Progress Report - July 7, 2026 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

This week's Progress Report is going to be relatively short, but packed with some very optimistic news (in my opinion, anyways). So let's just jump right into it!

So right up top, To Breed & Bond Episode 3 has been rendered out in its final 4k form as of yesterday. It's currently awaiting the final audio mix, of which Tonedeaf and I will be meeting tomorrow evening to discuss and hammer out. Provided that there are no significant changes that are needed to the mix (and there rarely are; he and I are usually on a pretty strong wavelength these days, after having worked together for so long), the episode should have its final audio mix and be ready for it's July 10 Early Access release by this time tomorrow.

Now for the real meat and potatoes good news! Those of you who follow me on Bluesky already saw this, but after being understandably distracted for the past few months dealing with an unexpected death in her family, Milly has returned with a new batch of Mercy audio for Overbreed! And she did an absolutely phenomenal job. You can click here to watch a preview of how well she plays off Moira.

I haven't had a chance to lip-sync her new audio yet, since that audio came in yesterday and I rushed to get it installed, and then record and post that video. Lip-syncing it all is my primary task for this week.

What more, Milly has seemed to get herself fully back on the recording wagon, and is planning to record the next (and last!) narrative sequence this Friday, and is hoping to get it to me before end-of-day next Monday. So, all things going well, next Progress Report may have even more Milly audio to report the arrival of!

Once Milly's Narrative C audio comes in, we finally move on to the dubbing audio. This will be a long process, with Mercy having a whopping 13 sections to record - 1 section for Sequence A, 4 sections for Sequence B, and a staggering 8 sequences for Sequence C. But when she finishes it all, that will be all of the audio recorded!

Cinder is currently in the process of recording section 5 of Sequence C, meaning that she only has 3 more sections to go before all of Sombra's audio is recorded. And as much as I love Milly, I don't think even she can manage to bang out 13 sections in the time it'll take Cinder to record 3. Cinder just has the time advantage here.

Of course, it's not a competition. All of the audio has to get recorded in the end. It doesn't matter who gets it all done first, as long as it all gets done. And boys and girls, we're getting it all done.

And then the last major thing I want to mention in this post is Starsail Bordello, the game idea that I first shared many months ago before getting stumped on its direction, and then recently solved the direction problem and resumed production on, and shared the synopsis of in last week's Progress Report.

I elected to take this past Sunday to sit down and further work on the design for the game, rather than do a livestream as is usual for my Sundays. This is because I am actually feeling extremely confident about Starsail, and think that it is tantalizingly close to becoming the next on-stream project, finally returning to the game development streams.

To announce my taking Sunday off to work on it, I put together this infographic. If you've already read the game description that I included in last week's Progress Report, then there is nothing new here. But I think it's a nice-looking image regardless. And it better be, because I spent like 2 hours just trying to figure out the best way to get all the text on screen. Because fuck me is it a lot of text.

That Sunday ended up be extremely productive, with me building out a ton of the systems for the game. To the point that I came out of that work session even more confident in the game design than I was going into it. And I was already pretty confident.

There is still a fair bit more for me to work out, so I will end up taking this upcoming Sunday off to work on it more. I have a few other systems to work out, and I definitely need to rework the numbers that I just kinda picked at random when writing my notes - but that is just balance tuning, so I'm not going to worry too much about it. Throw it all into a spreadsheet, do a first-pass of tweaking, and then move on.

Really, the biggest thing I need to figure out is actually related to the UI mockup that is this post's preview image. Also, to be clear, it IS just a mockup - it's made in Photoshop, not in any game engine. But to explain that related thing, I need to briefly explain what exactly the UI mockup is showing.

So, real quickly, this is the single menu you will spend your time looking at in the game: it is the minigame of pairing up clients with your ladies, to get the most buck for your bang. This is a brothel-sim game after all. This is the brothel-ing menu.

The core premise of how this minigame works is something that is honestly easier to understand intuitively than it is to explain, but I'll do my best regardless:

Every aspect of the brothel experience has a parameter - physical traits, sex positions, sexual acts, finishers, etc. Every client has a generated preference rating, between 0 (completely uninterested) and 1 (absolutely obsessed with), for every possible parameter in the game. With 0.5 being "no particular feeling one way or the other."

The goal of the minigame is to pick the lady, position, sexual act, and finisher that best matches your client's preferences - you want to get everything as close to 1.0 as possible. The outcome of the pairing between client and lady depends on the overall preference score of the pairing - the better your choices match the client's preference, the better the outcome.

The complication comes from the fact that you don't have access to all of the client's preferences. While the client's preferences are fully defined, you are only shown a select few of them. Any parameters that you choose that you don't know the client's preferences for are just presented as big question-marks. They are literally guesses, and the more unknowns you pick, the more of a wildcard the outcome will be.

This opens the minigame up to tactical play. Say, for example, you know that a client has a very low preference for red-headed bimbos - say, 30% for each. But you have no idea what he feels about petite blondes. Do you take the certain 30% hits and pair him with a red-headed bimbo, or do you roll the dice and hope that his preferences for petite blondes are higher than 30%?

There's more nuance to the minigame, but that is the core. The problem that I need to resolve is progression. I know that I want player progression to be tied to how many client preferences are revealed to the player. As the player progresses through the game, I want them learning more information about the clients, allowing them to make more informed choices - which is counterbalanced by there being more choices to make, opening up an entirely new dimension of play.

I want the general experience to be that you start out effectively just making total guesses, but having plenty of time to think about and make the best guesses. And then by the end-game, as you're chewing your way through the Capitol sector on your way to the Headmistress, you are making tactical choices with near-perfect information, but you have so many choices to make, that it goes from being a guessing game to a triaging game - you have more clients than you do ladies, and they all are very demanding and require near-perfect fits to get positive outcomes, forcing you to make tactical decisions of how to pair your ladies up for the best results.

The issue is that... I don't know how to tie that increase of information to progression. If this were a game where you controlled just a single lady, I would tie it to some sort of charisma skill - as she gets better at flirting with clients, she is able to extract more information out of them, and better learn exactly what her clients like.

But this isn't a game where you control just a single lady. And so things get more... complicated.

That is the biggest problem I need to resolve in the design. It's not the only thing I still need to iron out, but it's the biggest. Hopefully I'll be able to figure it out this upcoming Sunday.

At any rate, that's all for this week's Progress Report! Like I said, relatively short this week.

Breed & Bond Episode 3 releases to Early Access this Friday, July 10!

Until next time, everyone!