Progress & Family Health Update (Patreon)

Hello, everyone.

As per last week's Progress Report, I am still currently at home with my folks, as my dad mends from breaking his back on New Years Day. And as I am sure at least some people are curious to hear how things are going on that front, I have decided to make this post public as well. Which means no lewd images in this post.

I am very excited to share that my dad has had an exceptionally fast recovery, so much so that it's even surprised his primary care doctor.

He is able to walk around entirely unassisted now, not even needing his cane or walker. Though being on his feet too long definitely still exhausts him, and he does need to sit down every few minutes, and needs the cane for longer stints.

He is still slow getting around, but as long as he takes it slow and he doesn't twist, he is able to get around without any discomfort or transient pain. He still has ambient soreness in his back, but it is at such a point that the pain medication he has already been taking to deal with the arthritis in his ankle and elbow is able to manage it.

He actually tested going back to work this past Monday (yesterday as of writing), which managed to work out well. He works in the wet lab at a paper mill, meaning the majority of his job is walking around the site collecting water samples, and then running and processing tests on the computer back at the lab - so not a physically laborious job, with a lot of sitting and no strict time limits (he normally finishes his tasks within 4 hours of his 8-hour shift and has to just kill the remaining 4 hours, so he has plenty of time to take it slower in the next few weeks).

This is all fantastic news. As such, my family decided that I probably don't need to be around to help around the house much longer. I am going to stay the rest of the week, but unless something cataclysmic occurs (and as we've already seen, this is not just an idle hypothetical; cataclysmic things do occur, see why I'm still here in the first place), I am planning to return to my apartment (and back to full working capacity) this weekend.

On the production side of things...

As I mentioned in the last post, I had reached out to Milly Stern, to see about the possibility of reigniting our work on the Pharmmetra Micro Chapter, where she was voicing Mercy in a four-episode segment. Our work together had died off in October, after she kept running into complications and had to focus on putting out metaphorical fires in her life.

She was eager to start the new year out strong though, and - as the preview image for this post suggests - managed to get her audio in to me over this past weekend. I don't have much time to work on lewd things while with my folks - and even less to work on anything with sound, because then I am completely isolated and unable to hear my surroundings - but I have been slowly processing one video an evening. Tonight should see the last episode processed.

As the image also suggests, Milly's audio isn't quite as simple as simply drop-and-forget. It's a bit of a jigsaw puzzle, figuring out what goes where. And that's before you take into account the reality that is listening to, choosing from, and synthesizing together multiple takes. It's a slow, but incredibly satisfying, process. Milly's audio for the first 3 episodes has been absolutely fantastic, with only one line really needed a retake (and one line just flat missing, oops). I am certain her Episode 4 audio will be just as impressive - Milly don't miss, after all.

As such, the Pharmmetra Micro Chapter is back in full production. My current plan is, once my sound designer has finished with the Life is Strange Micro Chapter, to immediately toss the Pharmmetra project at him to start working on. He can work through it while the Life is Strange Micro Chapter moves through its production cycle.

With Pharmmetra back on track and, as such, currently in the same post-blocking stage of production as Life is Strange, that means that I currently have ten episodes of material, each between 1-to-3 minutes in runtime, entering the final stages of production for scheduled releases. If I stick to the plan of releasing an episode every 2 weeks, then that equates to 20 weeks work of content, or FIVE MONTHS of regularly-scheduled releases, all humming along in the background as I chug my way through Overbreed Episode 1.

Even if I were to accelerate the plan to weekly releases, that's still 2 and a half months worth of releases. Though I am not certain about such an acceleration - we will need to see how the two weeks between releases works in practice, before making that judgment call. We're still experimenting here, after all. I've never done a release process like this before.

Beyond Pharmmetra getting unjammed, I have also managed to unjam the Marie/Honoka Micro Series, A Short Love Story. Where Pharmmetra was unjammed at the audio stage, Marie/Honoka was jammed on a technical level. The 7-episode chapter had the first 6 episodes fully assembled and put together on stream, but the pose for the last episode simply wasn't working due to Marie's height. I tried to come up with a few alternate poses, but wasn't happy with any of them, and so I eventually just put the project back on the shelf to come back to later, and focused the streams on Life is Strange character models.

