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Friday Update #42: Obsessive-Compulsive Developer
🕑 Added 2023-09-09 09:34:16 +0000 UTCEdit January 17 2024: I got tired of the images in this Friday Update being broken for over 3 months and decided to fix that by adding all the images that I could remember back in. I've made very minimal edits to the content as these posts are meant to be a sort of time capsule.
Hey all, Scott...
Wait, no, that's not right. I'm CaptainCaption, not a video game review YouTuber.
Although I am/was a speedrunner and do stream on Twitch, and could hypothetically be a PNGtuber as I have the full power of Samantha's sprites as my writer persona's avatar, but I kind of want to keep those identities separate.
Superman has to balance being Clark Kent, Superman, and Kal-El, but I have to juggle being <DEADNAME>, Samantha IRL, PvtCb/PvtCinnamonbun, and CaptainCaption, so I am 33 and ⅓% stronger than Superman.
I also fixed this outfit combo for Samantha so her shirt to look less poofy because I care far too much about getting things right, which is a good segue to the topic I want to discuss!
Today's Friday Update is about art; more specifically, how hard it is to get re:Dreamer's art right (or even just get the art), how that process is complicated by my OCD (and other factors), and what those art procurement issues mean for the game.
Starting this off with some mildly disappointing news (and some potentially majorly disappointing news at the end)... the 0.16.3 update that was due for tonight is unfortunately going to be delayed by about three days (hey, I started writing this post 6 hours ago at 11:00 PM), as the new CGs proved really hard to work with in the script and slowed down progress a lot more than I thought it would have, as this is a dialogue-heavy scene and I had to keep checking expressions against the Clip Studio Paint file.
Unlike sprites, where I've got reference sheets for expressions and have long since memorized Zoey, Britney, and Samantha's faces and can quickly add them to a scene with minor checking from the sprite viewer.
But this scene has 5 major head variants, each with different expressions. Not only can I not make expression sheets for all of them, but masking the facial parts (eyes, eyebrows, mouths, etc.) in Clip Studio paint is slow, even though it's faster than doing things in-engine and letting the script auto-reload after saving.
It sucks, because I actually had the writing for this scene done a while back, with a mix of the exact lines I wanted, detailed summaries of each part, and an idea of how to fill in the rest (but when you are commissioning art like this, you kind of need to know what you are doing with it ahead of time for the design documents).
Perhaps unexpectedly, the most time-consuming part of this game's development is the art, which is frustrating as my attention to detail (read: OCD) means I can't let minor details slip.
My design documents have to be very thorough (just look at the one for this scene and Samantha's sprites), I have to edit the art for consistency (as minor deviations in something like the colors or outline widths means that they'll stick out like a sore thumb in the use case of instantaneous jumps from pose to pose or expression to expression), I have to make sure the art gets as polished as possible (both to look good as good as possible as our artists don't have the same attention to detail [read: OCD and insanity] that I do so it'd be unrealistic and cruel for them to adhere to my insane standards, and to be consistent with other art on other characters, like the school uniforms, which is a task that becomes even harder given that we have multiple artists), and I have to make sure that the art is used effectively within the visual novel.
Here's a cursed game of Spot the Difference caused by my mental illnesses and proclivity to obsessively tinker with things, which demanded "rebuilding" most of this outfit (this one took about 6 hours for this one pose; achieving a similar attention to detail across all of Molly's sprite art took over 90 hours and I still haven't finished as Pose A for her new bikini needs polish to match the polish I gave to Pose B).
I'm a writer, but I'm also a hellish blend of an "idea guy (or girl, or they/them?)" and an exacting engineer. Out of all my duties for this visual novel (writing, programming, image editing, promotion, community management, issuing updates, general directing and producing, art directing, sound design, animating, and more that I am forgetting), I like the writing the most, but it's been having to take a backseat to the demands of the art in recent months.
Thankfully, these new CGs from TiltSHIFT required only the most basic of polish (besides re-making the bed and room lighting to fit the dimmer lighting of the room at this time of night, this most notably meant making sure the hairs for both girls got adjusted to better match their sprites, the mouths had the same style of shading as seen on the sprites, and that Zoey's chest binder had a slight hex pattern applied to the fabric to show it being a mesh). Despite me getting off so "lightly" for adjusting the art (which took about 20 hours over the course of 3 days), the process of turning everything into the PNGs needed for Ren'Py to make the layers and making the LayeredImage code for them took another 20 hours.
As Natalie of Natalie.tf pointed out recently, 2D art, while relatively cheap for its value, is time-consuming to make, requires advanced planning, and can lead to severe issues if you need to make a change to a characters design later (yes, I haven't forgotten that Zoey is due for a community poll about whether or not we're proceeding with a chest size adjustment sometime in the near future).
I'm not going to lie: the art is usually quite chill to work on. Hell, I'd say it can even be relaxing and enjoyable as I can often chill in a voice call in re:Dreamer's Discord server (invite here) and talk to people as I work on the less-involved parts (such as color checks and turning things into PNGs).
