Progress Report - January 27, 2026 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

For today's Progress Report, I have not a lot to speak on any one thing, but a lot of things to speak on! Overbreed, Love and Degeneracy, Short Love Story, the Micro structure overall, and even some Blue Star!

Let's just jump right in with Overbreed!

Earlier this past week, I made a bleet on Bluesky announcing that Overbreed has officially breached the one-hour mark! As of the time of that post, the runtime had reached 62 minutes.

That was posted on Friday. I was hoping to have a bit more progress made since then, but I ended up losing Monday to working on an endless cavalcade of spot-renders for Love and Degeneracy (see the next section). What started out as "I'll spend an hour on L&D and then work on Overbreed" turned into "well apparently I'm spending 12 hours on L&D." It was a long day.

Nevertheless, progress continues to churn at a respectable rate. As of writing today, I currently have 7.5 minutes of animation built for Sequence B. This corresponds to the 7-minute mark of the storyboard, which means that we're pretty much right on target, taking into account the changed pose I made from the storyboard near the beginning of the sequence.

Sequence B rolls for 15 minutes in the storyboard, which means that we are almost exactly halfway through blocking out Sequence B's animations. Seeing how close I've been able to keep the runtimes between the animation and storyboard, I am confident that the sequence will end up running the same 15-minute runtime as the storyboard, give or take a minute.

I'm going to be generous and say I have another 10 minutes worth of animation to build in Sequence B, which would then put the final runtime at the 72-minute mark. Which is perfectly in-line with the various earlier predictions I've made, suggesting the raw animation will probably run up against the 75-minute mark.

Of course, what the final runtime will end up being once audio, VFX, and post-processing comes into play, who can say. But I think the 70-to-75-minute mark is still a pretty safe estimation to make.

Love and Degeneracy

As I mentioned above, I ended up burning all of Monday on Love and Degeneracy, which was absolutely not my plan at the time.

More specifically, I spent it doing high-quality 720p renders of the shots used in the chapter preview (excerpted in the above clip), to make sure the lighting looked good. This preview is the first viewing of both this specific chapter and the series as a whole, so I want to make sure it looks as good as I can reasonably get it.

Despite only being about 75 seconds of animation, it ended up taking near two hours to render them all out. Once. And then I found various errors in the renders that I had to correct and rerender. And then since I had so much time waiting for the renders, I ended up rigging Chloe's bed, so that it can properly bounce as needed.

Similarly, there was just a million little things I kept tuning between all of the rerenders of individual shots. Before you know it, "I'll spend one hour working on it" turned it "I'll spend two hours rendering it" before finally "jesus christ did I really spend 12 hours on this?"

BUT! I am supremely happy with how it all turned out. I still need to bake in the jigglebones, but otherwise, I am calling this teaser done as far as visuals go. And you can watch it right now by clicking here! And before you ask, yes, the release dates at the end are definitely final. January 99 2099 is gonna be a busy day.

Note that the audio is NOT finished on the teaser yet. There is no unique audio to it (as evidenced by the wholly silent series teaser at the beginning), and the audio in the chapter teaser is the raw unmixed audio, with zero additional sound design.

I haven't heard back from my sound designer yet. He was hoping to be ready by this past Sunday. I am hoping to get ahold of him either today or tomorrow and just see what's what.

I'm looking forward to hearing peoples' thoughts on it all. The series teaser, the chapter teaser, the animations themselves, the greater narrative context behind it all, how it all looks, how people are feeling about it. If you've got any thoughts, please don't hesitate to share them down in the comments.

Short Love Story

I have also been making some progress on the last episode of the Marie/Honoka project, the first chapter of Short Love Story.

This was a project that was originally done on-stream, but I ran into technical difficulties with the planned pose for episode 7, and the backup poses didn't work much better. I ended up putting the project on pause and shifted to working on the Life is Strange models on-stream instead.

Over the past few weeks, I pulled the project out of the freezer, with a fresh idea of both the pose and the narrative. I mentioned it in a previous Progress Report, but since then I have made some progress on actually building the episode out.

While I only have about half of the episode blocked out, I do have it fully written out, and mostly animated. So it's just a matter of chewing through the screenplay and laying it out. The only major animation left to do is the climax - beyond that, it's just framing shots and blocking out unique animations, which generally goes much faster than blocking out core animations.

