Progress Report - May 20, 2026 (Patreon)

FIVE-TWENTY BLAZ--wait shit wrong month.

I apologize for once again being a day late with the Progress Report. I offer this screencap as justification.

I have also decided, since this is an interim week, to open this Progress Report to all my paying Patrons. My apologies to the free Patrons, but Patreon won't let me post things with lewd previews for non-paying members.

On that note, I ended up spending pretty much the whole of yesterday just putting everything together for Short Love Story Chapter 1, which was not how I had originally planned to spend the day. By the time I finally had everything sent out to prospective voice talent, to get their read on the project and if they're interested, it was already past 1AM.

And so here we are.

But, that delay bears good news! So, let's talk about that, and other things done this week!

I am proud to announce that I have officially gotten VoiceLikeCandy on-board to return as Marie for the project, and I have gotten MimiHung on-board for Honoka. And while I haven't gotten explicit confirmation yet, I know from the last few times I spoke with her (including last week), that InsideIncognita has been looking forward to returning as Helena. To the point I am confident name-dropping her as the cast.

Throw in AspyVA as being on-board for a bit role at the end of the project, and that officially marks A Short Love Story Chapter 1 as fully cast! Over the next few days, I will be cutting together special dub cuts for the individual roles, and full annotated transcripts for the dialogue, to send out to everyone involved.

Zooming back a bit, as you all probably noticed, Love and Degeneracy has officially concluded its first chapter! Episode 6 was release to Early Access this past Friday, with the public release slated for the 29th. It has been an exhilarating experience putting it together. I don't know how you all have felt about it, but I am personally beyond chuffed by the fact I was able to keep up a rigid 2-week release schedule for the past 3 months and change.

As I'm sure you all know, my schedule has been plagued for years now of spending 3, 4, 5, 6 months working on a single project, with no releases in between. And I fucking hate it. It makes me feel terrible, going so long without releases. I've written entire postmortems about it on my blog.

So to actually have regularly scheduled releases, which are also relatively low-stress and low-impact on my overall productivity, is absolutely fantastic for my mental health. I've been feeling better the past few months than I have in years. And, as this post's opening suggests, I have no intention of stopping.

I mentioned at the top how A Short Love Story's casting is underway. I find it pertinent to remind people that To Breed And Bond is the next Micro Chapter to be released. It will be formally entering production on May 29, when the last episode of Love and Degeneracy releases to the wider public. It will be a 4-episode Chapter, with the first episode slated to release on June 12.

I am getting A Short Love Story's recording started now, because I know that recording can be a process that takes a deceptively long time. Even out the gate, one of the voices involved is currently in the middle of a project and won't be free to record until the first week of January, so that's already 2 weeks shot down. With To Breed and Bond being 4 episodes, at an episode every 2 weeks, that gives a minimum 8-week buffer. And we've already chewed away a quarter of that buffer.

It's just one of those things I've learned over the years: recording takes a week, expect it to take a month, get it started two months ahead. And so, here we are.

And then speaking of recording, the latest installment of Overbreed audio came in earlier this week! Cinder's first dub sequence for Sombra came in hot, and as always, she did an absolutely fantastic job. She also really went above and beyond, providing not only three different takes of the dub, but three different approaches and intensities to each section, as well as alternate translations for Sombra's Spanish dirty-talk.

A big reason why I was excited to cast Cinder for Sombra is because she is native Mexican, meaning that she has a deep cultural understanding of the language in a way that I simply don't have. Anyone whose ever actually lived in a second language can tell you that there is a world of difference between what the textbooks teach you and how people actually speak. I have learned more about Mexican culture from these past few weeks working with Cinder than I learned in the year of Mexican Spanish I took in community college - and Cinder is always so eager to share and explain the context and etymology behind her alternate translations, which I absorb like a sponge starving for water.

Beyond Overbreed and the Micro projects, I have largely been taking things easy. The most notable thing to have really happened between the Friday release of the last L&D episode and today was that I returned to working on Juno's outfit on last Sunday's stream. Much like her core suit, I elected to completely rebuild her jacket from scratch, with entirely new mesh and textures.

And I have to say, I'm rather pleased with the results:

In regards to the Sunday streams, I am still trying to figure out a game project for us to pick up. I currently have a project that I have been quietly working away at, but it's a pretty large and ambitious project, and I think we would be better suited doing a smaller project to start with.

I've been revisiting the Starsail Bordello idea, which had gotten extremely bogged down with a lot of mechanical cruft. I've looked into stripping all of that out and returning it back to basics, but I feel like the project is losing a lot of its original identity in doing so. My current feelings on the project can be summed up with this Futurama clip:

"I'll go build my own lunar lander! With blackjack! And hookers! In fact, forget the lunar lander! And the blackjack! Ahh, screw the whole thing..."

So now I'm more or less back at the drawing board for figuring out a game design. I'm still eyeballing either a sex-work simulator (which is what the ambitious project idea is), or a brothel simulator (which is what Starsail Bordello was). There is also the potential for a harem simulator, but I am not strongly considering those right now because those tend to rely very heavily on writing, and right now, I want to focus more on mechanics.

