Progress Report - April 28, 2026 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

I swear these weeks keep getting shorter. At any rate, let's discuss Overbreed, Love and Degeneracy, and other endeavors. This week's preview image already hints at one of the other endeavors.

So first things first, audio continues to come in and get processed for Overbreed. I mentioned last week how my intentions to animate Moira's dialogue animation were interrupted by Milly sending in her first batch of dialogue audio, while Cinder recovers from an infection.

Amusingly, my intentions to animate Moira's dialogue this week were interrupted by Cinder sending in her first batch of dialogue audio. She does an absolutely fantastic job as Sombra, and brought so much energy to the project that it was difficult for me to have to pare down each line to just one choice.

More importantly though, now that I have both Sombra's first batch of lines and Mercy's first batch of lines, I was able to actually see how they line up together in conversation, and adjust the timings of the shots. And boy howdy did I have to adjust the timings. I think there were only 3 shots whose timings I didn't need to tweak. Everything else, the shots were either a second too short, or a few seconds too long.

After everything was adjusted, the first narrative sequence ended up changing by a whopping... two whole seconds. Shorter, to be precise. In the grand scheme of things, with over an hour of total runtime, I don't think those two seconds will be missed.

At any rate, to celebrate the fact, here is a little excerpt of Sombra and Mercy from Narrative A. It's not animated yet, not even lip-sync, but the voice acting--as always--does all the lifting anyways.

I really wish I could directly embed the video into the post, but unfortunately, you'll have to click here to watch it.

Milly had aspirations of getting the next batch of audio in before end-of-day on Monday, though that didn't pan out. She said that she will be out of town this week, so I'm not going to bother poking her about it till next Monday end-of-day. At the same time, Cinder has collected all the material for recording her next batch of audio, and will hopefully manage to get through it sometime this upcoming week.

In the meantime, I plan to sit through and lip-sync everything that I have so far. I want to have this entire Narrative A sequence lip-synced by next week, hopefully before the next batch of audio comes in.

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Next up, Love and Degeneracy. Last week, I mentioned how I had lost two days worth of allotted work-time on L&D, which had really jammed up the schedule, with one day ending up basically needing to pull a double shift to get all the allotted work-time in and clear the jam.

I also mentioned having aspirations to have all of the core work done by Friday, with an implicit (and oddly unstated, not sure why) goal of having the final 4k render underway by end-of-day Sunday.

I am very excited to report that, against all odds, both of those objectives were actually achieved. The schedule has been unjammed, and I managed to get the final 4k render for Love and Degeneracy Episode 5 going Sunday evening into Monday afternoon.

I then proceeded to have to the final 4k render going again Monday morning into this afternoon. It only finished rendering a few hours ago.

Yeah, I didn't realize until after the render had finished that I completely forgot to enable the jigglebones. And you know I gotta have the ladies all nice jiggly. It's critically important to the intended experience!

Also fun fact! While writing this post and going to grab that gif above, I realized I have to do a third partial rerender! Turned out that, when fixing a mesh overlap in the wall behind Chloe's dresser in the second shot, I somehow applied the window texture to the wall behind Max in the gif. So it's currently actively rerendering as I write this post. Isn't that neat?!

At any rate, Episode 5 is done on my end, which frees up the rest of this week's allotted time for exploring other things. Tonedeaf was hoping to get his first draft of the sound design to me by end-of-day yesterday, but that never transpired. I am hoping he'll be ready to send it tomorrow morning. We'll see how things play out.

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And then finally, on the topic of other endeavors, I suppose I might as well address the huge dark-elf tiddies in the room.

Last week, I mentioned how I was putting together posters for a visual timeline of both this year's and next year's Micro Chapters. I noted how I wanted 2027 to be "the Year of the Original Character," but I couldn't figure out what the fourth original IP should be.

In the days after writing that Progress Report, the answering became blindingly obvious to me: Fallen Throne.

It has been on the order of 10 years since Queen Nualia was really given much attention. I briefly revisited her in 2020, with a model rebuild, a new outfit, and a new chocolate skintone. But that didn't last long, and truthfully, I wasn't terribly happy with any of it.

