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Progress Report - March 26, 2021
🕑 Added 2021-03-27 06:54:25 +0000 UTCHello, everyone!
Been a busy week. (Aren't they all?)
Data Collection
Got another 5 pages edited since last week, halfway through editing page 23. Final stretch now. I might actually manage to finish editing all of the pages by next Friday - if not, I'll be within spitting distance.
Then it's a matter of finalizing and compositing all of the panels. That's... that's another story altogether. But at least the editing is almost done.
Layout Generator
Got a good chunk of work done on the Layout Generator tool I use for putting the comics together. Most importantly, I've fixed a problem where panels would look with the wrong cropping - it wasn't critical, because the editor had the right cropping, so you just had to open each panel and immediately save to get the cropping right - but when dealing with 170 panels, that gets cumbersome.
I've also fixed a handful of start-up issues with the program. Loading this comic used to lock up the program for a good 30 seconds. Now it doesn't lock up, and it loads everything in dynamically rather than waiting for it all to load before giving control back to the user. You can even edit panels and pages while they load in, though that's at your own risk - it pointedly ignores errors (rather than crashing) and just returns garbage data when it runs into them, so you can get... odd results, if you try to edit things that aren't fully loaded in yet. But you can do it.
I am hoping to release the latest version of the Layout Generator in a few days, but before I do that I have to rewrite the editor. Hilariously, where before the images loaded in wrong but the editor was correct, now the images load in correct but the editor is wrong. This is because the editor and the comic pages actually use 2 different systems for cropping, with the comic pages system being newer. I need to update the editor to use it - and I am just going to rewrite the whole fucking thing, because it had so many errors in it I literally had to make an "oopsie woopsie I made an uwu fucky wucky please reset everything" button just to be able to finish this comic.
Witcher Storyboard
Not sure if I've mentioned it before, but I am putting together a storyboard for a Witcher project mini-series. In brief, it is a single evening of Triss, Yennefer, and Ciri killing time while Geralt goes on an epic winding quest in true Witcher 3 fashion.
This project is, no joke, a 9-part miniseries. When you throw in magic, at-will futa, bodymorph, and throwaway gimmicks, it turns out there are a LOT of unique ways to get three people to fuck each others' brains out.
I've currently got the storyboard for the first 5 parts finished. I'm only working it on evenings when I'm not too tired. Only got to work on it for maybe 3 hours total this past week. Been working on this since February 27, so about a month now, just quietly tinkering away at it.
Each chapter is only 6-8 panels per storyboard.
Overbreed
I have revisited Overbreed with some fresh thoughts and ideas. More specifically, I went at it with an angle-grinder to smooth out a few rough edges, only to realize what I thought was a few bumps ended up being sizeable hills.
As such, Overbreed's undertaken a minor rewrite. The major progressions of the 7-part miniseries are mostly unchanged, but the narrative structure is being reorganized. The biggest change is that Moira is no longer an antagonistic force - as I said down and actually teased out the story to its logical conclusion, Moira's previous motivations actually ended up aligning more with Mercy, in that they were more Neutral Good than Chaotic Neutral.
So the futa serum that the entire miniseries is built around is no longer something Moira built clandestinely and that Sombra stole and gave to Mercy (which was also a bit out of line for Sombra's Chaotic Neutral alignment). It is now something that Mercy herself has developed, and Sombra is now set to steal it from Mercy and sell it to an anonymous bidder (which is much more in line with her selfish inclinations).
The original underlying premise of Overbreed is that, in the aftermath of the Omnic War, populations across the world were completely ravaged, with the male populations hit particularly had as fighting-age men died in droves for their countries. With the world facing a repopulation crisis, Moira saw opportunity to exalt her name and establish a legacy, by using her expertise in genomics and her complete lack of ethics to engineer a hyperpotent futa serum, allowing portions of the surviving female population to assume the biological role of their fallen male counterparts and ensure the species' survival (RE: ladies knocking up other ladies with futa cocks).
In retrospect, the "save the world from a repopulation crisis" angle fits Mercy much better than Moira, being a Lawful Good with emphasis on mitigating the suffering of others. This also solves a rather large loophole in the original story, of justifying why Mercy uses the mystery serum on herself rather than studying it - with Mercy developing the serum, she is fully cognizant of what it should do and what to expect from it. And with cranking her fealty to the Hippocratic Oath of "do no harm to others" to 11 is definitely within her goody-two-shoes personality, so it only makes sense that she'd use herself as a test subject rather than subject someone else to it in the testing phase.
This change solves a good few issues, though it raises a few more than I still need to work out. So that's all I'll share on the rewrite for now.
Post-Comic Thoughts
As a final note, I've been having some thoughts, and they've been filling me with anxiety. I intend to sit and think on them more before I come to a conclusion, so consider this an early-access peek into my thoughts on the matter.
The short version is that I'm not sure if I want to resume the Rachel/Chaos project immediately after the DVa comic is finally done.
The long version is that I really like the Rachel/Chaos project. Like, I really like it. I think the idea is super interesting, I've had an absolute blast animating it, and I think the screenplay is pretty damn fire.
But, I like Overbreed even more. Like, as much as I like the Rachel/Chaos project, I have literally lost sleep over Overbreed. I've laid in bed for literally 5 hours one evening, some months back, with my brain just churning over how exciting Overbreed would be. I haven't had that at all with the Rachel/Chaos project.
As such, I am strongly considering jumping into the first episode of Overbreed once the DVa comic is done, and pick up Rachel/Chaos afterwards.
On the one hand, Rachel/Chaos has been the public-facing project for months now (even if the DVa comic accidentally put it on ice for 2 months now, oops), and I know there are some people who are very excited about it (as in they keep messaging me asking about its progress). And in general I don't like doing back-to-back projects in the same IP, and jumping from an Overwatch comic to an Overwatch video would violate that.
On the other hand, Rachel/Chaos is really only barely started. I did the math, and despite the fact I've made 10 core sex loops for it, that's only between a third and a quarter of all the sex animation involved - and including all of the non-sex animation that the project will require, Rachel/Chaos isn't any more than 1/6th of the way through core production. And that's not counting lighting, scenebuilding, choreography, detailing, voice and dub recording, audio engineering, and lip-syncing. Then throw in the fact that, even months after my last big burst of writing on it, my brain still keeps constantly churning on Overbreed...
I honestly don't know right now. All I know is that if I do decide to put serious thought into keeping Rachel/Chaos on the shelf for a few months more and put together episode 1 of Overbreed, then I will absolutely put together two polls asking for peoples' opinion on it - a public poll on Twitter, and a private poll on Patreon.
But that's where my headspace is at. It's been taking up a not-insignificant amount of my mental energy this past week, and has been causing me a noteworthy amount of stress and anxiety, so I think it's only fair I share it.
That's all for now. See you all next week. Hopefully with news that the comic editing is done! Or at least almost.
