Progress Report - July 29, 2026 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

I apologize for this Progress Report being a day late. I don't even have the excuse of meaning to do it yesterday but running out of time. I'll be honest with ya'll, I just completely dead-ass forgot about doing it. I'm taking this week off, and apparently my brain decided that includes Patreon posts.

Let's discuss Overbreed, Short Love Story and Primordium, and some other endeavors I've gotten up to over this past week!

So up top, before we get into the meat and potatoes of things, I just want to make it clear that, with the release of Episode 4 of Breed & Bond this past Friday, I am currently taking this whole week off.

If we take a look at the Micros schedule on my latest blog post, we can use it as a guide for drafting out how the next few weeks are going to go.

So while Episode 4 of Breed and Bond was released to early access on July 24, of course, the episode hasn't yet gone public. That will happen on August 7. And then, like with Love & Degeneracy before it, I intend to stitch all the episodes together into a single video to be released on the Films page. That will be released on August 10.

I'll be honest, I have no idea what I am going to title it, seeing how Breed and Bond is also the title of the standalone Short project that started the whole story (and killed the Shorts). Probably just To Breed and Bond: Chapter 1, with a note in the description about the fuckiness in relation to the other video of the same name.

And then of course, as the schedule states, the first episode (technically second episode) of A Short Love Story is slated to release on August 21.

So, with all of that in mind, a brief look over my schedule is looking something like this:

July 24 - July 31 : Taking this week off.

July 31 - August 7 : Using this week to put together the Short Love Story intro sequence. I have decided on have a quick montage that summarizes the entire plot of the series, across 18 shots.

Some series, like To Breed & Bond and Primordium, are written to run indefinitely, with no end in sight. Some series, like Primordium, have an ending written out and is being used to drive the greater plot forward; while other series, like To Breed & Bond, have no greater plot they are working toward, and are effectively just a bunch of slice-of-life episodes, and will simply end when I run out of ideas for it.

By contrast, other series, like Short Love Story and Demonseed, are very intentional stories, with explicit beginnings and ends, and an explicit plot that they run through. They are not meant to run indefinitely, but rather have very definitive ends. They are stories I have planned through and written out.

So with that in mind, I decided that Short Love Story's intro sequence will be a super brief run-through of its entire plot, from beginning to end. Is that a bad move? Maybe. Does it spoil the destination? Certainly. Does that invalidate the series? I don't think so.

For me, stories are about the journey, not the destination. It can be exciting not knowing where a story is going to be sure. But I think that stories can be interesting simply through how they're told, regardless of where they're going. After all, that is the fundamental assumption that prequels are built on: we already know how the plot ends, the original film tells us that. What makes the prequel interesting is how we get there.

As such, I have 18 brief sequences to animate, scenebuild, and light for the intro. Each will only be shown for 2 seconds, but I still have to build them all. That's a lot of work, which is why I am cutting my normally-two-weeks of vacation between projects down to just one week. I already have 6 of the 18 sequences animated, and 3 of those scenebuilt and lit. I expect being able to get the rest of the intro sequence done with the one week I am allotting to it.

August 7 - August 21 : These are the two normal production weeks that I allocate to Micros. Unlike the week I am spending for the Intro, these won't be focused weeks. Like with all my other Micros, the plan is to spend 2 hours a day working on Episode 1*, and then spending the rest of the day focusing on other projects.

*Technically Episode 2, as this first chapter is continuing the 60-second standalone Marie Micro that started this whole Micro project. But for the sake of my sanity, I am going to refer to it as Episode 1, as that 60-second Marie video was written and made completely divorced from the series; the remaining 6 episodes of the Chapter were all tacked onto the end of that 60-second video, months after it was released.

The one exception to this is that the first few days of this 2-week production week are going to be double-stacked: once I spend the 2 hours in a day dedicated to Episode 1, the rest of the day will be spent on finishing the shots of the other episodes required for the series trailer, which will be the public release accompanying the early-access release of Episode 1.

August 21 : The release of Episode 1 of Short Love Story, and the conclusion of this schedule interim breakdown.

So with all of that out of the way, let's briefly discuss Overbreed!

I am still waiting to hear back from Milly in regards to her Sequence A dubbing. If I don't hear from her by end-of-day tonight, I intend to toss her an email and just see what's what. She said she was hoping to get it recorded last Sunday, so I intend to simply ask if she needs more time.

Cinder has kept the ball rolling with her dubs, with her audio for Sequence C-5 having come in over the past week and get processed and installed. She is planning to start recording for Sequence C-6 this weekend, and so while we probably won't get any audio before next week's Progress Report, the next Progress Report will hopefully have yet more Sombra audio delivered.

