Progress Report - October 7, 2025 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

For this week's Progress Report, I note how progress on the Frozen video is coming along quite well! There haven't been any updates on Pharmmetra. Primordium has made progress, as has the Life is Strange Micro! Some more design work has been done on my current game idea early in design, Starsail Bordello. The "DVa is a sex gremlin" ideas still won't let me sleep, and another one has broken containment. And finally, a discussion of production delays and how to work around them with what I refer to as a double-barrel approach caps off this report.

Let's get into it shall we? Starting off with the Frozen video, then...

I mentioned last week that the only major work left to be done is sound design and mixing, and that while it wasn't going to be difficult, it was going to be tedious. In the end, it's 4 audio tracks - Anna, Elsa, Fireplace, and Walla - that needs to be mixed over the course of an hour's runtime. This mixing is a combination of both panning and volume control, to give the illusion of spatiality.

As of last night, 3 of those 4 tracks have been fully mixed - only Elsa remains to be mixed. Seeing how long Anna's track took me, I expect that Elsa will take me 2 to 3 days to mix. I expect I'll probably be done mixing her by end-of-day Friday.

It is possible that next Monday will see the release of the video in place of a Progress Report. As I noted last week, I'm not quite ready for release once the sound design is done. I also need to package together all of the assets for the project, upload them to my fileserver, and create a landing page on my website explaining how everything works, for anyone who wants to tackle the challenge of finishing the video.

But compared to everything else, I don't expect that to take more than a day. I'm not going to be bringing out the crack team of website designers for this. It's just gonna be a basic-bitch static page with some simple text and pictures.

Unfortunately, I have no news regarding Pharmmetra. I noted last week how Milly said she had hoped to get me her audio within 24 hours of that post. I also noted how I was not optimistic about that coming to pass. Unsurprisingly, though disappointingly, my lack of optimism proved to be correct.

I sent her an email this past Saturday asking for an update, but have yet to hear back from her. Tomorrow will mark the 4-week mark since I first sent the dub videos out for audio recording. The original intent with Micros, for posterity, was that there would be a 1-week turnaround for audio. So far, that has not panned out in any capacity.

The only thing I can say about this is, the delays aren't because of anything on my end. My hands are tied here. I don't want anyone to fault or blame Milly for anything, she has enough things going on as it is. There's no one at fault here. Scheduling conflicts happen. It's just frustrating on my end, having a video that's 90% of the way finished just sitting on my hard-drive collecting dust as I wait for the scheduling conflicts to resolve themselves.

On the Primordium front, my inability to accurately gauge project lengths continues to astound and confound. I started putting together the second episode of the Micro over this past week (starting with episode 2 because it's both fully written and the simplest setup of the three), since I can't exactly work on Pharmmetra during my Micro-allocated time. And, uhh.

It's currently at 3 minutes of runtime, at 13 of 22 shots. The way it's going, this Micro is going to end up pushing the 5-minute mark. Derived pretty much entirely from a single sex animation and its permutations.

So that's definitely violating the "3-minute max" paradigm of Micros, but it's excelling above and beyond most of the other Micros in the "one sex animation" paradigm. Like I said, continue to astound and confound.

I've been making a little bit of progress on the Life is Strange project as well. Namely, I have put together the core poses for all 8 episodes, and have started going through and building their core animations. As of right now, poses 1, 2, 3, and 5 have been animated. And then as I stated before, the first episode is mostly assembled, clocking in at a minute and needing to be capped off as it was assembled as part of a different project and still needs to be adapted.

Similarly, I've made a bit more progress on the game design for Starsail Bordello. Majority of the effort put into it this week went into making some mockups for the UX, specifically a mockup for the conversation system (which I didn't even originally plan to have), as well as the main UI. This was done as infrastructure work for the "Playthrough" write-up, which I detailed in last week's Progress Report. I find that writing a guide that describes navigating the UI to be a lot easier when you actually have a UI to describe.

I'm only spending one day a week, my Thursdays off, working on this. So the design work is currently slow-going. But it is going, and every element I write out for it only further reinforces my confidence in the project.

It is important to stress that the above images are mockups. They are not taken from any existing Unreal build - I don't even have the Unreal Engine installed on this machine, since my last reformat. The images are made with a combination of Source Filmmaker and Photoshop, in an exploration for the tone and visual aesthetics of the game.

I've also been exploring a DVa Group-sex project idea for Micros. It's an idea I've had pounding against my skull for years at this point, as long-time Patrons are likely painfully aware of. It'll get birthed into this world one day, if for no reason than to finally get me some damn peace of mind.

This most recent iteration came about while I was exploring how I could make group-sex actually be narratively interesting. It then occurred to me that Micros don't strictly-speaking need a strong narrative lead. I have always described them as being centered around sex animations, with "whatever narrative is needed to tie it all together." That is certainly something I could do for a group-sex project, build it similar to how the Frozen video was done, as just a collage of loose animations. This sparked the idea of exploring the DVa group-sex project as a Micro series.

Naturally, I then immediately threw out the pretense of "it doesn't need narrative" and began instead layering up various narratives atop each other. However, I am taking the approach of writing the narrative in a non-linear fashion. The group-sex itself will have very little narrative cohesion around it - "DVa wants lots of dick" doesn't need to become the Odyssey.

