettisoning Short videos from the Production schedule, to focus purely on Long videos (Overbreed, Blue Star, etc) and Micro videos.

3.) I want to hear what you all want from me as an artist.

There is a poll at the bottom of this post you can fill out, if you don't want to leave a comment. The poll only addresses the first two questions though, as the last one - the most important one to me - is too open-ended to be placed into a poll.

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Those who aren't at the Progress Report tier haven't been privy to the details of all this, but those who have been keeping up know that Batcat has been having a tortured production cycle. I was originally hopeful of it getting released weeks ago, pushing into the "months ago" territory now. But things keep coming up that drag the production cycle down.

The most recent thing to come up is that I apparently lost most of the detail animation work I had spent the past few weeks on. I don't know where it went, but considering how I still have the detail animation work for the second project file, I can only surmise I accidentally saved over the first project file with an older version. So that's over 400 seconds worth of detail animation, a week's worth of work, just gone. Poof. No way to retrieve it.

And I'll be honest with you all. That just broke me.

It wasn't a decisive killing blow, I could recover from it, if that is all there was. But it was the latest in a thousand cuts.

I have been pretty transparent in the production cycle of the Batcat video. It is one of the things I pride myself on, transparency about the process, showing how the sausage is made. But one thing I haven't been transparent on, and I try to keep out of my Progress Reports in general, is how I feel about the project itself. Not how I feel about the individual steps, on the mechanical work of the thing, but about the project as a whole.

So allow me to be transparent about the Batcat project now:

I fucking hate this project.

I have hated it for months now. Every time I load it up and see just how far short its fallen from what I imagined, when InsideIncognita first presented her fantastic story to me, a pit of contempt and disgust just wells up inside of me. It's one of the reasons I have had such a hard time focusing on the project. And every time I push myself through working on it, I keep telling myself, "once this pass is done, it'll be better, and I won't hate it anymore." And as every pass gets done, it doesn't get better, and I still hate it.

More importantly though:

I feel like I'm wasting everyone's time.

I could get over hating the project, if I at least felt it was a good project. But not only do I hate this project, I think it's a bad project, too. That is absolutely not InsideIncognita's fault, I think she wrote a fantastic story. The problem is squarely with me, and my decision to adapt her story. There are stories that work better as animations, and there are stories that work better as novellas. And I think Innie's story is one that works better in the written word.

I knew going in that adapting it would be a challenge, because of how cerebral it is. The story is all about thoughts and feelings and sensations. The physical descriptions Innie provided were a vaguery. Her story was never about the what was happening, but the feelings involved therein.

I thought I could adapt it well. I was wrong. This is all squarely my fault. I accept responsibility for everything that has fallen out, and has yet to fall out.

I was so desperate to collaborate with Innie, that I let my excitement to finally put together a project we've discussed since 2016, nearly 10 years ago now, blind me to the fact that the project just wasn't a good fit for the kind of videos I put together, my workflow, my style of animation. And now you all are paying for that, three months on.

As July 1st is right around the corner, I look back at the fact this project started in earnest April 4th. How the original goal was to release it in mid-May. How all of May came and went. How all of June came and went. And how July is now looming ahead of us.

And I just don't think it's worth it at this point. I don't think it's worth another month of delays. Not for this project.

A project like TO BREED & BOND also ran absolutely out of control and far exceeded the one-month production time I wanted for it. But it had good reasons for it. It had a tortured preproduction cycle. It was 15 fucking minutes long. And, perhaps most importantly, it was a good video.

I hated how over-schedule Breed & Bond went. I hated how much time I was spending on it. I hated how much of the original idea I had to cut out. But I never hated it as a project. I never felt like I was wasting peoples' time with it. I knew Breed & Bond was a good project, and I was more than willing to put in the time to get it completed properly.

I don't feel any of that with Batcat. It actually had a pretty clean preproduction cycle. Innie and I meticulously timed it down to the second (even if it did end up running exactly one minute longer than planned). And I just think it's a bad project.

And so, we finally roll around to point described at the top of this video:

I am considering abandon-releasing the Batcat video. Do you all think that I should?

To be clear, this is not a straight abandonment. It is just a halting of further refining the video, and just releasing what I currently have, in its unfinished state. I abandon-released Miranda Versus The Galaxy several years ago, and will be abandon-releasing the Frozen video in a few weeks, after Batcat is out the door (one way or the other).

I don't want to put to waste all of the fantastic voice work that InsideIncognita, Milly Stern, and SultryLamp did on this project. And PornSFX did an absolutely phenomenal job on the sound design for the video, and his work deserves to be heard just as much as the voice actors do. They all did work that outperforms my own on this project. As I've said before, this failing is utterly and entirely my own fault, my own doing, and my own responsibility.

And because this is my own fault, an abandon-release would be deeply discounted. There would be no 4k version, because those just take an ungodly long time to render, and the whole point to the abandon release is to stop wasting time. And the 1080p version would be released onto the $5 Work In Progress tier, rather than the usual $10 1080p tier. The 720p version would, forever and always, be free to the public.

As a general reminder, the schedule has been - since Batcat's production started in April - that once Batcat is released, I will spend a week or two to get the Frozen video up to the point I can start rendering it out for an abandon release; I will then spend a few weeks working on a Blender workflow, preparing for building some projects that need the cloth and hair simulations that Blender provides; and then I return to working on Overbreed.

If we abandon-release Batcat, then I can immediately start working on the Frozen video, the Blender workflow, and Overbreed. If we don't abandon-release Batcat, then it will be a few more weeks, possibly another month, as I continue to trudge through it and get it to a polished state. The additional weeks won't make the project fundamentally better. It isn't remaking the project, it's just polishing what's made.

