2 Important Announcements: DVa and a Newcomer

Hey guys, I just got a couple quick, important things to share. The first is a mixed bag of good and bad with a silver lining. The second is by no means bad, but how good it is might depend on how similar your tastes are to mine.

The first bit is that I'm drastically reworking the DVa animation plot-wise. The setting and characters involved will not change. It's not a complete remake, and all the setup work I did previously will not need to be re-done. I'm well aware (and kind of worried, honestly) that my content output hasn't exactly been Speedy Gonzales-tier lately, and I already had half a rough draft of the original plot done. So what gives?

Here's the thing: I wasn't feeling it. The plot progression was slow and uneventful, the scenario wasn't that interesting to me, and it felt like a lame excuse for the inflation to happen instead of supplementing it and making it better. I also wanted Mercy to actually get inflated along with DVa, and not just show up for a half-assed cameo. It also doesn't try anything that fun or interesting, and involved a lot of work on meaningless details that ultimately didn't really make the inflation any better.

In retrospect, I hated this and wasn't having fun with it, and it felt like a huge amount of work for a likely-mediocre payoff. I'd rather spend more time on a project to make it better, even if that means starting a big part of it over, rather than rushing out crappy content. This isn't the first time I'm dummied out large amounts of content or switched projects either, it was just never made public given that I didn't have anything resembling a work-in-progress blog until now. I may make a compilation of some of those things down the road just for fun. Some of them were legitimately bad, and others were just me weighing a couple possible ideas and liking one better at the time.

So what's this mean for the animation? It means I'll be whipping up a new storyboard. I've already got about 1/3 of it done, but I'll share some of the changes right now:

• The gum is now hyper-compressed Mountain Dew candy, making the inflation carbonation-based instead of blowback. It'll also be a bit more gradual and unwitting as a result. It'll also most likely speed up whenever DVa and Mercy are shaken, jostled, or move quickly. Maybe with some burping. The inflation is more spherical, growing out like a pudgy belly initially, then turning their midsection round. It may spread to their limbs a bit as they become huge too.
• The plot progresses directly to the inflation faster. DVa finishes her game as before, but instead of running off immediately, finds the fizzy candy sitting on the table as she sets her controller down. She pops one, starts feeling weird, stands up, bloats out a bit, then panics and runs off to find Mercy.
• DVa finds Mercy herself, as implied in the last point. Mercy, knowing that DVa is self-destructively bratty and stubborn, makes a point of being deliberately unhelpful while faking sympathy. She starts off using a stethoscope on DVa's belly to listen to it, and then starts feeling it, eventually grabbing and slapping it to make her get bigger faster.
• DVa catches on and gets sick of Mercy's bullying. In an outburst of anger, she chucks a piece of candy into Mercy's mouth as she's talking/laughing, causing her to swallow it and also start inflating.
• They both start trying to blow each other up and getting into a bit of a slapfight, causing them to start blowing up faster and faster.
• Both DVa and Mercy get huge and fill up the room, much like Li-Ming in her animation. I'll likely do a popping and non-popping ending, one where they have to sit around and slowly wait to deflate (maybe by burping or something) and another where DVa pops, returns to normal, and then turns around and bullies Mercy to popping, after which she also returns to normal.

I'll upload the new storyboard here as soon as I'm done with it. But that's not the only thing. I have a test animation to do, because...

...I successfully ripped Marah from the old Dawngate game files!

I don't know if you remember me saying it, but I mentioned that if I found a model of her, I'd be making something with it ASAP. Well, now's that time! One test animation of mini-giantess tree waifu, coming right up! On that note, I'd like to also make another page or two of that Marah inflation sequence I've been working on.

So yeah, I've got my work cut out for me this week, but I'm excited about it again. I'm sorry I haven't been as active as I'd like, but I really hope to make it up to you guys with this DVa remake. I'm almost positive it'll be a much better animation this way, so I greatly appreciate your patience.

That's all I got for now, but with any luck, I'll have some really interesting stuff to share within the next week or two. For now, take it easy guys!