Progress Report - July 9, 2025 (Patreon)

Howdy, everyone.

I apologize for this post being so late. I intended to make it last night, but I ended up getting so caught up on chasing the "just one last thing to put together for the post" that I ended up chasing 24 hours worth of "one last thing"s, and now here are.

Before we get into the meat of this post, I just want to say upfront that, after last week's crash-out, I took this past week off to not work on Batcat and to not feel bad about it. The comments that people made in the wake of that, and the support you all showed, really meant a lot to me, and it helped me settle my anxieties that I can take a week off to recenter myself without ill consequence. I cannot overstate how much your responses, both in public comments and in private DMs, meant to me.

Instead, I took that week to pursue my personal interests, and that is what this week's Progress Report will be about, after a brief review of last week's poll results. As such, I have decided to make this post also be available to all Patrons - it's only fitting that, if the crashout was available to everyone, then the results from it should also be available to everyone.

With that being said, let's just get right into it!

Batcat Poll Results

So, I did not look at these results once during the past week. I opened them for the first time about 3 minutes before I started writing this post. Let's take a look at the results together, and I'll share my thoughts on them.

Looking at this, my first three immediate thoughts were, in order:

1.) "Wow, only 22 responses. I was kinda hoping for a bit more than that."

2.) "An almost perfect 50/50 split between people being interested in the video and people not being interested in it doesn't feel great."

3.) "Mad respect for the one person who took the poll and chose the 'I don't care' option."

After those initial reactions, I do see that there is a slight majority of respondents who are interested in the video, at 12 versus 9, or just under 55% of people who voted being interested in it.

What I think is far more pertinent is that, of the 21 people who had an actual opinion, 17 of you were okay if I were to just wrap things up on the video and just push it out the door. That's just over 80% of respondents.

The fact that such an overwhelming amount of support for that action, be it for my mental health or just because people want me to move on to other projects, is extremely encouraging. And the fact it is split so evenly across people who are interested in the video and those who aren't I think suggests that, regardless of peoples' opinions on this one specific video, they are more interested in me moving on than they are on me polishing a video to as finished as I can get it.

The second question's results I think are even more interesting. My first thought upon seeing them was "wow that is a very lopsided skew in favor of the Long videos." My second thought was "I wonder if one of those 2 'no strong opinions' votes was the same 'no strong opinion' on the first question", EG if there is one person who took the poll and then just didn't actually vote on anything. If so, I have major respect for you, mystery poll-taker. And then my third thought was, closely related, "respect to the one person who is uninterested in the Shorts but okay with me making them anyways." It takes personal strength to say you're okay with something you're not interested in.

With that in mind, of the 20 opinions provided for this question, an overwhelming 16 responses, a solid 80%, all agree: people would prefer I focused more on Long videos, rather than taking such long excursions pursuing these Short videos. And that is an almost even split between people who like the Short videos, and people who don't.

Taken together, I think these two questions send a pretty unambiguous message: People would rather I just wrap up the Batcat video, push it out the door, and sunset the Short videos system.

And honestly, this was a conclusion that I found myself gravitating toward when I was writing last week's post. I didn't want to make any executive decisions then, because I know better than to make any sort of executive decisions while I am emotionally spiraling, and boy howdy was I spiraling then.

A week on though, even before reviewing these results, and I think that is still a conclusion I am in agreement with. As I said back then, when the Short videos began, I think they were a viable way to keep the content flowing and keep myself fresh and avoiding burnout, like the notoriously terrible crash I had after grinding Blue Star Episode 3 for like half a year without breaks. But the Shorts lost their way at some point, and ended up becoming longer than some of the "Long" videos they were originally meant to be a break from.

So, I think I am ready to make an executive decision on it now:

I am going to spend the next week finalizing Batcat, and I am going to sunset the Shorts initiative.

Right now, my goal is to get the render started on July 15. The order of events I am going to take over the next week is as such:

1.) Animate the camera in all of the shots. An animated camera can go a long way in hiding stiff or unfinished animation, and I think it will do a lot of heavy lifting with the unfinished video.