But not only have the server's voice calls been less active after some recent drama that triggered a migration to a country club I can't enter for not being trans enough (the second time this has happened), there has been a lot of art for the visual novel recently, and I am starting to experience the closest thing I have felt to burnout as a developer since the four-month delay involved with making the ill-conceived arcade games for the mall date in Britney's route.
Running through the changelog, here is all the art that has been added/changed in the last year, with an explanation for the overall estimates of how long each took, which is combined from how long it took to make the design documents, working with an artist to check over and revise things, fixing and polishing up things on my end, and adding the final results to the game by turning everything I need into PNGs and code (although unlike Visual Studio Code, I don't have an automated tracker logging the amount of time I've had Clip Studio Paint open):
- Samantha Taylor's sprites (which I had to remake twice) — At least 100 hours, but this number might be much higher as I could easily see myself having gotten to 150 hours of work with the two rounds of revisions and the finished but not implemented variants for the AP MILF Zoey transformation you'll see sometime later for a re:Dreamer quest. Yes, the art can legitimately take this long, as I was at this every day without break for over two weeks.
- "CaptainCaption's" sprites — While not finished yet, I've edited them for around 15 hours as of now and expect at least another 15 hours to complete them, so an estimated 30 hours in total.
- Zach's sprites (and later adjusting the expressions to more closely fit Zoey's and working in the HotZach base that the artist gave us because they deviated too far from the instructions of "twink") — 10 hours? This one was actually very quick.
- Molly's sprites — At least 100 hours. Not to disparage Myumi, but there were a lot of minor consistency issues that stacked up, and things like the tartan patterns on her fall pants and spring skirt took a long time to get right on my end; polishing her expressions alone took about 70 hours.
- The Keisuke pool CGs — about 2 hours.
- The gorgeous new Keisuke Day 1 CGs and HCGs (there were four major variants: the mirror examination, the one for kneeling on the floor + masturbation, the one for sitting on Keisuke's lap with fingering, and the one for leaning against the mirror with fingering and sex) — At least 80 hours, but it might have been a lot more as I was obsessed with being consistent with minor details like the belt size, the belt hole spacing, and the denim texture size and angle.
- Zoey's Day 1 marker masturbation HCGs — This one depends on whether or not you count generation the doujins in Zoey's captain's drawer under her bed as time spent editing the art, as I just left Stable Diffusion Web UI running for most of that time and chose the best ones after a few rounds of creating an img2img batch and adjusting the prompts, but I'd say 50 hours is probably right for the amount of time I was actively working on them.
- The new Britney yuri topping CGs and HCGs — 40 hours overall, but this might be the one item on this list that is an overestimate, as I have been so fatigued with art.
- The plethora of fancy stock photos for the World Information screen — Finding everything was about 10 hours of work.
- Keisuke's new emote layers (his sweat drops and "shine" effects), new blush layers, new wet skin (and swim trunks) layers, a flaccid version of his nude layer, and swim goggles on his forehead or face — the new emote layers took about an hour, but the design document for the artist took about four hours; so overall, 5 hours.
- Ryouichi's sprites' expressions got edited to more closely match Keisuke's — 2 hours at most.
Zoey's sprites deserve a separate entry due to her volume, but she got:
- A new burgundy skirt — 30 minutes at most.
- A maternity bra borrowed from her mom (that she can wear a loosely-fitting men's T-shirt over) (I actually made this one by hand as it felt wasteful to commission TiltSHIFT for a "trivial" edit) — 5 hours?
- A medium-length hairstyle (based on the length and style scene in the transformation scene when she is kneeling as her shoulders cave in, her hands shrink, and her Adam's apple disappears) and a long hairstyle with straightened hair — 10 hours each, but that was mostly the variants working with the beach hat and two hoodies, then making them for the seven other hair color variants.
- The sporty beach outfit — 20 hours. This is easily Zoey's most complicated outfit due to its heavily modular nature and plethora of variants, and this was the first time I was working with a hood or a hat for her sprites, and the process of figuring out what to do for the layering of those took over 5 hours.
- A modular maid waitress outfit — About 3 hours, but most of that was obsessively checking art to find that it was already good.
- The fall play princess dress costume — 6 hours, most figuring out how to make the front hem of the dress slightly translucent and making the taller leg variants. This number could skyrocket by up to 10 hours once I turn this outfit into the sprites as Zoey's taller height with the heels would require remaking at least some of her sprite code.
- A sleeveless off-shoulder red sweater dress (and Christmas hat) — 2 hours, most of that realizing I liked the red color being darker and more saturated, and dialing in the settings for that.
- Redone Pose A breasts (to better line up with her expected size if they get remade) — 3 hours, most of it testing variants and finding the best one.
- A variant of the compression bra with a mesh texture (which is used in Britney's route) — 2 hours.