And so, it only felt fitting to return to the Queen in the year 2026, 10 years after her initial 2016 reveal, and to return to the basics. Starring yet another model rebuild, absorbing in the latest of the technical achievements I have made over the decade, as well as the most recent rebuild of the DOAFantasy body. Not only did it feel appropriate, given the Queen the comically huge tits she has always demanded, but it also doubles as giving her outfit compatibility with the other DOAFantasy P5 characters. Not that she really needs it, but, whatever, it doesn't hurt.

And speaking of outfits, just as I returned to her original blueberry skintone, I also returned to her original outfit design. But rather than just do a refitting of the actual outfit, the Thalmor Viceroy modded outfit for Skyrim, I decided to instead build her a new outfit that pulls heavily from that Viceroy outfit's design, but with some changes that I think better fit Nualia's intentions.

And what more, for some reason, I elected to build the whole outfit entirely from scratch. Wholly original mesh, wholly original textures, wholly original UVs. I am not sure what exactly compelled me to do this, but I am supremely satisfied with the results.

If you are curious, I made a thread on Bluesky with a complete breakdown of each individual outfit piece and how it was made. You can read that thread by clicking the link in the previous sentence.

In the days after that thread, I since decided to tackle her boots. They were a particularly interesting challenge, and I will be the first to admit that--in retrospect--I definitely made a few wrong decisions in putting it together. But for having no idea what I was doing, I am overall pretty happy with how it came out, topologically.

I haven't unwrapped or textured them yet (obviously), and truthfully I have no idea what I want to do for their textures. But all of that will be figured out in good time.

On the topic of figuring things out, despite the Fallen Throne chapter being 1-to-2 years out (depending on the final order of the 2026 chapters) I have already settled on its structure: it will be six episodes, with two episodes dedicated to each of the three main characters of Fallen Throne's story: the Queen herself; her rebellious daughter Caldreth; and Muheri the traitorous cleric who kickstarts the whole greater plot.

Figuring out the individual episodes won't be terribly difficult. The hard part will be figuring out how to best establish world-building while still keeping focus on the sexy times, while operating within the constraints of the Micro Episodes. There is a lot of world-building to establish in Fallen Throne, and that isn't even beginning to set up the actual story.

Just as a brief example of what exactly I am contending with, here is an excerpt from a quick first draft of Nualia's first episode. This sequence currently occurs after Nualia has secured (in exactly the way you expect her to secure) a trade arrangement with a petty human baron:

BARON: "I've heard tales of the grandeur of the last free city of the elves, but they truly do it no justice."

NUALIA: "An insult wrapped in compliment is no less an insult."

BARON: "Beg pardon? Have my words offended your majesty?"

NUALIA: "Less your words, more the reality they reflect."

BARON: "I am afraid I don't follow."

NUALIA: "Pray tell me, whatever happened to my sisters? Where are THEIR so-called 'free cities'?"

BARON: "Please, my fair queen. Let us not dwell on the injustices of the past. You know well the communion the Federated States have with our local Elvish population."

NUALIA: "Yes, and what of the great majestic cities my sisters are allowed to build within the fenced pens your great King Amidalan grant them reservation?"

BARON: "Barmidos."

NUALIA: "What?"

BARON: "King Amidalan died nearly fifty years ago, your majesty. His grandson, Barmidos, sits the throne now."

NUALIA: "I forget how short your human lives are. Has King Barmidos granted my sisters sovereignty over their lands, as his grandfather lorded over them, then?"

BARON: "No, your majesty."

NUALIA: "Curious. And yet you stand here before me, speaking of freedom as if a right granted by gods, and not stolen by men."

And this is me attempting to be brief and concise. Like I said, there's a lot to set up.

But, as I also said, this is at minimum 1 year out, as far as 2 years out. So I have plenty of time to figure it out.

As a final note, I am still working through that timeline. And I am also still working through the blog post. Nothing particular to note there. These things just take time, especially with everything else I work on - they are the bottom of the totem-pole of priorities.

At any rate, that's all for now. This Friday is scheduled to see the early-access release of Love and Degeneracy Episode 5, with the public release of Episode 4. Beyond that, we keep on keeping on.

Until next week, everyone!