Progress Report - February 10, 2026 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

This past week has been a real milestone! The blocking for Overbreed Episode 1 is finished!

With what little VFX shots and transitions the project uses, the final runtime clocks in at one hour and 8 minutes, or 68 minutes. Just a hair lower than the 70-to-75-minute projection that I've been eyeballing, and it awkwardly lands in between the two Funny Numbers - which in itself makes it a Funny Number, if you ask me. One minute more, and it'd be 69 minutes long - and one minute less, it'd be 67 minutes long.

And you can watch the whole blocked video by clicking here, in all Funny Number 68 minutes of glory.

I am still in the process of reviewing the project in totality, taking notes along the way. I've gotten about halfway through the video so far, with a dozen notes of things to change. Most of them are minor - change a line of dialogue here, fix a typo there - with just a few actual animation changes needed. And even those animation changes so far have been minor.

As such, the version you can watch above is before any of those changes have been made. So you'll find a few errors, like the subtitle formatting error 3.5 minutes in, for example. But even still, I think it's fair to say that this represents probably 98% of the intended final vision. Which means, for better and for worse, what you see here is roughly what you can expect in the final version, in terms of narrative, action, and pacing.

Hopefully you all enjoy the preview, and as always, I would absolutely love to hear any and all thoughts and opinions, positive and negative. I am especially receptive to any suggestions for the Swiss German and Mexican Spanish used throughout, but I would love to hear anything else people have to say, too. Similarly, if you find any errors in the video - either in the text, or in the animation itself - I would love to hear about them, so I can fix them. I'd rather 10 people report the same problem that I fix, than 0 people report a problem that I miss.

On the note of the Swiss German and Mexican Spanish, this is also before I have had any native speakers look through the screenplay and offer more natural translations. It's all machine translations right now, so I apologize for any native speakers who get confused and/or offended by them.

With the blocking done, I wouldn't expect to see too much visual progress done in the next few weeks. As I detailed last week, the immediate next thing to do is for me to watch through the whole video and correct any errors I come across. After that, I need to export out some human-friendly transcripts of the whole video, and then find a pair of native speakers for Swiss German and Mexican Spanish to go through it all and offer natural translations to counter the machine translations.

Once I have all of the translations finalized and locked in, the next thing to do is lock in the full voice cast. I can probably get Milly started recording her non-sex dialogue, since I know she's already locked in and ready to go. Beyond her, I will need to get the rest of the gears turning.

And then I can't really do much of anything with Overbreed until the audio starts coming in. I intend to handle the audio in the same logical segments as the video, with the three narratives and three sequences.

Furthermore, I intend to tackle the narratives first, since those are both a lot shorter and a lot less demanding on voice talent to record. As each narrative segment comes in, I can start processing them and getting them installed. After all of them are done, it goes onto the much more intensive dubbing sequences, during which time I can work on lip-syncing and detailing the narrative sequences.

Even with that parallel workflow, it is very likely that I will stall out and have all of the narrative segments basically finished before all of the dub audio is even recorded, let alone sent in and processed. But that's just the nature of the beast.

So yeah, I wouldn't expect any sizeable Overbreed updates for the rest of the month. At most, I might have formal announcements of all the voice casts, but don't expect any new video WIPs as I transition from the blocking phase into the audio phase.

Love & Degeneracy

Beyond Overbreed, the first episode of the Life is Strange Micro chapter, Love & Degeneracy, is finished and ready for its final 4K render. Which leads into a problem that I've been alluding to over the past few Progress Reports, but haven't been too concerned about as I work away at it:

My sound designer has disappeared on me again.

I love him as a person, and love working with him professionally, but I won't lie when I say that his habit of disappearing on me for weeks at a time - in the middle of a project - is starting to grow old. As those who have been around for a while know, this isn't the first time he's disappeared on me and jammed up a project. The last Pharmmetra video was stalled for weeks as he disappeared without a trace, before I finally gave up waiting for him and did all the audio work myself, to middling results.

I'm not going to let my sound designer stall this project, too. The Micros schedule has already been massively derailed, when Milly disappeared on me during the Pharmmetra Micro chapter, resulting in L&D's manifestation in the first place. That train finally got put back on the tracks, and I'm not going to let my sound designer disappearing on me derail it again. I've already dropped him a line saying that if I don't hear back from him by this time next week, I'm going to find someone else to do the work.

That being said, I am going to utilize the time between now and however that falls out to work on other projects in the backburner. The other week, I posted a bleet about a new animation layer system I put together for Source Filmmaker. It's not quite finished yet - I want to add animation layers for the IK chains that drive the hands and feet, which I'm not quite sure how to pull off, and need to do more research on.

And far more importantly, I need to figure out a way to sidegrade existing animations onto the animation system. Sequence C of Overbreed, which was the first thing animated and as such is the oldest animation in the project, was built years before even the one-layer animation system. It's all built on raw metal, which even for the raw blocking was a struggle at times. And my preferred constructive approach to animation demands four layers, when currently I can't even add one.

I intend to split my free Micros time between exploring that, and returning more focused attention to the space brothel game. I've been tinkering away at it on and off over the past few weeks, but I'd like to sit down and really focus on it, collecting all the loose notes and ideas and start coalescing them into a coherent design.

I like a lot of the high-level ideas for it, but I want to take time to focus on fleshing out the mechanics of it all. Maybe even build a spreadsheet prototype of the game - if you can play a game in Excel and it's actually fun, then you have a very strong foundation for adapting the mechanics into a fully 3D space.

At any rate, that's all for now! Again, I would love to hear any feedback people have on the Overbreed Episode 1 blocking!

Until next week, everyone!