Progress Report - July 28, 2025 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

I hope you all enjoyed C U Next Tuesday's release, such as it was, last week. I apologize for how late it was to come out - there were just a million little things that I needed to do ahead of release, and it all added up.

As I stated in last week's Progress Report, and in the blog post associated with CUNT's release, that is the last Short video for the foreseeable future. From here on out, my attention will be focused on Long videos, working on Micros on the side.

Frozen

And as I have stated across several Progress Reports now, my immediate focus is on housekeeping. The first order of business is getting the Frozen video ready for rendering. And that endeavor almost ended before it began.

To keep a long story short, back when my CPU was dying, I had reinstalled Windows in an effort to salvage it. I thought I had backed up my Davinci Resolve project files, but apparently I only backed up some internal data for the projects, rather than the projects themselves. Meaning that I lost all of my Resolve projects, including the Frozen working project that had all of the audio cut up and placed.

That is annoying, but it's not a particularly big deal. I can cut up and place the audio again. It's not hard, it just takes time.

What was a far, far bigger deal was the fact that, uhh, apparently I was temporarily storing the Frozen audio on my C:/ drive. The one that was reformatted for reinstalling Windows. And it wasn't backed up.

I don't panic easily. I damn near had a panic attack, as I scoured my hard drives with Voidtools Everything for every possible combination of "Frozen" "Elsa" "Anna" "Disney" "Peasant" "Gang" in an attempt to find the audio files, to no avail.

THANKFULLY, the wonderful voice actress who recorded over an hour of footage for the project, Mimi Hung, happened to still have a copy of the audio on her hard drive, despite it being like a year since she last sent it to me. So she was able to reupload it and send it my way again, and now I have all of the audio in my possession.

I still need to reconstruct the timeline, but thankfully Mimi is highly organized and her audio files are named after the raw dub videos I sent her. I can download those videos off my fileserver and import them and the audio into Resolve to reconstruct the timeline, and then from there figure out exactly where all the audio needs to go in SFM. It'll be tedious, but it shouldn't cause any problems.

Autoreleaser

Before I jump into working on Frozen in earnest, though, I am taking some time to put together a new Autoreleaser tool.

As I'm sure most of you know, most of my contributions to the SFM scene aren't actually in the form of the videos I make, but rather in the models and tools that I make and share. As such, I have an Assets page from which people can download all the stuff I make and share.

That Assets page is a chore to maintain though, and so many moons ago, I wrote an Autorelease system for the Assets, that is basically a fire-and-forget alternative for me to quickly upload and release things, complete with a download manager that I am fairly certain no one actually uses.

Unfortunately, when I reinstalled Windows and lost the Davinci Resolve files, I also lost the uploading part of the Autorelease system. This one genuinely upsets me, because I spent like 2 solid weeks on that fucker.

Ever since that reinstall of Windows, I have just been releasing the occasional thing by just randomly posting links to them on Bluesky. This is obviously just a temporary solution, and I have long intended to write a new release system once Batcat was done. I was not going to spend another 2 weeks rewriting the Autorelease uploader.

With Batcat out the door, earlier today I decided to meet myself in the middle. I'm not going to rewrite the full set of functionalities the original Autorelease uploader had, but instead write a very simple and pared-down version of it. As of right now, I have it properly loading all of the existing releases, allowing me to view them in full. Next up is making it able to upload new versions of existing releases, and release new assets altogether.

That is my immediate focus. I should be done with it by Friday at the latest, Wednesday at the earliest.

Body Count

This one was entirely unplanned.

I have shared thoughts of a DVa gang bang project in the past, but have been unable to find a good medium for it. Long video means it'd be years before I get to it, because I have fixed Overbreed Episode 1 and Blue Star Episode 4 in my schedule. Short video was giving me writing problems even before I recently dropped Shorts altogether. And Micros? There's potential there, but I haven't really explored it yet.

And then last night, while I was trying to sleep, I had a sudden thought hit me: what if the DVa gang bang project was a game?

I've been exploring various ideas for a game for us to build on stream for months now, ever since our last game project fizzled out because I was just figuring it out as we went and it turns out that's a terrible way to design a game. I've had a few ideas that have been promising, but none that have really jumped out at me as a "yes definitely this one!"

Body Count isn't quite there yet either, but I definitely think it has a lot of potential. I managed to write up a 2400-word outline of thoughts for the idea, pulling in various ideas from previous iterations trying to make it work as a video project, as well as various ideas from other game ideas.

The design definitely isn't even close to finished yet, but I have decided to share what I have written anyways. I hope it doesn't come across as scatter-brained and incoherent - I wrote it in the middle of the night after insomnia was keeping me from being able to sleep.

Narratively, the premise is simple: DVa is upset that the news reports on her heroic efforts got sidelined by reports of Juno hosting herself a massive gang-bang. Seeing every news channel reporting on it, DVa's pettiness and competitive edge gets the better of her, and she sets out to prove that she can rack up a higher ahem body-count than Juno ever could.

Mechanically, the game is built around running a variety of smaller gameplay loops in a bid to build up DVa's skills and stamina, convincing (RE: fucking) various sponsors to fund her lavish gang-bang project, and contacts to get it broadcast on live television. And since she intends to have this be a big televised affair, she has to be entirely above-board for it, meaning she needs to pay every performer involved - and her sponsors won't touch that, meaning she has to foot the bill herself.

That is where today's preview poster comes in - while the gang-bangs themselves need to be above-board, how she gets the money to pay the performers is under no such obligations. And so she ends up racking up cash by bouncing her ass - pole-dancing, cam-whoring, prostitution, and starring in porn films all provide uniquely different systems for generating cash. Pole-dancing is the most variable, with how many people show up being entirely outside your control; cam-whoring has a long road before it starts really becoming profitable, as you have to build up a follower base through good ole persistence; the world's oldest profession is also the most reliable, but it comes with the inherent risk of the police confiscating all your hard-earned cash; and the porn industry in this fantastical world works entirely off residuals, meaning you don't make your money up-front, but metered out over several days and weeks.

With all this in mind, you don't just jump straight into a 100-man gang-bang, of course. You gotta build up to it. And so, once you've convinced (RE: fucked) enough sponsors, built up enough stamina, sufficiently honed your skills, and got together enough cash, you proceed through a series of progressively more intense gang-bangs, each of them with a specific theme and proving to be an explicit skill-check, to make sure you're on track for progression.

As an example pulled from the text, the second gang-bang is with a 5-man esports team, being filmed as a hardcore (in every sense of the word) marketing campaign. The kicker? DVa's going to be playing video-games the entire time the team runs a train on her. So you'll need to practice your multitasking through cam-shows, prostitution, and porn shoots (pole-dancing won't really do much for this one) if you want to be able to pull it off!

There is still a lot of stuff I need to figure out - such as how the game controls, for example. A lot of major game design mechanics, and even more details.

But that is the high-level vision I have for the game. If that sounds interesting to you, I go into a lot more detail in the write-up linked above. And if you'd like to see the game idea be explored further, or even made on-stream, then please feel free to voice as much in the comments!

Closing Words

So yeah, that's it for this week. With Batcat's release being so late last week, I haven't had that much time to really get stuff done between then and now. But the gears are turning.

Hopefully next week's Progress Report will have something substantial with the Frozen project. I want to have the new Autorelease uploader done by then, and at the least be in the process of reconstructing the timeline by next Monday.

Until then, though, that's all for now!