Now that I have the Love and Degeneracy teaser pretty much where I want it, I am going to spend my Micro time allocations on getting this series ready for dubbing, and start putting into motion all the machinery for that.

Realistically, that means finishing up this episode's blocking, rendering out all of the remaining 6 episodes (episode 1 was technically released a long while ago; it wasn't originally intended to be part of a larger series, but it is being retroactively grandfathered in as the first episode of this chapter), and then reaching out to all of the voices.

I actually spoke with Innie last week and casually brought up the project, and she was very excited at the idea of voicing Helena again. Of course, that was an informal conversation, so it isn't a hard commitment. I am hoping to iron that out and lock it in before next week's Progress Report.

Similarly, I incidentally talked with Candy just this past Saturday, entirely on accident. Saturday afternoons, I stream an hour or two of games on my Discord, and Candy just so happened to wander in to say hello. We didn't talk business, but it was nice of her to just pop in and say hi - especially since this was the first time in over three years she popped into the server. So I am optimistic that, if she has the time to pop into a random game stream in a server she never visits, that she'll be up for returning for Marie.

I also have a prospective voice in mind for Honoka. I have classically eyed Milly for voicing Honoka, because she voiced Honoka in a project prototype that never went anywhere near a decade ago. But the recent schedule issues with Milly, and the consequence reflection of just how many characters she voices for me, made me reevaluate that idea. I still have DOA characters that I think Milly is a great voice for, such as Lisa Hamilton, but I think I want to spread the voice roles out a bit more. I have not spoken to this prospective Honoka voice yet, so I am not going to drop any names here, but I have worked with her before and I am confident that Honoka would be well within her range. It's mostly a matter of her interest and schedule.

The Micro Horizon

So with all of that in mind, let's take a step back and get an eagles-eye view of what exactly the landscape is looking like right now, in regards to Micros.

As of writing, I have four Micro episodes that are currently in various stages of production. They are, from most-finished to least-finished, the following:

Love and Degeneracy (Life is Strange) - Fully written, 6 of 6 episodes animated, fully voiced, currently in sound design

To Breed And Bond (Pharmmetra) - Fully written, 4 of 4 episodes animated, fully voiced, waiting for sound design

A Short Love Story (Marie / Honoka) - Fully written, 6 of 7 episodes animated, not voiced yet

Primordium (Witcher) - 2 of 3 episodes written, core animations blocked, 2 of 3 episodes fully animated, not voiced

As a quick observation, before continuing this train of thought, it only now occurs to me that 3 of these 4 projects are all romance stories (in their own perverted ways). Huh. That... was not intentional. ANYWAYS MOVING ON.

The Chapters will be released in this same order. They will all follow the same schedule that I have described a few times now in previous Progress Reports: a public release of the teaser for the chapter as an "Episode 0", then a public release for a new episode released every 2 weeks, with the Early Access tier getting each episode early (Episode 1 alongside the teaser's public release, Episode 2 alongside Episode 1's public release, etc) and the 2160p Tier getting an unpolished but fully voiced release of the entire chapter alongside the Episode 1 public release.

I have voiced concern about the 2-week period being too long between episodes, and noted that we'd have to just see how it plays out in practice. After the past week spent detailing just the teaser, I am now supremely confident that 2 weeks is the minimum time I need between episode releases. It honestly may not be enough.

This is largely because I have to remember that I am building Micros differently than the Short / Long videos of old. Previously, with the Short-Long Cycle, I would spend 8 hours at a time working on the current video, be it a Short video or a Long video. Just full work hours, day in and day out, for weeks at a time.

The Micros, however, are being built fundamentally differently: I only allot myself 2 hours a day to work on the Micros. I explicitly set an egg timer for 2 hours. The remaining 6 hours of the work day are dedicated to working on Overbreed.

As such, I am effectively doing a quarter of the work in a given week. What would normally take me 3 days to detail balloons up to taking 12 days. Where it'd take me just a day to lip-sync previously, suddenly that explodes up to half a week.

Again, we'll have to see how things fall out in practice. But that is the current shape of things, on the Micro department.

But what about on the Long department?