- The tattered gray XL hoodie and sweatpants — 15 hours (that paint splatter, oil stain, and ripped fabric combo took a while to figure out how to do well, and making all the possible variants into PNGs was complicated and time-consuming). I also later had Myumi add a variant of her lifting the front hem to prove to Britney that she doesn't have her dick anymore, and that took a fair bit of time to sort out.
- Edits to her jeans and turtleneck sweater to improve compatibility — 4 hours? Most of that time was spent rebuilding the ribbing of the turtleneck sweater.
- Edits to her Casual C outfit for the flipped text of the "FALSE" log and sunglasses variants — About 3 hours.
I am definitely missing some things here and there as not everything makes it into the changelog, but that's over 500 hours of work.
I'd estimate I work about 50 to 60 hours a week (passion projects can do that to someone, and despite this being my job, it is a passion project first and foremost), so let's split the difference and say it's 55 hours a week. Given the bold assumptions that my output is consistent because I live in a fantasy world where I never get sick or struggle with mental health, that's 9 weeks out of the 52 in a year just spent making the art.
Source: Shiratsuki Shiori on pixiv
"Welcome to/<3 Hell" indeed. I've fallen asleep at my desk at least four times I can think of.
That's... insane, especially when you factor in that I don't know how to draw. Impressive, but insane, as all of my edits are from self-taught mastery of what I can do in Clip Studio Paint (and occasionally Photoshop) with just my mouse, keyboard, Google, and an excessive amount of patience, stubbornness, and elbow grease.
I may be stubborn as a mule and a solo developer, but I can tell this is not a sustainable practice. I have thankfully moved past a lot of what I think will be the worst of the art, as with the exception of a Sustainer eventually paying me a few hundred dollars to commission sprites for her self-insert as Britney's mom, one character whose existence is a spoiler, and one character whose existence is a massive spoiler, I am out of the woods with the most time-consuming part of the art, which is the design documents and art editing of the female character's sprites, and none of the remaining girls are going to be nearly as complicated as the ones beforehand.
There are some male characters who will eventually need male sprites. In a descending order of priority, they are:
- Zach's dad.
- Britney's dad.
- Keisuke's dad.
- Rich.
Now, one of those is not like the other. Rich is supposed to be a main character of the visual novel, but there's no easy way to say this, so I'll just get it out there:
Rich's route is being cut.
This is from a combination of four factors:
(1) We can't find a male sprite artist.
Espeon and I have been searching for literally years to find a replacement for Hakei, Keisuke's sprite artist, after he got exclusively contracted with a webcomic publisher. We loved working with him, and we loved working with the asked-to-be-unnamed artist who made Zach's sprites and the recent Keisuke CGs and sprite edits, and while we had talked to them about doing Rich's sprites, we later got this email on July 17th:
Espeon and I (mostly I) had assumed an earlier email from the artist saying (about the Keisuke CGs, the Keisuke sprite edits, and the Rich sprites) "I've reviewed all of them and they are all in order" and "I will start on the highest priority static CG in June" that they would be good for the Rich sprites.
I guess it's easy to misconstrue things when talking to a foreign speaker. I had first missed an earlier December 2022 date of "the further commission window" assuming that was the date for the start of the commission and not the delivery, meaning I was late with the Rich sprite design document for the artist.
So, I talked to Espeon about this, and we came to the hard conclusion that this was probably a sign that we needed to shift our priorities.
The sprite issues, more than anything else, are the reason for #CancelRich happening, but Espeon touched on the two other points and myself one; I'll start with Espeon's.
(2) There was low interest in the Rich route.
From his outset, Rich has never really garnered much interest from readers or discussion in the server. I think this is largely from him not having any appearances, but I think most of the distaste around him is from my own explanations of the route, which have varied from "it's the dark dubcon route" to "it's a toxic relationship" to the more recent "it's a mutual 'I can fix him' story between an incel beta (former) male and a volcel (wannabe) alpha male with a lot of shared drama between them and an unequal view of the other."
While the second half of this needs edits for conciseness, the start of Rich's route is outlined, and you can read it here.
This has been written since December 1st of 2022, but there was a lot more that remains unwritten but was planned out in my head in decent detail, as his sprites' outfits would need to fit the planned events, like a hunting trip, golf course visit, horse polo game, beach trip, business meetings, and so on.
While the short Rich Outline kind of got overshadowed by the Keisuke route's very thorough Christmas day outline dropping the same month, reception was moderately positive albeit muted. As usually, if there was interest in the Rich plan, people were treating it more like "I'll read this after everything else" (if they'd not avoid the route altogether due to its reputation). It lacked the ability to get the foot in the door with its audience, which is hardly motivating for me as a writer, but I still kept picking at it, determined to improve the pitch and flesh it out more, as I was convinced that was the problem.
From there, I spent more time slowly but eventually coming up with ways to flesh Rich out more, this first being one of them and a rather important one:
### CONTEXT
# Zoey is out to her mom by this point, but 'zach' is used for speaker name for script compatibility purposes (this needs to be changed at some point, but it's hard to break nearly 4 years of muscle memory typing "zach quote test quote."
