Progress Report, 25/08 - 23

Hello everyone and welcome to another brief progress report!

The Ivy project has once again seen some headway, with the walking cycle effectively done. Save for some extra bits needed to it, I managed to sort out almost all of it today, which puts the intro into a completely different state from prior. It'll still require more work, but today has been a fruitful day, and it was quite fun tackling the hallowed walking cycle animation, finally getting the opportunity to try my hand at it. There's still plenty to go on the project as a whole, where Scene 2 will have its posing sorted next week as well, as to make the darn thing less lopsided in terms of its scenes. Runtime is as of this moment still unknown, but will probably push close to 3 minutes or the likes, and I am genuinely considering trying to find some voice acting talent for this owing to how much I like how it's turning out. We will see, in the end, what I settle on.

Ada Wong is also having her Scenario of the month sorted, with two long animation shifts of mine slated for this weekend. With some luck I won't have too many distractions and I'll be able to deliver it on Monday the 28:th, but in the worst case scenario I will just push it towards the end of the month.

Come all this, and after the Ivy thing has been sorted, I will be sitting down and carefully considering my options in terms of the heap of projects I have announced or otherwise considered over the years. I've realized a few of them, sadly, act as genuine roadblocks to my work, where I have trouble mustering the motivation to work on them and genuinely feel drained whenever I even think about them - a manner of malaise that doesn't stop there, but also saps energy when I try to work on other things. In that sense, some projects will face alterations and get refurbished, some will remain as they are, and some will be axed completely. This is not a decision I have come to, nor make, lightly, so I want to apologize to those who no doubt will feel disappointed at this announcement, but I figured that it would be better to warn about it a little ahead of time rather than suddenly proclaim this matter out of nowhere. Know that it's been something weighing on me for a while, and one of the primary reasons large projects aren't made as often as they used to be.

In conjunction with this, and as mentioned in the previous report, I'll also be incorporating the matter of Holiday specials into the polling structure, dedicating months (or parts of them) to the holidays instead of piling on yet another project on, well, the pile. Conversely, milestones such as Twitter followers or otherwise will be treated to a wallpaper or similar levels of effort for celebration, as to not also add to the project clutter. The idea is that after I've carefully looked through what I have in the works and decided on what to do with it, I won't end up in this position that I am currently in, ever again. I want to always be able to look at the projects I have in the works without feeling that one of them is a priority owing to some kind of abstract deadline, thereby taking away my ability to work on what I am motivated to work on in that moment. We all work differently, and the way I work is that I tend to poke away at projects over time, and then just get "caught" by one, hyperfocusing on it until it is suddenly finished. With a Twitter milestone or the likes hanging in the way of that, I will always be haunted by the fact that I "should" be working on this other thing, which tends to kill the motivation to do so, making it all fizzle out instead.

Learning how to structure my work here is also learning about myself, how I work, and how I can apply myself to this trade. In that sense, thank you for being patient with me as I figure all this stuff out, over time. If you have questions pertaining to any particular project that interests you personally, then feel free to ask - while I have not figured out what to do with all of them yet, I promise to answer to the best of my ability. A larger announcement of this will occurr sometime after the Ivy project is sorted, in lieu of a Progress Report, so as to maintain as much transparency as possible.

I'll also be reworking the Patreon sticky post into something more akin to a FAQ structure one of these days. I've realized that I get a lot of similar questions that probably could be caught in that web, which would free up some of the time I spend on administrative matters.

Hell of a wall of text this time around. Regardless, thank you, as always, for your continued support and for all of your kind words. The weather has returned to torrents of rain, continuously throwing a wrench into my forest cardio plans, but I will take that over the wildfires that rage across the world. Hope you're doing well out there, all things considered.

Take care of yourselves, and each other!
/DH