So I leave it all to you: would you rather I abandon-release the Batcat video and move on to other projects, or would you rather I stick it out and polish it up at the cost of more delays?

All of this actually rather segues cleanly into the next big point of contemplation: Short videos.

The Short videos have been consistently plagued with schedule problems and overruns. Every Short video I've ever made has had these issues. They got so bad that I started working on making even Shorter videos, the Micro videos.

As I sat here and contemplated abandon-releasing Batcat, I started to think on the greater landscape of things. All throughout the time I spend on these Short videos, I always get the same questions. "How is Overbreed doing?" "How is Blue Star doing?" "How is Rabbit Hole doing?" "How is Frozen doing?"

I never get asked about the Short videos. Maybe that's because I am constantly posting updates about them when they're my active projects. But when I am working on the main projects, I don't get any questions about the Short videos. They're always about the Long videos. They're always about Overbreed, Blue Star, Rabbit Hole, Frozen.

Put frankly, I get the impression that no one cares about these Short videos. Which then raises the question: am I just wasting everyone's time by making them?

Out of full transparency, there are two audiences I make videos for: you all, and me. I am willing to tip the scale one way or the other to a degree. Even if I feel like no one else is interested in a video, if it's a video I personally really like, I am still willing to put a few weeks of my time into it.

But that is a few weeks. Not a few months.

When we start measuring production schedules in months, I begin to question if an audience of one (me) is enough to justify that much time being spent on a project. A week? Non-issue. Two weeks? Honestly, non-issue as well. Three weeks is when I start to question if the project justifies the production time, if no one else is interested. And anything beyond that, the calculus just gets worse and worse.

And so, this brings me to the second big thing I want to get peoples' opinions on:

Short videos.

Before discussing the Shorts of today, let's look at my videos of ages past. Not Short videos, just, videos in general. Looking back at it, we can see that my very first videos were all less than 4 minutes.

Bounty Booty, 3.5 minutes. Phazon Experiment A, 3.5 minutes. Humans, 2 minutes. Cold Winter's Night, 2 minutes. Breed Your Queen, 1 minute. Phazon Addendum A, 2 minutes. Miscellaneous Expenses, 3.5 minutes. Alternate Advertising, 3 minutes.

It isn't until Radio Silence that my Short videos started reaching runtimes in excess of 6 minutes. And Radio Silence, rather infamously, was the first video of mine that ran into major production issues. I still remember the outcry people had about me "abandoning the video" when I said it was delayed indefinitely (which only ended up being a week).

I'm not sure exactly when the Long/Short mechanism came into being, but I know it came about during Blue Star Episode 3's troubled development (27 minutes, by the way). It came about as a solution to the long development cycle, to at least have something being released during the long months of development on Long videos.

At some point, though, Short videos lost their way. They ended up becoming longer than the Long videos of yore. Rabbit.Hole Episode 3--a Long video--is 12 minutes long. To Breed And Bond--a Short video--is 15 minutes long. Make it make sense.

As I have sat down and written out (and even animated) several Micro videos in recent weeks, a thought has kept rattling in my head. It is a comment someone made several months ago, when I told them that Overbreed Episode 1 is slated to be about an hour in length:

"Why don't you split it up into smaller videos and release it in pieces?"

My answer to that question then is the same as my answer now: because Overbreed Episode 1 was not written to be split into smaller videos and release it in pieces. It was written as a single cohesive experience, and is being built in that way.

But these Micros I have been writing are exactly that. They are stories explicitly written to be split into smaller videos and released in pieces. Each Micro is written to only be 2 or so minutes long, and each contains both a nugget of narrative and a bulk of sex. They are written to be self-contained releases that can be enjoyed on their own, with an enhanced satisfaction if watched in order.

And the more I think on it, the more these Shorts continue to get longer and take longer, the more the Shorts of today outshine the Longs of yesteryear, the more I feel like I need to jettison the Shorts in their current form, and focus instead on Long videos, with making Micro videos on the side.

The back-to-back production cycle, what I called the Tick-Tock cycle back in 2019, when it all began, was a good idea in theory. I think it worked, more or less, for a time. But I feel like it's just grown long in the tooth now. And I think it's about time to take it out back and put it down.

And so, the second point:

I am considering jettisoning Short videos from the Production schedule, to focus purely on Long videos and Micro videos. Do you think I should?

And then all of this sort of quickly wraps around to the third point, which I think is really the core question behind all of this.

The bulk of this post is about wasting time. And more specifically, wasting your time. The time of my audience. The time of the people whose generous funding allows me to make these videos in the first place. The time of the people who continually ask about Overbreed, and Blue Star, and Rabbit Hole, and Frozen.

And so I think it's only fair that I ask what you all want from me. What brought you to me in the first place? What made you stick around? Have you been happy with what you've gotten in the interim? Or have I been wasting your time, like I feel like I have?

What do you all want from me, as an artist? Please tell me, so I can try to not waste your time.

I really think that's about it.

I will continue to tinker away at Batcat over this next week. I'm shifting my priority from the expression pass to rebuilding the lost detail animation, as well as animating the camera so that the shots aren't so still.

Whether or not I finish the expression pass, and do the required VFX work for the game screen and what-not, depends on what people think on all this.

You can click here to answer the first two questions of this post in a poll. Though I would strongly prefer people leaving comments, so you can properly expand on your thoughts. And if nothing else, the third question - the most important one to me - can't be fit into a poll. I would, at the very least, like to hear your thoughts on that.