# Zoey just got done telling her mom that she never met up with anyone she knew at campus when asked because they're planning for Zoey to pass as intersex and need a hiatus period from everyone for that excuse to work. Zoey explained that she never said hello to Britney despite living in the same dorm building and kept ducking her due to "anxiety."
# With Control <= 2, Samantha tears into Zoey, basically calling her a gross white knight who put Britney on a pedestal not out of respect for Britney and women in general, but because he was a coward afraid to escape the status quo and because Zach's pornography addiction (the details of which Ai told Samantha) was a good-enough substitute.
# Samantha only stops when she realizes she's nearly brought her child to tears, and she was mad for *two* reasons that she explains.
Man, Patreon really needs a proper Markdown or code format for text:
zmom "{size=-6}Sorry. You know how seriously I take matters of love and romance, but I was shoving my expectations onto you again.{/size}"
zmom "{size=-12}{i}Damnit, Samantha! You're going to need to give more context than that to apologize properly!{/i}{/size}"
zach "Mom? What context are you talking about?"
authorsnote "Samantha didn't intentionally mutter this aloud, but she's very quickly able to pivot to using it for her advantage."
zmom "{i}Well, since I just had to say it out loud...{/i}"
zmom "Don't ever bring this up to your father, but I had a few admirers during college."
authorsnote "Leon Burton (Jeff's best friend) was one of those people. He had tried to woo Samantha before Jeff and Samantha started dating, and while Samantha clearly told him she only had eyes for Jeff, Leon still never fully accepted the rejection and things are remain more than slightly weird between them to this day."
authorsnote "He's been married to his wife Carol for nearly 20 years, but some part of him would still be interested in catching Samantha on the rebound should she become... {i}available.{/i}"
authorsnote "For full clarity, hiring her husband for a position that required constant traveling that left Samantha increasingly lonely wasn't a part of some Machiavellian plan Leon has to drive a wedge between their marriage, but Samantha sort of thinks it is and Rich definitely thinks it."
authorsnote "In fact, the number one driving force behind Rich's attempt to style himself as an alpha male and to be more emotionally distant from women was his dad."
authorsnote "He sees in his father a man, that for all his success, can't fully let go of a woman who firmly rejected him 2 decades ago. A part of his dad is incomplete, and his dad's love for his mom is one afforded to the consolation prize, and Rich can't let himself go through life like in such a pathetic way."
authorsnote "Bet you weren't expecting Rich lore in Samantha's route, were you?"
zach "Wait, why I am I surprised by this? You're attractive as hell and have a way of leaving a lasting first impression on people."
authorsnote ":screaming:"
zmom "I'd like to think I picked it up from your father, but yes, that's one way of wording it."
zmom "I can't even humor the thought of being with anyone but my husband, but that didn't stop men from having eyes on me once I started putting a bit more effort into my appearance to get his attention."
zmom "I wasn't quite as good with scaring people off back then, but the first time it happened was when I was telling a particularly insistent business major that I wasn't interested and that he should leave me alone."
authorsnote "Leon, again."
zmom "It didn't quite scare him off, and I soon unfortunately learned that there's a subset of guys who find that sort of thing weirdly attractive."
if persistent.Horny >= 4:
zmom "Oh, before I forget!"
zmom "So, your father isn't one of those weirdos. He has basically no reaction to me sounding like I'm going to stab someone to death with an icicle."
moaningzmom "But there's {i}this{/i} voice I pull out in the bedroom that drives him wild." # pink text, cursive font
zach "Oh my God, Mom. Don't just start talking like a porn star at breakfast, let alone try to give your daughter bedroom tips."
think "But I guess that explains the moans during sex."
zmom "Sorry, sorry."
zmom "But all my attempts to get those gross creeps to back off only bolstered their efforts, and it wasn't until your father and I had started dating and the news became more widespread that they stopped chasing after me."
zmom "{i}That's{/i} why I got so upset at you not being direct with your feelings for Britney."
zmom "I can't even begin to tell you the amount of guys who tried to be my friend but sucked at hiding their true intention, which was getting in my pants. It's just pathetic way to live, and girls can almost always tell."
zmom "I think the only reason Britney hadn't noticed was that you had started off your friendship with purely platonic intentions."
zmom "So, it wasn't just that I expected you to be as passionate about getting your love to notice you as I was and your lack of romantic initiative in what would have been a golden opportunity to dramatically re-enter her life and redefine your relationship as good friends into something more that made me upset."
zmom "You were going down a dangerous path for a young man, but in an unexpected way, my worries were unfounded."
The reception was positive:
These magenta blocks are two separate people.
And there were more:
I wanted it too. Thinking about Rio's business suit on Zoey unlocks something primal in me.
I've had at least a general idea of where Rich is going for a while:
I usually don't write stuff down until the situation calls for it, but I've had this as the plan for the route for at least a year and a half before this.