2.) Grab Gas Station Simulator and record some footage for the video.

3.) Do a shit-can render of the video, and do the VFX compositing (game footage and the keypad).

4.) Redo the lost detail animation

5.) Finish the emotive pass

Note that, importantly, this is not a "get all of this done" list. This is a "get as much of this done" list. Once end-of-day July 15 rolls around, hell or high water, I'm hitting render. If only half of the shots have the camera animated, then so be it. If all of the emotive pass is done, then that's great. Realistically, I expect the render will fall somewhere between 4 and 5. I might get some more emotive work done, I might not.

I have decided that I am going to do the 4k render, but the video will still be released at discounted tiers. Public 720p will be free as always, the 1080p will be released at the $5 Progress Report tier, and the 2160p will be released at the $10 Early-Access tier. There will not be any early-access, all three versions will be released simultaneously.

What Happens After Batcat? Micros, Overbreed, Frozen, and Blender.

Once Batcat is out the door, I am going to instead shift my focus to working on Long video projects, while exploring Micro video projects during the evenings and on my day off. I am undecided on if I want to bring back Saturday streams to work on Micro videos, once the current modeling endeavors are done. The next Micro video project is going to be the Witcher one, it's been sitting half-completed for weeks now, and while I have since decided that it isn't what I want Micros to be, I'm just going to get it done and out the door because fuck it why not. After that, we'll see.

I want to reiterate that the goal for Micros is "something I can put together in a day." They are intentionally tiny projects that can stand alone on their own. The ideal is a single sex animation, a finisher, and a smidge of narrative to tie it all together. Larger series of Micros can and will exist, but each episode will be written to stand on its own. No filler episodes, no long gaps without sex, and no long intricate sex sequences within a single video. It is that last reason that makes me unhappy with how the Witcher Micro came out, because it consists of 8 sex animations and 2 finishers. Which, consequently, is also why it's been stuck in limbo - I've been busy putting together other potential Micro projects rather than investing so much energy into all of that.

Returning to Batcat going out the door, I am not going to be particularly rushed on its renders, either. I'm just going to let it render overnight, and I am going to spend the days working on Overbreed Episode 1. I think I am going to focus on just getting as much core animation for it made as possible. Toward that end, I am going to focus on the non-sex narrative interstitials first, since those are generally the easiest to put together, just blocking a lot of dialogue with some major complementary animations. After that, I will work on the cold-open Sequence A, which is pretty short and straightforward. Batcat will get finished and released as its overnight renders finish.

Once all of that is done, I am going to shift gears and focus on getting the Frozen video ready for rendering. Hopefully I can shunt that over to my Render Machine and let it do its thing. I don't remember how many lights I use in it, so I don't know if my Render Machine will be able to handle it. I know from first-hand experience, during the two weeks my CPU was dead, that the Render Machine cannot properly handle Batcat, which is why I won't even bother trying to render it during the day.

If not, then I will have the Frozen video render out while I spend a few weeks experimenting with Blender. It is worth reminding everyone that the Frozen video will be rendered at a low-quality 720p, just to stop my PC from exploding, and it won't have fully polished animation either. I've been saying this for like a year now, so no one should be caught off-guard by it when it does finally release.

For Blender, I want to get at least a fundamental workflow figured out for it. Top priority is writing a Python script to automate creating SFM-style IK rigs, just fire and forget. I'd like to explore Blender's new asset library functionality that I've heard about - in theory, it allows me to create individual .blend files for each of my characters, and then instance them into Blender projects. And importantly, the instancing means I can make changes to the character .blend files, and those changes will automatically reflect in all projects instancing them - meaning I can start working on projects right away with the characters, and then I can slowly figure out the best settings for cloth, hair, and jiggle simulations later, and automatically have them dropped in and working on the projects.