All of which means that Cinder and I are getting close to the finish line for her part. There are only 2 more dubbing sections left after this current one, in C-7 and C-8. And once C-8 clears, Cinder is officially 100% done, with all of her Sombra audio delivered!

Which would mean then that it's just Milly working through her dubs. And she has a lot of dubs. Beyond the current Sequence A, she has four Sequence B dubs (technically 5, since one of those B-dubs is Mercy quite literally fucking herself, meaning Milly will need to dub both parts - that'll be an interesting sound-design nightmare for me to figure out when we get there, to mitigate it just devolving into disorganized chaos). And then of course, she has the 8 Sequence C dubs, paired up with Cinder.

So, while Cinder finishing her recording in the next few weeks is a massive milestone, we're still a long ways off from being finished with the recording phase. But progress is progress!

Jumping back to Short Love Story briefly, the magnanimous InsideIncognita managed to get all of her Helena audio in for it, which officially marks the conclusion of all the major recording for the Chapter! There are technically a few narrative-only male lines that are needed for Episode 7, but I'm not too bothered by that. I have a friend whose been chomping at the bit to voice as many roles as I can possibly give him whom I am sure will be up for it - and worse comes to absolute worst, ya'll might just get jumpscared with a genuine Aardvark Voice Cameo. I do have a microphone, after all, as part of my streaming setup.

Next up, let's briefly discuss Primordium. While this is not the next immediate Micro project, I feel like it is worth a separate mention, because it is the first Micro chapter that isn't actually core-complete yet.

Recall that, due to production complications, To Breed & Bond and Love & Degeneracy actually got flipped around. To Breed & Bond was originally planned to be the first Micro series released, but it got stalled in production, and during that time, I put together Love & Degeneracy, which ended up getting completed and released first. And while Love & Degeneracy was finishing production, the stall on To Breed & Bond was lifted, and so it, too, managed to get core-completed.

And then, beyond all of that, recall that Short Love Story wasn't originally a Micro project at all - it was actually made as an on-stream project, which I later adapted into a Micro chapter (and later adapted to naturally follow from the 60-second Marie Micro that started the whole Micro system).

All of which means, while Love & Degeneracy was being released in biweekly increments, both the next Chapter To Breed & Bond and the Chapter after it Short Love Story were both core-completed. I didn't have to worry about getting them to a finished state, because they were already there.

That is not the case with Primordium. While I have all of the core animations for the Chapter made, I do not have the core-complete, which means they are not fully blocked out. Episodes 1 and 2 are fully written, and Episode 4 is mostly written, with Episode 3 only half-completed in writing. And only Episode 2 has any blocking done at all on it, being about half-blocked out.

Considering the fact that I have only been able to barely keep up with the 2-week production cycle of just lip-syncing and polishing the episodes as it is, I hold no illusions that I will be able to add writing and blocking onto the tasks to get done in those 2 weeks. And so, realistically, that means I need to get the episodes of Primordium fully written and blocked out before the production cycle for it begins.

I've put a lot of thought into it over the past few weeks, as I was working on the last two episodes of To Breed & Bond. And I've decided that the approach I want to take is throwing that work into the "other things" part of the Micro schedule.

Which is to say, after I finish the allocated 2 hours of work on the current episode of Short Love Story, I am going to throw "finish Primordium" into the same pile of work as Overbreed. And, since Primordium actually has a very real deadline ahead of it, I am going to prioritize finishing it first.

All of which is to say, I probably won't be making any outward progress on Overbreed for at least the first few days of Short Love Story's production cycle - the time I would normally allocate to working on Overbreed, will instead be dedicated to Primordium.

Now, ideally, it won't take me more than a week to get Primordium core-complete. Recall that one of the original design philosophies of the Micros was that a given episode would only take 2 days to get core complete: 1 day to build the core animations (sex and finisher), and 1 day to block out the episode. Throw in a day for writing, and ideally, each episode of Primordium will only take at most 3 days.

Given how most of the episodes are already at some state of partial completion, I expect that 7 days is just about right for getting them all core-complete. So it's only a minor diversion from Overbreed.

On the subject of Episode 4 now being mostly written, that is actually where this Progress Report's preview image comes from. Specifically, I sat down and quickly wrote and blocked out a first-draft of the ending of Episode 4, which is narratively setting up the rest of the series.

As it is right now, I need to aggressively edit it down. The ending by itself is currently 2:14, which is longer than most entire Episodes. I want to get it down to, at minimum, 1 minute. Ideally, I want it to be no longer than 30 seconds. I have some ideas of things I can cut to speed it up, but I think I will have to do some fundamental rewriting if I want to hit that ambitious 30-second target.