Hell, I've had Britney and Keisuke outlined for a while now, and I only recently put the themes/messages of their routes in writing (while putting Rich there just to keep him in the fold of what could have been):
I don't remember how old Rich's general idea is, but his general backstory of "rich kid of Zach's dad's boss who Zach never liked much but could be an ace in the hole for Zoey" has been around for a very, very long time:
authorsnote "Bluntly, Rich is a financial prodigy who is going to live up to his namesake. Zach sort of hates Rich for being a greedy self-sure prick, but what he truly hates is that Rich might be smarter than him. Rich has a sky-high ambition of going to Wall Street and dominating the financial world, and Zach genuinely thinks he can pull it off."
authorsnote "Rich has a honed talent for reading financial markets like tea leaves and uses it to make an exorbitant profit by getting into markets and pulling out of them at just the right time."
authorsnote "While he has a number of {q}gray-market investments{/q} that make getting a truly accurate view of his finances impossible (which is kind of the point), he's a multi-millionaire at 19 with a net worth of at least $2,500,000."
But that's the thing: While I've always had ideas for Rich, his route has never been a concrete idea until recently, which leads me to my third point for why he's going to be remaining those ideas.
(3) Rich had a shaky foundation from the start that was too loose.
Rich's misogyny got dialed back a few notches some time after this, but it's a bit frustrating to type something with excitement to either see it fall flat or land with a thud as people avoid it.
I set out to make Rich show a different side of Zach (well, in this case, Zoey) and the world of re:Dreamer.
Despite what what is a dark premise when viewed in the right light (the protagonist is trapped in a morally dubious competitive sex game whose primary mode of competition for other players points to sex crimes because the grand prize of a world-changing wish that could very well wind up in the hands of a sexually deviant sociopath is the only way they have to change their body back), re:Dreamer ended up a fairly "soft" title.
Sure, it's not Weenie Hut Jr's like Student Transfer gets (I have never seen a dev team as excited to rip the teeth out of a story as that one; sure, some of those parts don't gel with the rest of the game, but those are latter additions and the motivations behind neutering or removing content seems to come from more of a puritanical view of content tone about sex and/or being uncomfortable rather than objections to its storytelling merits; it's okay to have a bad ending where a character gets turned into a mindbroken slut with their life ruined because everyone got mindjacked into thinking that's the way things should be, but sex with a teacher intentionally painted as a morally dubious event meant to make you think crosses the line even though by the dev teams own rules everyone in the school is over 18?!), and I feel like it approaches dark content in a bit more nuanced of a way than Press-Switch (aka, the universe where everyone is kind of a jaded asshole, which while compelling, is starting to feel a bit stale after ten years of writing and re-writes; but to Trigger's credit, his visual novel still manages to surprise me with remixing what I have seen as one-note ingredients).
I am mostly pleased with the tone of re:Dreamer. Outside of having to back away from noncon due to Patreon's TOS and wishing I had set the earlier parts of the story to be a bit more brisk in their pacing, the writing has not been afraid to pull punches.
For example, I haven't shied away from:
- Graphically showing gender dysphoria and repression.
- Zach's anxiety, which has even more weight the more you notice how much it drives his behavior and how different the context of Zach's likeability becomes when you strip away being able to read the narration and his thoughts.
- The trauma of Zach losing his dearly beloved father figure at a young age (his grandpa; his dad never stepped up to the plate after) and the sadness Zach feels over a decade later.
- The traumatic event that drove a wedge between Zach and Keisuke and made them start to drift apart (I feel like in-game context is enough to explain this one, but to avoid spoilers, it was a very painful way for both boys to realize their mortality at the same time).
- The effect that Samantha's severe mental illnesses and recovery from her trauma has had on her family, making her turn to "day drinking" aka she's a few steps away from becoming alcoholic.
- A dark family secret that involves a literal Nazi extermination camp commandant.
- Imperial Japan conquering America's Pacific Coast through the power of war crimes and mass civilian population center bombings whose scars still remain despite an indoctrination program in schools designed to show a new revisionist history.
- The setting of this new territorial region being heavily implied to be a sham democracy covering an authoritarian police state that regularly commits human rights violations and environmental destruction to refuel Japan's war coffers.
- Japan's modern version of the Greater East Co-Prosperity Sphere creating devastating economic exploitation in SEA, especially China.
But a dark romantic relationship something that this game has only had in light doses, most notably with Zoey potentially unlocking her yandere genes for Keisuke and Zoey and Britney's relationship being a painful quid pro quo situation Zach coerced Britney into against her misgivings and further locked her into against her consent (which can be really bad if you paint it as "a simping incel signed up his crush for a 'friends with benefits' relationship and demands she help him despite her being a Catholic lesbian who has moral misgivings about participating in sex but cannot leave him out to dry without violating her moral code").
Rich was going to be that dark relationship. It was going to be toxic. It would have confronted misogyny, toxic masculinity, and the "alpha male personality" as a core plot point. But I only recently figured out a good framing device to show that while balancing the razor's edge of Rich being redeemable and sympathetic, and this visual novel is coming up on its 4th anniversary.