I won't lie when I say I still really like my Rachel Roadtrip idea, but I just know that Life is Strange is an extremely niche lewd fanbase, and that Rachel is a niche character within a niche fanbase - it'd be pretty much a game with an audience of one (me). Which on its own is fine, but the issue is that the primary goal of the streams is to entertain people (I am an entertainer, after all). And I fear that no one will be particularly interested in watching me make a game that no one cares about.

I could of course, and am considering, taking the Rachel Roadtrip idea and generalizing it. The idea of wanting to be a Hollywood star and making a pilgrimage to Los Angeles to achieve it is hardly an idea unique to Rachel. And the concept of a character being an unscrupulous manipulator perfectly willing to trade sex for favors is also not a novel concept. It wouldn't be hard to take the Road 96 hitchhiking mechanics and adapt them to an original character (or in this case, the Dead or Alive characters) in an original hitchhiking story.

Hell, if I really wanted to, I could even adapt the idea to my original character Suki. She is already a loner nomad who regularly trades sex for favors. I never intended for this to be her story, but she would fit the bill perfectly.

I'll keep hacking away at it. We'll see what falls out.

And then on a final note, I want to briefly touch on what my plans for these 2 weeks I am taking off are. Really, they begin and end with the SFM Blender Pipeline. I haven't been able to find time to work on it between L&D and Overbreed, and I am tantalizingly close to being done with it.

Outside of any hitherto undiscovered bugs (which I am sure there will be plenty), I really only have one major thing left to do with it, which is handle root locks. To keep things simple, Source Filmmaker has two styles of locks: bone locks and root locks. Bone locks are locking mesh bones to mesh bones, such as the arm bone of a jacket to the arm bone of a character. I already have those supported in the pipeline.

Root locks are a bit different, in that they are locking an entire object to a bone. Source Filmmaker accomplishes this by creating an entirely fake bone for every object it calls rootTransform, which serves as the bone that the object itself is attached to. That way, Source Filmmaker works entirely with bones. Blender doesn't do this, instead having the object itself its Armature) be something you can lock, separate from its bones.

So I need to figure out the best way to translate Source Filmmaker's fake rootTransform locks into Blender's Armature locks. In theory, it should be a straightforward translation, about as simple as what I just described. But I nevertheless still need to implement it.

In theory though, once I have root locks implemented, I should be able to finally import in that Kate/Victoria pose that started this whole project months back, and finally get that mirror surface working and do that render.

And, of course, the broader ramifications of the SFM Blender Pipeline is that, hypothetically, I could animate scenes in SFM - which I already have over a decade's worth of tools written for - and then import them into Blender for final touches. Beyond rendering in Blender, I can take advantage of the various mechanisms that Blender offers that Source simply doesn't. Such as...

Mirrors (the impetus for this whole project)

Emissive materials that actually emit light (instead of having to fake it)

Proper 360-degree point lights (rather than faking it with multiple spot-lights in the same spot)

Full HDRI lights (think outside environment lights, again instead of having to fake it)

Proper global illumination (instead of, once more, faking it with bounce lights under the floor)

Proper colored specular maps (instead of needing to use hacks in SFM to replicate it, which I personally don't use due to their performance impacts)

Full cloth simulation (for things like dresses or long coats, rather than having to manually animate it by hand)

Full hair simulation with collisions (SFM's jigglebones for hair is pretty good, but it has no collisions, meaning I have to manually correct the hair clipping into the characters' heads)

Fluid simulation (rather than manually animating rigged meshes with transparent materials)

And that all is just off the top of my head.

I've stated before that my eventual goal is to move beyond Source Filmmaker in its entirety, but the SFM Blender Pipeline would be a significant halfway point toward that endeavor. Not to mention that a lot of the ancillary mechanisms I've needed to build for it are also tools that I would directly need in my transition over, such as recreating Source's bodygroups mechanism in Blender, as well as the bone-to-bone locking used in the Pipeline also being the basis of recreating a Blender version of the Outfit Loader.

As I've stated before, my goal is for Overbreed Episode 1 to be the last major project I make in Source Filmmaker. Once it is done, I intend to spend time building up both the tools and the experience to work fully in Blender. During that time, I will still be using SFM for minor projects, such as the biweekly Micro Chapter episodes. But once I am comfortable enough with Blender to start developing Blue Star Episode 4 in it, which is the next major project after Overbreed Episode 1, then I plan to move the Micro Chapters over to Blender as well.

It won't be soon. It won't be fast. But the shift will happen eventually. I've been eyeballing it for a long time now, and have been slowly but consistently working my way toward it. I love Source, it is the GOATed game engine. But its closed-source nature always meant it has a hard upper limit of what I can achieve with it.

And I just really, really want some fucking mirrors.

At any rate, that's all for this week! I don't know what all next week's Progress Report will bring. Maybe some more Overbreed audio, possibly some game design musings. But I wouldn't expect too much more than that.

Oh, and I want to finally finish that main blog post, too. I've had it 90% written for weeks now, but haven't had the time and inclination to sit down and finish its conclusion.

Until next week, everyone!