I don't know what all I'll get done with Blender. Will I put together a prototype Micro video? Probably not. I don't think I'll get much more than some infrastructure work done. But it is important infrastructure work.

Once I am satisfied that the Blender work has reached a good pausing point, I am going to return my attention to Overbreed Episode 1. I have noted before that I will probably end up rewriting the Sequence B, and I have decided that is exactly what I am going to do. Or, more specifically, I am going to rewrite the flashback sequences of it. Sequence B is composed of two interwoven parts: Mercy getting lost in the sauce gooning herself stupid, and her retrospecting on her moonlighting as a dominatrix (which eventually morphs into a transcendental gooner fever-dream as she opens her third eye and pumps her stomach full of her own jizz).

I'm perfectly happy with Mercy gooning herself stupid, and am pretty excited to animate her absolutely going to town on her fleshlight. And I've already prepared a Tool playlist to play on loop when it comes time to animate Mercy becoming the locus of all knowledge. It's specifically the early elements of her retrospections as a dominatrix I am not happy with. I need to figure out a better, more interesting mechanism to reflect that. She still needs to be a dominatrix, just... presented in a different way that what I currently have written.

It is that uncertainty with Sequence B that made me decide to put the Frozen/Blender split in between "everything else" and "Sequence B". I can tell that Sequence B is going to give me the most stress in figuring out what to actually do with it, that I don't want it to jam up the works. Overbreed Episode 1 has been delayed enough as it is.

So, that's the plan for the next few weeks. But what have I gotten up to this past week?

Life is Sex - A Micro Series

I spent a fair bit of time adapting my previous Life is Sex ideas into a Micro Series. With the exception of the first episode, each of them are designed with the Micro ethos I described earlier: one sex animation, one finisher, and a bit of narrative to tie it all together. Stuff I could put together in a day.

In fact, I put together the bullshots seen in the above gif, episodes 3 through 10, all in a single two-hour sitting. Episode 1's bullshot was slowly put together in the evenings before bed over the past week, Episode 2's bullshot was actually adapted from an earlier iteration, and Episode 11's bullshot was done as an experiment the night before I put together the other 7.

Unlike my other Micro projects, I am explicitly writing out the entire series before I actually commit to anything. All of these bullshots were literally only put together for the sake of this post, to quickly communicate my ideas for the series.

I will be the first to admit that I don't know exactly how the entire series will unfold. The 11 episodes shown here, I have written out completely as full screenplays. But beyond them, I only have vague ideas of what I want to accomplish (which makes sense, because I haven't written them yet!)

Super broad strokes, Life is Sex (not sure if I will carry over the "Enter the Whoretex" subtitle from previous iterations) is split into three acts: Act 1 is establishing all of the major characters and their kinks, Act 2 is the quote-unquote "conflict" between Max's sluts and Victoria's whores, and Act 3 is the two groups learning to work together and eventually merge, ending in the 10-girl orgy that Episode 1 sets up as the big conclusion.

All of the girls, sans Chloe and Max themselves, have clearly established kinks: Victoria's into being free-used, Courtney has a pregnancy fetish, Dana is a 0% pussy gal, Juliet's horny for getting her face fucked, Alyssa's a bonafide gang-bang girl, Brooke likes to watch and livestream herself having sex, Taylor goes all-in on the choke-and-slap flavor of rough sex, and Kate is an insatiable size queen.

Chloe and Max themselves are a bit more ambiguous, dipping their toes into various things but not really committing to any one thing, other than their devotion to each other. Chloe's a bit of a power bottom whose into degradation, Max is a bit of a service top that likes her butt being played with. And the two are basically inseparable, doing everything and everyone together.