With "more time in the oven," so to speak, I am positive I could get a better idea of how to proceed the story. Hell, I could probably pull another marathon writing session and outline his route to the same detail I outline Britney's. But would it be worth the limited time I can spend on this visual novel? And would I want to write that route enough to fight for it to have a place in the VN despite all the obstacles it has faced with getting art and garnering interest?
And that leads me to my final point, and this actually might be the most important one.
(4) I need to get this visual novel done.
As you likely know, I have corticobasal syndrome. As a degenerative disease, it's something that will slowly progress further along its course until it winds up being a straw that breaks the camel's back, but not being the cause of death per-se. As Michael J. Fox said about his (analogous) Parkinson's disease, "Parkinson's is something you don't die from, but die with."
I've got a, well, let's just say interesting case of CBS. I'm a year away from a decade from my initial diagnosis (if you count the initial misdiagnosis as Parkinson's disease on my 21st birthday as that date). For those first six years, the symptoms were so mild as to be next to unnoticeable, but as time has passed, I've noticed it more and more every year.
Every year, my right arm just gets a little bit more stiff, it trembles just a little bit more, it becomes just a little bit less coordinated, and it feels just a bit more numb. The symptoms started with my right ring and pinkie finger, then my other fingers, then my hand, then up to my wrist, then forearm, and nor my entire arm up to just below my shoulder.
As I type this, my entire right arm feels moderately numb, like I slept on it. The motions of my fingers across my keyboard simultaneously feel slightly stiff, sluggish, and jerky. My wrist is a bit more sore than usual, but that might just be because I've trying to switch over to a hover-hand touch typing style as my doctor said a wrist rest might be pinching a nerve and/or reducing blood flow, which is something that would be exacerbated by my CBS.
My "daily driver" is this HEX.6C with Kailh BOX Pinks (the top housings were dry lubed with RO-59 KT, which was allowed to dry, then the top housing and slider rails are lightly brushed with Krytox 205g0 and reassembled with aftermarket 50 gram SPIRiT BOX springs that have been bag lubed in generous GPL 105 oil) and ePBT Skadi (I do not recommend this manufacturer, as all the modifiers besides the space bar were warped due to PBT's shrinkage during mold ejection when done carelessly and they required heating in an oven until softened then delicately bending them flat, which was a process that loosened much of the heat-sunk dye from most of these keys, resulting in slightly blurry graphics or text legends) and an aftermarket Alps Alpine EC11E18244A5 rotary encoder (gotta love that smoothness and greater detent count!), built on a custom POM plate from cbbplanet with StupidFish aftermarket 4 mm plate and 3 mm case foam, with KBDfans switch pads and stabilizer stickers, with the black AEBoard Staebies v2.1 using very light Krytox 205g0 (I eschewed my usual XHT-BDZ on the wires for Krytox 206g0, as the very thick BDZ can gunk up the newer-generation stabilizers like the Staebies and TX AP v4 stabs as their tolerances are so tight), and the case assembled with the rubber wraparound gasket on the bottom and the thin PORON strips on the top (while this photo doesn't show it, the knob got replaced with an aftermarket KILO INTERNATIONAL knob that has some amazing knurling).
Part of the reason I put in so much effort into my keyboard hobby is autism, but comfort for long typing sessions and preventing RSI is another.
And that's just the physical symptoms. While my strained mental health, stress, hormone changes from HRT, and lack of sleep play a part, I have noticed worrying mental symptoms. I have a thicker slur to my speech than I used to, my math skills have declined (although this one is mostly OCD, as one of my symptoms is that I have to obsessively re-check work; more on that latter), my memory is a bit less sharp and I have to take more notes about things than I used to, and I get lost or lose things a bit more often than I'd like to admit.
I am nearly 30. While my doctor and I are exploring promising options (like a brain pacemaker), I cannot say I will be alive at 40. If I die without finishing re:Dreamer, I am going to become a vengeful wailing ghost roaming the earth for all of eternity.
I am not as good at math now as I used to be, (despite being a former mechanical engineering major), but I can do the numbers of this. With my life expectancy up in the air, cutting 33 and ⅓% of the game (at least on paper, if you ignore the common route start and stuff like the alone route and The Mom Route™) makes a lot of sense.
I want to write the Rich route, but when you throw in The Mom Route™ to the mix, the numbers don't lie, and they spell disaster for Rich (or at least, "sacrifice Rich to get this visual novel done").
GOD I love doing callbacks (although I wish this one had been a bit more succinct).
So, I don't want to say "never" to the Rich route. Not only was he planned from the very early development and his route's absence means some part of this ambitious story I am trying to tell is missing and it will never be done, but this visual novel could very well be a golden goose and something I want to work on until the day I die with additional stories (and my health would allow for that).
But let's be honest: there is more interest in a post-release DLC for Molly than there is for Rich, and from the start I never planned her to have a route and was vocal about that.
