Progress Report! (And What's Coming Next)

Howdy folks! My energy level is all over the place as of late! I am very hyperactive at this moment and am really not used to that given the last year of exhaustion so I'm making a progress report because I doubt I can get any constructive work done, but honestly, I'm kind of sick of existing as a performative art of dramatic irony to say nothing about being a living allegory of dualism!

Anyways, speaking of that work... I've been polishing up the art for the Keisuke swimming pool sex scene in preparation for turning them into PNGs I can use in Ren'Py for just under two weeks now. Outside of the scare/bullshit of my endocrinologist telling me to cut my feminizing HRT dose in half despite my concerns about that worsening my CBS symptoms (which is exactly what happened and it fucked me up for a few days and I'm honestly furious at him and am trying to switch providers to someone who listens and doesn't tell me the symptoms I reported aren't real), I've been able to pull at least 8 hour days more often than not even if progress has been slower than I expected because I'm sorta having to remember how I edit the art I get, both from shaking off rust of not doing that for about a whole year and the mononucleosis wreaking havoc on my memory.

Thankfully, the me from over a year ago was proactive in documenting all the nuances of my procedures for how I make Zoey's palette match up with her sprites, make the masks for exporting parts of her facial expressions with as few compatibility issues possible, how I rework outlines, etc. but much of it is still somewhat tedious in a way I can't automate, and believe me, I've tried, but Clip Studio Paint just doesn't have enough complexity to its auto actions system for me to get any real use out of it.

I often get asked why I spend so much time polishing the art instead of talking to whatever artist I am working with to do that process so I don't have to, but I mean, have you seen my obsessive attention to detail?

First, not only do I not think I'd be able to fully convey those instructions through writing or even examples, but I wouldn't even get any "finished" art to work on if I kept playing a combination of telephone and agonizingly slow tennis with people who live 12 time zones away from me.

But second, I am far better at this than I should be and I truly think that attention to detail make the expensive focal points of this visual novel even better.

This is how TiltSHIFT delivered the background to me:

And this is how I've improved it so far:

It's not quite done, but even when it's downscaled it looks so much better.

This SFW Imgur album shows these samples in 4K in case you can't just right click them in this post to open each of them in full size in a new tab (Patreon changed its UI again so who the hell knows!), and I encourage you to open these before and after images in two different browser tabs and pressing ctrl+tab and ctrl+shift+tab to better highlight all those changes.

Even if you don't humor doing that, I think the comparison between the after samples look a lot to Zoey's sprite of this outfit than the before samples.

Sir Keisuke is a little, uh... this guy right now:

TiltSHIFT struggles with drawing male characters and I've struggled to find an artist who can roughly match TiltSHIFT's style but for male characters, but I've fixed Keisuke in CGs before, and I can do it again.

I don't think I'm gonna match this CG (which I asked its artist who has requested to be unnamed to draw in their actual style with a lot visual flare), but I think I can at least give Keisuke some muscle definition and harder shadows because yadda yadda yadda gender bender is the fetish of contrasting the male form with the female form and blah blah blah Zach is bisexual (and into Keisuke) and doesn't realize it so the hotter I make Keisuke look the more fun I can have with writing Zach's mental gymnastics routine to deny an agonizingly obvious fact.

I don't know how quickly I'll be able to do those revisions when much of my self-taught process is experimenting until I find something that works, but after around 50 hours of work, I think I'm over halfway done with the rest of the edits of the CG set.

Honestly, editing the art has been an unexpectedly fatiguing process because I don't quite have my old endurance and focus back. It is genuinely so fucking frustrating to feel like I've forgotten how to ride a bike I've spent a lot of time customizing to my own exacting specifications: I know how everything works, but I have hazy memories of how I used it. I'm really champing at the bit to write the scene that uses these so much that I keep telling myself I can switch gears to something less monotonous than rigorously checking for art consistency and making needed edits, but I know I'd regret shifting gears away from the art when I have to go back to finish it once I do all the writing I can without them. I try to make all the multimedia and writing of re:Dreamer feel cohesive, and I'd be harming my ability to do that before I have everything I need to lock the fuck in to writing. If there's a single lesson I've learned from this project, it'd be that it's far better to take the time to make sure I do something as well as I can on the first attempt instead of giving myself more work than I otherwise would by cutting corners and having to go back to it later to spruce it up to my high standards.

As tedious as this might feel, I might not have to do it so much in the future. I know TiltSHIFT improved tremendously between making this complicated CG set and the very next one he made me (the Keisuke mall CGs to replace the current placeholders).

No notes, dude knocked it the hell out of the park with these. I'm probably going to have to do a few tonal corrections to stuff like Zoey's hair, but I'm a lot more satisfied with this CG set's starting quality than the pool one.

If anything, I'm really excited to see how much TiltSHIFT has improved in the last year. He really stepped up his game in the last 3 years with professionalism, quality, and just kind of the overall experience of working with him. When I was sick from October 2024 to July 2025, I was worried even more sick by the thought that the gap of not working with him for almost an entire year would make the process of getting back into his commission rotation hard to impossible (which I don't think I need to explain would be cataclysmic for the future of this project), but he responded within an hour of me contacting him for the first time in 8 months. He was just glad I was okay, and I only had to wait two weeks after getting back in touch with him to getting back on his calendar.

The segue I am awkwardly trying to get to because I'm exhausted from hormones kicking my ass (likely echoes of that dose change from a week-ish ago even though I switched back after two days of hell and several days of awful but not quite hell) is that TiltSHIFT is starting work on the next CG set.

I've previously linked the (NSFW) design document for that, but he got back to me this very morning with a price ($3,965):

And a sketch:

I think it's safe to say my producer (Espeon) has greenlit it.

So uh... yeah ngl I am getting kinda cooked here. I'll be posting another progress report once I get done with the art edits on my end so I can throw myself at the writing with full steam, and I'll be sharing the work I get from TiltSHIFT once he finishes each phase (rough sketches, line art, colors).

P.S. (or whatnot (idk I am bad at this (I write porn, not letters))): I am absolutely getting more Britney CG sets after this Halloween one finishes. As I explained in the last progress report, Myumi has been really slow on delivery for one, and I gotta pass TiltSHIFT more design documents for that route since the ratio of Keisuke/Britney art has gotten unacceptably lopsided. If you've read the exhaustive Britney outline, I'm very likely to start that queue with her route's version of the Halloween party sex scene since it feels too apt to pass up on, but I'm curious enough to see what CGs of notable sex scenes you are interested in that I'm humoring doing a poll to gauge interest.