I am extremely happy with how everything has gone so far with writing it, I definitely think it has the most legs of all the Micro series I've explored so far. The Marie/Honoka series, "A Short Love Story", has a lot of high-level potential, but the content of specific individual episodes eludes me. I need to find that magic line to ride for it yet. My series "Rover, Wanderer, Nomad, Vagabond" with the original character Suki, I still think has a lot of potential. But I received some feedback about her character model, calling out her tattoos as being "campy", which isn't the vibe I am going for. I intend to return to her at a later time, bringing on a professional artist to design some proper tattoos for her. That isn't a high priority to me right now. My Claire/Jill "Refuge" Micro series has run into a few obstacles, first with Javi and I having a falling out leaving it a bit rudderless, and then with my own explorations of where it could go running into technical issues. It turns out that cars just really aren't built for having sex in, especially while driving. Who would've imagined it? And then finally, my other original series "Demonseed" is sort of having the opposite problem - it's too damn hot for me to focus on. Every time I sit down to write out my ideas for it, I get so caught up in imagining the demon queen dominating the everloving shit out of the half-elf witch that I just can't focus on the writing. I think it's gonna be pure fucking platinum, if only I can keep my hands on the keyboard long enough to make the fucking thing.

New Tiddies, Who Dis? - DOAFantasy Prototype 5

Another thing I spent some time on this past week was building a new Prototype body for my DOAFantasy characters. Something I have been doing for months now, since before I even created my Bluesky account, is every time I go to use my DOAFantasy ladies, I always scale their tits up 10%, sometimes 15%. Every DOAFantasy poster I made during my first week on Bluesky, I did this. And I did it most recently for Helena and Honoka both in the first Marie/Honoka Micro.

I can't remember the last time I did anything with them that didn't involve me scaling their tits up.

And so I finally decided, over this past week, to bite the bullet and just build a new version of the DOAFantasy body, with their tits properly sized. It's better to size them directly in 3dsmax, where I can exactly control how they look and behave, rather than scaling them up in SFM and relying on the rigging looking okay.

I'll spare you all the rather convoluted details of the path from the publicly-released DOAFantasy Prototype 4 body, and this newest Prototype 5 body. All I'll say is that, if each incremental change I made was its own version number, we'd be closer to Prototype 20. But I think I've got it where I am happy with it, and so I am firmly calling this iteration Prototype 5.

I started with Lisa for it, because Lisa has the most interesting story in the larger DOAFantasy project I have been writing: she is the only lady of the cast who doesn't start out with the huge-tiddy bimbo body. She starts out with her still-respectably-busty canonical body, and through a combination of science, magic, scientific magic, and magical science, transforms herself into her DOAFantasy bimbo-body alternate.

Unfortunately, the transition to Prototype 5 means that all of the outfitting work I had done for Prototype 4 is mostly moot, and will require being adapted over. That is an eye-watering 60 outfits that all have to be retooled. But I knew that was likely going to happen when I jumped into the DOAFantasy Prototype 4 project. It is why I explicitly titled it "Prototype 4", and why I haven't been forthcoming in sharing the models - I knew they were in a state of constant flux, and were liable to be completely broken and rebuilt at a moment's notice.

Well, that moment's notice finally came.

Once I had the new body built to my liking, I then decided to fit a bunch of bikinis to it. Because I was taking this week off, using it to emotionally recuperate from last week's crash-out and mentally recover from the burnout of working on Batcat. And I like fitting little bikinis around big tiddies. I have currently fitted 8 bikinis, with a potential 15 more picked out. These are all explicitly two-piece bikinis. I have some one-pieces I would like to fit as well (including the ones I had fitted for the Hentai Wedding Dress for Prototype 4).

I actually started by fitting this new business suit, for Nyotengu. I had briefly considered starting a DOAFantasy Micro series with a Nyotengu episode, but as working on the suit started to feel like a chore, I shifted gears to the much more enjoyable bikini fitting. And then I just kept going. And will continue to keep going.

As much as I'd like to start with Nyotengu or a few of the other ladies, this particular story really does need to start with Lisa. Right now, the big hurdle is adapting Lisa's story to fit the Micro Series format, since her story as written is more cerebral and internal. Her entire motivation for bimbofying herself is she has nerve damage that makes her physically incapable of being sexually stimulated, while still having a healthy sex drive - she's horny, but unable to get off. She hopes to escape her sexual prison through the hypersensitivity of the bimbo body, and gorges herself on group-sex once she realizes she can finally cum again, after years of being unable to orgasm.