Seeing how I've had nothing but time to think these past few weeks, I returned my attention to the Marie/Honoka project, and managed to come up with a pose that I actually like even better than the original, as well as come up with some more interesting dialogue than what I had originally planned. I also tested and verified the pose does actually work.

All around, I think this new Episode 7 is stronger than the original.

The recent project arrest with Milly also made me reevaluate my voicing choices. I originally wanted Honoka to be voiced by Milly, based on a conversation and an abandoned project we discussed nearly a decade ago, where she did exactly that. But when I put together the "Voices of Milly Stern" image on Bluesky the other day:

It really put into perspective just how many characters Milly has actually voiced for me. And of these characters, most of them are involved in long-term projects. That's all well and good until something goes wrong, like this recent stall that we're only now overcoming.

As such, I am thinking that I am going to reach out to someone else for voicing Honoka. Spread the voice-work out a bit more. I already have a voice actress in mind as a prospective Honoka, but I haven't formally reached out to her yet to confirm anything, so I'm going to be vague as to whom I have in mind. I have a general personal policy of not naming people till they're officially attached to a project.

After the Marie/Honoka Chapter is done, I want to return my attention to the 3-episode Micro Chapter that is an adaptation of my original plans for the Primordium pilot. I have it mostly all written out, with all of the core animation already done as well. It was similarly stalled due to Milly voicing Triss. If Milly is up for tackling it when the time comes, then that'll likely by the next project.

If everything happens to fall out as planned - the 6-episode Life is Strange, the 4-episode Pharmmetra, the 7-episode Marie/Honoka, and the 3-episode Primordium - then that by itself is 20 episodes worth of content that is already mostly produced and relatively quick to shove into the release schedule. That's between 40 weeks (10 months) and 20 weeks (5 months) of regularly-scheduled content, depending on what the final schedule I settle on ends up being.

Beyond all of that, I have ALSO been working on drafting out even more Micro series. These are all just purely in preproduction at this point, and aren't even fully drafted out.

The two most imminent Micro series I have in mind are a Mass Effect series focusing on Chakwas, and a Frozen series serving as both a prequel to Peasantsday and a culmination of my various other loose Frozen ideas.

The Chakwas idea is predicated on the idea of Karin being a bit of a sex goddess in her academy days, which is something she is very humble about and doesn't even bring up in conversation. When one of the other crew come to Chakwas for a sex-related medical issue (think a sore throat from face-fucking), while they try to be coy about it, Chakwas is able to immediately clock it for what it is, and offers some entirely professional advice (relax your throat, use numbing spray, things like that) unsolicited and without judgment. When asked about how Chakwas knows these things, Karin explains her own deviant days (through a flashback with young Chakwas, hence the image) before offering to assist and teach the crew member how to more safely and more effectively engage in the sexual behavior in question. Word quickly spreads about Karin being a sex guru, and soon enough all of the ladies are approaching her for advice, flashbacks, and training on how to be better sex fiends themselves.

The Frozen idea is much more nascent. Right now, it is largely using the framing from my canceled Frozen comic, Whispers of Fate, to contextualize the sisters' slide into depravity. The first chapter is built around the idea of Elsa clandestinely writing a self-insert bondage fantasy story, with the episodes alternating between Elsa in her room writing and a visual demonstration of her Curvy-self-insert smut. I have a rough structure in mind for it, but there's still a lot of writing that needs to be done for it.

So yeah. In conclusion, I have said before I had lots of ideas for Micros. It was just a lot of them were jammed up for various reasons, which has resulted in a real delay. Everything is starting to get unclogged though, and ideally we will soon have an utter glut of content coming out.

And all of these Micro Chapter releases will be done in the background as I make forward progress on Overbreed. Once the flood gate opens, we should be sitting pretty for a long time to come.

That's all for now. Hopefully next week, I will finally be back home and able to work on things in full capacity.

Until then, everyone!