At the very least, cutting Rich means I have less to worry about, which means expanding The Mom Route™ more than initially planned and giving more budget to Keisuke and Britney's CGs (but really, artist time, as the budget for this VN is quite solid at the moment).
But back to the art...
Izumi (who previously drafted the design of the spring break beach, princess theater costume, and maid waitress outfits) needed a flash commission to pay for a laptop charger, so she has been drawing the vampire countess Halloween costume for Zoey we'll be seeing in Britney's route.
There was a bit of a miscommunication on my part, and because of that, this ended up a bit less... European that I was expecting. Don't get me wrong: the Asian-like design of with the embroidery and tassels and long sleeves looks amazing, but I was going for a cool prince-like tomboy vibe, and it's too early in Zoey's story to wear something this feminine.
Source: Cen on pixiv
Source: 3O °C on pixiv
She's working on a revision (as part of the miscommunication was not clearly stating I wanted multiple designs to look at and pick from like I did with the maid outfit sketches) and I'll be sure to post that later, but I want something even the most cis male (or repressing) Zach would be excited to wear, solely because his dorky chuuni ass thinks it looks cool and isn't feminine enough to make him cautious about wearing it for a night.
Plus, an aristocratic vampire just has to have a folded white cravat (aka ascot), right? I wasn't even intending to find a reference from goddamned dracula clothing dot com, but it was one of the very first results when searching "white cravat" on Google.
That's great and all, but what's not so great is that Myumi and TiltSHIFT both have empty queues for art I've commissioned from them.
Part of that is that after the mental health struggles of the recent server drama, recovering from COVID-19 (again) and from some new SSRIs that left me in a mental fog, switching back from Vyvanse to Adderall has worsened by ADHD at the cost of making my wallet healthier (sure, it's $300 less a month, but I came back to this sentence when checking the Friday Update for typos but saw that I hadn't even finished the word "Vyvnanse" and let it run into "general" making "Vyvageneral" which sounds like an awesome tokatsu villain but speaks volumes about how bad the ADHD has gotten), general body aches that sometimes require me to lie down ("those fuckers" on my chest are F-cups now; sports bras no longer cut it, but despite being wide enough for F-cups, my boobs aren't full enough to fill out the deep cups of an F-cup bra), general lack of sleep (I can't really sleep on my sides as my shoulders are wide and body and I wake up every time I roll in my sleep, and I can't really sleep on my back as my sinuses are messed up and clog my throat with drip unless I prop myself up by at least 30°), and my mom trying to make the entire month of September about her since her big birthday gift from my dad (a lake house stay over Labor Day weekend since her birthday is the 6th) wound up as a total disaster from a completely trashed rental on the side of a cliff, I am going to need to strap down and bust my ass to get the Author's Notes overhauled for the 4th Anniversary release on October 7th, and that is not going to be a deadline I am going to miss.
At least I finally figured out how to sleep on my stomach again but God is it stupid; also, I swear graphic design is my passion, but this was a quick and dirty drawing for a conversation in another server I am in since I didn't feel like getting up and taking a photo of my bed.
But another part of that is that despite having the references ready to go to make the design documents each would need to respectively make a Britney cunnilingus scene and Keisuke pool sex scene (something I could do in about 6 hours), I need to spend some time recovering from spending so much time on the art as of late and write.
More than any other time in this project, I feel like I have a firm roadmap and confidence in my ability to follow it (writing Britney's entire outline in such vivid detail helped a lot with that), but despite me champing at the bit to move the plot ahead, I keep getting bogged down by art and working in some features to the engine (I'd be tempted to say this is approaching the dreaded "feature creep" and likely would count as such to developers who aren't as single-mindedly dedicated aka obsessed as I am).
The obvious solution is "stop being so obsessive and just write," but OCD is a goddamned evil beast and doesn't work like that. The way it does work is by reasserting itself during high periods of stress. Until I listen to its demands and acquiesce to them, it will keep screaming in my brain that I need to focus so much on every last tiny detail, that I need to make everything perfect despite perfect being the mortal enemy of the good or even great, and that even though I just did something, I need to re-check it, because what if I got it wrong? After all, the only person I trust less than my current self is my past self, especially since CBS can lead to issues with short-term memory (and likely has in my case, but I am sometimes a hypochondriac, although I feel like I have good justification for that). I sometimes feel like I should just admit defeat and get a pad of Post-it notes or a whiteboard to keep me on track, but, like, that's awfully corporate and office-job-y, right?
O-Oh God, is my desk and "battlestation" my cubicle, and my bedroom with them in it my office? Fucking Christ, I'm even worried about posture and RSI now. I've got an ergonomic chair, and I've also developed a coffee addiction in the last 3 years. The next thing I know, a Hawaiian shirt will appear in my closet and demand to be worn on Fridays.