That's all well and good. How do I adapt it to a series of 60-second videos that each of which involve sex and climax? That's the problem I am currently facing with adapting Lisa's story in the DOAFantasy project.

I didn't burden myself with figuring that out this past week though. I just put the big tiddies into the little bikinis, and had fun doing it.

Whatever Happened to Rachel Amber? The Long Road to the City of Angels

Several months back, I explored and posted some ideas for a potential game idea involving Rachel Amber from Life is Strange, in a hypothetical where she hitch-hiked her way down the west coast to realize her dreams of making it big in Hollywood - and whored her way across the full thousand-mile journey.

After letting the idea sit dormant for a few months, unable to come up with some concrete gameplay mechanisms to tie it all together, my mind suddenly returned to it. I had recently started playing Keep Driving, a small-scope indie title that's all about road-tripping across a fictional countryside. And it had some interesting ideas that I felt could be adapted in a complementary way to the existing Road 96 inspirations the game idea had.

The two biggest ideas that I pulled from Keep Driving are both related to abstraction. Firstly, my previous iterations of the hitchhiking game involved complex choreographed unique narrative sequences for all the encounters, and a convoluted system for getting into and out of them. Keep Driving abstracts all of this away to just simple menus and minigames, and it honestly works exceptionally well for it. By making the game less Rachel's story, and more the player's story, I think the project comes out overall stronger for it. Rachel is just an avatar for the player engaging with the world.

The second abstraction that I am pulling from Keep Driving actually goes in the opposite direction. My previous iteration for this game relegated the entire non-hitchhiking mechanism all to a single static screen with a bunch of menus to navigate the towns. This felt really disconnected to me. Keep Driving has a similar navigate-town mechanism, but it abstracts it beautifully by collapsing the concept of the town into a flat one-dimension series of buildings you can move between, one building per function. It sells the impression of a town, directly grounds the player by placing them in the town and having them physically move around the space, but is still quick and snappy and doesn't drag everything down in minutiae. It's a wonderful mechanism that I think perfectly solves the disconnected hell of menus I had previously designed.

I think it works particularly well for this hitchhiking game idea, since a big component of the design is playing dress-up. Makeup, piercings, obviously sexy clothes, and even body mods are all components I have planned for the game design. I love dolling ladies up, and I think actually getting them into a physical space and watching them strut their stuff is a perfectly logical conclusion to that gameplay design. Once I had pulled that idea from Keep Driving, I naturally had the idea of having passersby ogle, pat, and even flat-out grope Rachel as they pass her by, all of which positively feeds into that very need to be seen that motivates her desire to be a Hollywood model in the first place. The sluttier she dresses, the more she gets ogled, the better she feels about herself. It's a beautiful gameplay loop.

As I started drafting out this new iteration of the roadtrip game, I decided to take a different approach to design. In previous game design iterations, I took the approach of describing a playthrough from start to finish. I found this actually worked pretty well, though it started to run into friction when it came to actually describing game systems.

This time around, I took it a step further, describing in explicit detail exactly how the tutorials would unfold. What is revealed when, what is explained to the player, how the tutorial progresses, the works. And this system actually worked so well that I actually found myself feeling the need to build a prototype of the sex minigame, just to see if the game design as the tutorial described it actually worked.

And so I did exactly that.

This is obviously very, very Spartan. It is a purely mechanical representation of the game system, with the simplest UI I could conjure up for engaging with it. The image at the top of this description is a mockup of how this would actually look in-game, where the animations themselves are front and center, and the numbers only secondary.