With that being said, you can click here to watch the current draft of the Episode 4 ending. I'd love to get peoples' thoughts on it, what all they'd like to see stay, what all they think can go.

And then to end this post, I want to quickly touch on two unrelated elements. The first is the Starsail Bordello notes. I haven't migrated anything more over since the last post, and I haven't publicly released the notes yet either. I plan to remedy the latter tomorrow, and I don't know when I may do some of the former later this week, depending on how the second thing I want to discuss goes.

I originally planned to spend basically all of next week focusing on Starsail Bordello, but that was before I decided on the monolithic 18-animation montage sequence for Short Love Story's intro sequence. If I happen to get that done faster than I expected, then I will probably work on Starsail Bordello during that time. Otherwise, it's just getting relegated back to non-stream Sundays. It sucks, but there are only so many days in the week.

And then secondly, I would like everyone to give a brief hello to the latest semi-original character, Iris!

As you all probably know, I have been struggling through figuring out a good Vault Liz project for a while. I've recently come across an idea I actually quite like and think will work well. However, I got some entirely valid pushback on the idea, with people not liking it characterizing Liz as being an airhead, feeling it strayed too far from both her canon characterization, and her Liziverse characterization.

Which, to be totally fair, I was also feeling. The Vault Liz ideas weren't really Vault Liz ideas, they were Vault Liz ideas, if that makes any sense. Plus, the existence of Vault Liz complicates the Liziverse continuity - where Liziverse is built around the idea of Liz bouncing around several different timelines and realities (in every sense of the phrase "bouncing"), Vault Liz is all about Liz being in a single continuity. They just aren't really that compatible.

And so, I started looking into building an original Vault character to take Liz's place in my Vault Liz ideas. After going through all of my available resources, I finally settled on Iris from Ascendant One, the Nexon-created MOBA that was canceled only a few days into its first public beta, and which my personal conspiracy theory insists was later recycled into the Nexon-owned game First Descendant.

Just to head off any inevitable comparisons, she is not influenced by Lucy from the Fallout show. What made me finally decide on using Iris as a base for the Legally-Distinct Vault Liz was the fact that I think she looks bubbly and fun - which is exactly the personality that she is written to have.

More specifically, Vault Iris is written to be relentlessly positive and upbeat, while also being utterly incompetent. She is without fail the first person to jump in and volunteer to do anything, and she will absolutely fuck it up in the process. She is the living embodiment of "it's the thought that counts" - she can't do anything right, but by Jove that won't stop her from trying. She only ever sees the very best in people, and can effortlessly point out the silver lining in any situation, no matter how dire it may be. It is all but impossible to dampen her spirits, and the only way to get her down is to physically pin her down and breed her.

Her truly unique personality trait, however, is how she channels that weaponized optimism and naivety: she's like a bonobo, in that her first solution to any and every situation is sex. No matter how wildly inappropriate or out of place it may be, sex is always her first suggestion. A particularly stubborn bolt is stuck and won't break loose? Maybe sex will help you relax and tackle getting the bolt unstuck while refreshed and rejuvenated. She just absolutely loves sex.

I'm sure you don't have to think terribly hard as to think of all the possible hijinks that can get her into (and out of).

As things are right now, Iris isn't quite ready for a proper public reveal. Her suit has a fair bit of work that needs to be done - before I can even begin making the various bodygroups for it, I need to split the mesh up into different materials. You may notice that her yellow reflectors have a blue reflection, which doesn't make sense. And her leather bracers have a blue silk shine, which is similarly incorrect.

Iris right now is my current relaxation project, which is to say, I'm just working on her as I feel like it. Model work is my zen activity, I find it very relaxing. I'm already very happy with how she's come along, and I am hoping to get her presentable by this upcoming Friday.

I don't know when I will get around to finally doing the Vault Liz Iris Micro project, other than 2028 at the earliest, considering how both all of 2026 and 2027 are completely scheduled out. I've been having some idle musings of maybe 2028 can be the year of the semi-OC, of original characters in established IPs. Iris in Fallout, Meeri and Tela in Star Wars. I haven't gotten any others right now, but I'm sure I could come up with more.

Of course, I'm not thinking too hard on 2028 right now. It's both a hella long ways out now, and I have a lot of other series I want to return to. Love & Degeneracy and Breed & Bond are both, in my opinion, high-priority series. And of course, by the time 2028 rolls around, there will be six other series introduced, of which some will undoubtedly end up doing better than others.

So there's a lot to consider for 2028, and we're a long ways away from that.

But regardless!

That's all I have for you all this week! Until next time, everyone!