In addition to the usual demons that whisper to folks at night, I have one who worries about semantics of describing how I do what I do and what it is that I do ("professional porn writer" is what I tell people when I am being funny, "professional visual novel developer" is what I tell people when I am being serious, and "remotecodingjobtiedtoanIndonesianoffice, sppleasenomorequestions" is what I tell my family and IRL friends).
I've been under more stress in the past 7 months (July especially) than I have in years, and I got used to the calm and took it for granted. I think I'm slowly getting my bearings again after my internal compass got sucker punched but the "you're trans, you idiot" revelation and then the "you're not trans, you idiot, but you're definitely not cis" revelation a few months later.
As you might have seen, I don't respond to stress that well, and because of my OCD, stressors can repeat on loop in my mind and build up over time, often without me noticing, like...
Okay, so you know a coil spring, right? Think of a toy you wind up, and if you wind it up to much, it breaks, often in a spectacular way.
Wait, no, that's not the metaphor/simile I want...
So, "the snowball effect" is called such as a tiny and often insignificant start can build upon itself to something much bigger in an exacerbating feedback loop, much like a snowball rolling down a hill collects more snow to become bigger and bigger.
That's kind of close, but not quite...
So, imagine you get offered a shot of liquor or something, or it was in a drink and you didn't realize it. You take a swig, and maybe it burns for a second. You gasp and cough, and maybe you need some water, but then you're good. Or at least you think you are.
But then when the alcohol hits your stomach and starts to get absorbed, you get drunk. You might have some issues with your short-term memory, and you might have forgotten you took a shot or a sip or whatever, but you then notice it.
You try to work backwards to how you got to this point, but with how the laws of your universe work, the act of thinking about how you got drunk gets your more drunk, but you've got an obsessive personality and can't let that thread go once you tug on it, even if you realize the illogical nature of what you are doing.
But maybe the worst part of all is not that you have an empty stomach, but one full of something absorbent (like bread) that keeps the alcohol from getting processed in a short, intense burst of drunkenness. Like a sponge, it slowly doles out that drunken feeling, but it also completely messes with your long-understood sense of and actually ability of your tolerance, so if you go back for an alcoholic drink, you might not realize how much alcohol you've pounded back before it starts to hit you, and by that point, it's too late to do anything about it. You've just got to accept that you're going to be drunk for the next few hours, and you can't even purge yourself by vomiting.
Yeah, that's close to the spirit of what I want to say, but in classic CaptainCaption fashion, it's way too verbose of an allegory that I haven't even explained yet.
If HRT is the bread, arousal is the drunkenness, and vomiting is getting off, then anything even remotely erotic is the alcohol.
So, there's a third reason I do not want to work on those design documents for the CG: 6 months into HRT, and my libido has not only not diminished as is typical, but it has increased to be more powerful than ever. If I start working on them, I won't be able to finish (in more ways than one).
I probably have a porn addiction that could even beat up Goku, but even when I am going out of my way to avoid it, my job cannot escape erotic content.
It's like being an alcoholic who works as a bartender (not far off, as I used to sometimes refer to the re:Dreamer Discord server a transbian dive bar until a lot of those people looking for that sort of thing or the couples that had formed there left in the fallout of the recent drama). I thought I had a strong tolerance to this stuff (porn, not drama), but HRT has thrown that out the window.
I can avoid looking at Twitter (the one acceptable use of a deadname on the planet besides Facebook), and I can avoid looking at the media channels in the Discord server (some bangers do get posted there though), but I can't escape my workplace so easily, especially when the current tasks are writing a sex scene or preparing detailed artist documents for two of them.
But the worst part is those new SSRIs I am on. There's strong data to show that they interfere with an ability to orgasm as this article and a quick Google search of your own will show, so I can't even purge myself to focus. Legitimately, it cannot happen, and believe me, I have tried.
I just have to sit there and deal with it, but like a snowball effect, attempting to dismiss that sensation causes a building feedback loop, but the mountain it is rolling down has no bottom, requiring me to step away from my computer and either lie down and try to sleep as I attempt to focus on nothing or try to distract myself with some lower priority (or useless) task to focus on anything besides how I feel.
This is AGONY!
Seriously, this is like some shit a villain doctor in a gender bender doujin would inject together with a sci-fi aphrodisiac into the transformed former male test subject to turn them into a mindbroken slut who begs for dick to get off.
Fuck, even typing that kind of turned me on...
But at least I know that the upcoming Britney sex scene is hot, right?
I-It's not like my libido is a needy-to-the-point-of-being-borderline-abusive girlfriend holding me hostage, right?!
Yeah, take a guess who has had the Ren'Py SKD alt-tabbed for the past few hours as I try to calm down from describing Zoey getting topped. Because, uh, it wasn't me.
I'll see you all when this update is finished, so until then, adios.
Comments
Dream Team
One of these days, Patreon will un-break the images.
Hercynian
SSRIs I have tried put me in the same hopeless situation, but without the doujin grade libido. Just regular horny is rough to deal with. I think it kind of works to just enjoy the process, but settling for no big release feels weird.