Instead, the narrative is built up around the group-sex. The high-level idea I am currently entertaining is that the group-sex video is a diegetic video stream, hacked and broadcast by Sombra in a jumbled and out-of-order way. Mixed in with the group-sex itself are cuts from interviews around the event, candid filming from before the event, and security footage from the planning of the event.

Through these various interwoven information streams, a story is pieced together of repressed feelings, hypersexual degeneracy, corporate interference, and conspiracy and collusion. All pivoting around the idea of DVa being a little sex gremlin.

I haven't worked out the details yet, but that's the high-level idea I am currently exploring. I think it has a lot of potential, but I'm not certain I'll be able to pull it off. It will need more time in the oven before I can make a call one way or the other. But I felt like sharing it with you all anyways.

And then finally, I want to end this post on some thoughts regarding waves hands ineffectively all of this.

As you all are painfully aware of at this point, the Pharmmetra Micro is stalled as I wait for Milly. That sucks enough on its own. But it is unfortunately part of a larger trend, and symptomatic of a larger problem.

I absolutely love Milly. She is a wonderful person and a fantastic actress, always an absolute joy to work with. But she is also unreliable. This isn't the first project that her hectic schedule has jammed up. I've even canceled projects as a result of her disappearing for literal months in the middle of production. Does the name "Rachaos" ring any bells? It sure does for me, and boy is it a sour note.

The worst of it, though, is that Milly isn't consistently unreliable. There are times where I will fire an email off to Milly, and then in the time it takes me to read it back to myself as proofreading for things I missed she responds. I've had her deliver audio in less than 12 hours after receiving the dub footage.

And then there are times like now, where she just disappears for weeks at a time, without a single murmur. And then often times, those murmurs are "I'll get this to you tomorrow" before another few weeks pass with nothing coming of it.

Again, I want to stress I absolutely love Milly. I am not blaming her for anything. She is a busy woman, with a family to care for, a day job to manage, and a life to live. She has only ever done voice-acting as a hobby, and in recent years it has only ever fallen lower and lower on her list of priorities.

But that doesn't change the fact that, when I have a project in production that involves her wonderful voice work, and she falls into a period of unresponsiveness, it jams the whole production up.

I've been thinking about this a lot over the past few weeks, and I think what I want to do going forward is what I call the double-barrel approach. In a nutshell, rather than having a single Micro in production at a time, like Pharmmetra, I instead have two. And importantly, those two projects don't share voice actors.

The idea being, if one of the projects gets jammed up--like Pharmmetra--then the other project is still (ideally) able to move forward without issue. The second project gets done and released first, and a different project gets loaded in its place, while the first project gets unjammed.

And in the event that neither project gets jammed up, then everyone wins! I have two projects that have gotten their voicing and are ready to be finished up and released simultaneously, two sets of voice actors get paid for their work, and the viewers get two projects released one after the other (hell, maybe even simultaneously!).

The single-production pipeline that I have been using so far is extremely vulnerable to jamming. It only takes one thing going wrong outside my control to halt the entire process to a halt. We're seeing that now. We saw it with Rachaos. And we've seen it with other projects over the years.

As such, starting today, I am shifting my focus away from the projects that involve Milly. So that's Pharmmetra as Mercy, obviously--though it hasn't had my focus anyways, as it's been jammed. But it's also Primordium, where Milly voices Triss. And it's Marie/Honoka, where I want Milly to voice Honoka. And it's a slew of other potential ideas I've been considering, but all involve Milly in some way.

While reflecting on this, it occurred to me just how many characters Milly has voiced for me over the years: Jack from Mass Effect; Triss from Witcher; Leliana from Dragon Age; Mercy from Overwatch; Gaige from Borderlands; Medusa in my original IP Corsair; Barbara in DC Comics / Batman; Lisa, Rachel, and Honoka in Dead or Alive; and I am sure there are even more than I've lost track of over the years.

And so, while Pharmmetra is jammed up, I need to look into Micro projects that don't include any of these characters. And ideally, don't involve either Bordeaux or Datura as well, since they are co-stars to Milly in Pharmmetra, and the ideal double-barrel Micro production has zero overlap. Technically, Bordeaux and Datura have already submitted their audio and so I can work with them again, but Bordeaux is currently fighting off covid and Datura is busy with commissions, and so I am pursuing other ideas first.

As of right now, the Life is Strange project is the best candidate for a second-barrel Micro: the voice actors I use for Max and Chloe last time, Dorn and Baku, aren't involved in any other projects. DVa projects are, of course, also valid candidates, as Silky is my go-to voice for her. And when it comes to DVa projects, I don't have to explore and develop out this specific idea - I could explore adapting the Rabbit.Hole Episode 4 plans into a Micro, which I have mentioned previously.

Then of course, there are other ideas I haven't hitherto explored. InsideIncognita for example reached out to me the other day saying she'd like to do something with Mad Moxxi from Borderlands, though what we haven't figured out yet. Silky also voices my renditions of Resident Evil's Jill. Oolay is a fantastic Miranda from Mass Effect.

The point is, I have options. I just have to figure out what all I could explore with them.

Forever and as always, I would love to hear peoples' thoughts, ideas, and concerns on all of this.

But that's all for now. Until next week everyone--where hopefully, the Frozen video will be released, even in its unfinished state!