I am actually extremely happy with how this game system came out. Even in its purely Spartan "I once made a web page in 2003" form, I actually had a lot of fun playing it, just trying to max out the score. The minigame is designed all around edging, playing chicken with the three meters that can result in an end-of-game: pleasure hits 0, orgasm hits 100, air hits 0. As you can tell in the screenshot's "Previous Scores", I managed to miss the timing window once and managed to have poor Rachel pass out choking on dick. Bad score, bad outcome, but amusing in its own way.

There is a lot of tuning I did and could still do to get the game to an ideal state, but even in its current form, I think it is fun in its own right, and more than sufficient as just a minigame in a larger game about hitchhiking and prostitution. I have decided to open it up in its current form for people to play with. You can play with it here.

It's relatively straightforward: the goal is to get as high a Point score as possible before the game-over state. As I described above, the game-over occurs in any of 3 ways: Pleasure hits 0 (it starts at 20), orgasm hits 100, or air hits 0.

Suck, Lick, and Deepthroat all increase orgasm by differing amounts, while Balls decreases it. The longer you use an action, the more Exhaustion it builds up. The more Exhaustion builds up, the less Pleasure it generates, eventually dropping into the negatives. Swap to another action to let Exhaustion recharge.

Deepthroat is unique in two ways: firstly, it has an inverse Exhaustion effect called Steamroll. Where most actions always provide max Orgasm score but have decreasing Pleasure over time, Steamroll actions always provide max Pleasure score but have an increasing Orgasm over time. And secondly, deepthroating consumes air (the only action here that does), meaning you may have to swap to a different action earlier than intended, to avoid passing out. Air will recharge when using any action that doesn't consume air.

And then finally, the Point score gained is directly tied to the Pleasure score: the higher the Pleasure score, the more Points you gain. But it is also exponentially tied to the Orgasm score--the higher the Orgasm score, the exponentially higher amount of Points you get. At 100% Pleasure, you will gain 4 times as many points at 50% Orgasm than you will at 25% Orgasm.

See how high a score you can manage to get! My personal best is 150k, but I think it might be possible to get higher through a careful combination of the different actions.

With all of that being said, I am actually feeling really good about this iteration of the hitchhiking game. The best part about it is that, while it is using Rachel as a character model, and the narrative has light connections to Life is Strange, it really isn't a "Life is Strange fan game."

You could easily replace Rachel with an original character, replace Arcadia Bay with Garibaldi Oregon (the real-life town Arcadia Bay is based on) or an entirely fictional Oregon town, and the rest of the game still just works: a starry-eyed young woman unafraid to get down and dirty, hitch-hiking across the country and suck-and-fucking the miles away, on a mission to make it to Hollywood with aspirations of becoming a Hollywood star.

It's a universal story, and it works perfectly both for fans of Life is Strange looking for a lewd alternate end to Rachel's story, and for people uninterested in Life is Strange and just looking for a game about hitchhiking as a hot slut.

I'm not ready to commit to as an on-stream game project yet--I still have more game systems I want to draft out in the write-up, such as working out the RPG mechanics and figuring out how group-sex would work. But of all the game designs I've fiddled with over the past few months, this is the one I am feeling has the most going for it. I think it might just be the one.

Conclusion

So yeah. That's where things are.

In summary, I am going to start the Batcat renders regardless of the state it is in come July 15, work on Overbreed while it renders, get all of the solidly-pinned-down stuff for Overbreed done, get the Frozen video rendering and work on Blender, and then resume work on Overbreed. The Shorts as a concept are being retired, being replaced with Micros that will not have weeks / months dedicated to them but will instead be worked on as side-projects during my off-hours from working on Overbreed.

I am writing out a Life is Strange Micro series, with a few other Micro series facing various blocks that I will slowly be tugging at. I've got a new body for the DOAFantasy characters built with a handful of bikinis put together, with even more planned, as well as another Micro series on the backburner for them. And I have been designing and even prototyping a game that I am honestly feeling really good about.

Next week's Progress Report will be reporting basically whatever state Batcat will be in when it's sent off to rendering, seeing how the Progress Report is slated to be on July 14.

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