Blue Star

The other day, I had an AMA come in through my website asking what the plot for Blue Star Episode 4 will be. I answered it pretty readily, but it did get me thinking about digging up my old notes. I was impressed I was able to recall as much as I did, but my memory is notoriously shit and imperfect, while notes - notes are forever.

So I ended up digging up the latest revision of my Blue Star plot outline, from 2021. Reading the notes for Episode 4, I was actually pretty close. There were a few minor plot deviations between what I recalled and what I had actually written down. A few of the ones I recalled I liked better, a few of what I had written I liked better.

So I decided to spin off a new revision of the outline, making a few changes here and there. Broad strokes, the plot has remained unchanged from the 2021 revision - to be honest, I forgot just how good of a story I had written for Blue Star. I've made a few minor tweaks to episodes, merged two episodes into one (leaving a vacancy I still need to fill), and most importantly massively expanded the Intermission episodes.

The Intermission episodes were originally just the Director monologuing, backfilling in the history and mission of the Blue Star Organization, while also discussing Miranda's ancillary role in the story, without any actual action in them. That's why they were originally called intermissions.

I am going to discuss some details from the plot, which naturally means that there will be spoilers. In reality, it's going to take fucking decades for me to get animating this story, but if you're someone who is sensitive to spoilers regardless, consider yourself duly warned.

I decided to keep the monologuing basically unchanged, but added B-plots to both intermissions. The A-plots now focus around Miranda (as before), while the new B-plots focus around Femshep. I also pushed the second Intermission to also be in the past, alongside the first Intermission, to provide symmetry in the B-plots: the first Intermission, An Arrangement Begun, focuses on Shepard being first recruited into the Organization, while the second Intermission, An Arrangement Ended, focuses on Shepard leaving the Organization to join the Systems Alliance.

More important than adding a second plot and pushing the timeline around a bit, though, I have added full sex sequences to both Intermissions, split between Shepard and Miranda in each Intermission. They are now fully-formed episodes unto themselves, and basically serve as a two-part prequel that is snapped into the spaces between seasons.

Speaking of seasons, Season 1 is fully written out (and has been written out all the way back in the 2021 revision). Season 2's plot is fully written out, though there are a few voids in the sex sequences. Season 2 doubles the character roster, adding Tali and Aria as main characters, splitting episodes alongside Liara and Jack, and as such while they technically have the same number of episodes, with 5 episodes per season, Season 2 has effectively twice as many sex sequences to figure out.

Season 3 remains largely a mystery. I have several plot threads that I intend to follow up with and resolve in Season 3, and I have a vague idea of the general direction I want the season to go. For example, I know that I want Season 3 to have the war between Blue Star and Cerberus, that is foreshadowed in Intermission 2, be a constant backdrop to the plot. I know I want Jack and Liara to reunite and work together through most of Season 3 (lots of FFM threesome configurations). I know I want Aria to come crashing in with her own army from Omega and break the stalemate between Blue Star and Cerberus, with her personally doming the Director in a big finale setpiece, before Liara and Jack fuck each others' brains out in a mirror of the first episode (with Liara in control this time). And I know I want to give Miranda a more direct role in the season, as a follow-up to her new roles in the Intermissions, and to give her an antisymmetric narrative to Jack and Liara.

I just don't know what form all of this takes. I don't know what the individual plot beats are, the order they come in, the parties involved. And I don't know what the sex scenes are, who they are with, what gimmicks they roll to keep unique and interesting. It's all still very much in the air, but I am not too bothered by it right now.

We're not even through Season 1 yet. I have plenty of time before I need to start battening down the hatches for Season 3.

If you are curious, I have uploaded a PDF of the current revision of the Blue Star outline to my website. You can click here to view it. Do be aware that there are still a lot of vacancies, as I've mentioned. This is not a comprehensive outline. And, of course, things are subject to change. But honestly, I'm pretty happy with the story as it stands.

Conclusion

And that's it for this week! I hope you all enjoyed this breakdown of how things have been going on my end for the past week. I hope you're all excited to see all this progress being made, and are as excited as I am for the imminent rolling releases of the Micros.

And I hope you all are as intrigued and compelled by the story I've written for Blue Star and shared here. It's gonna take us a while to get there. But I hope this inspires some confidence in the destination, if not the journey.

Until next week, everyone!