VirtualNovel

Gymnasium Playtest Build

Hey Everyone,

First, apologies for a lack of end-of-month build with no progress update! We hit a few last minute difficulties and had to delay the playtest build we've been talking about through most of July, which is the Gymnasium level.

It's a few days later than we hoped, but the build is now out! Patrons can access it by a private link that will be up shortly.

The playtest is a preview and work-in-progress of Takayama Highschool's sports facilites: the gym building and auditor...

Fitting Room Playtest 4.5 Release

Hey everyone,

Fitting Room 4.5 will be up in a private post shortly.

This build is more experimental than the previous relatively stable builds, as we're including some features to gauge performance across users' machines. No improvements have been made to selection / UI usage etc (only new features have been added!) so no need to re-report bugs or suggestions if you made them for a previous build, we'll get round to them!

The mirrors can now be turned on by selecting Reflections &...

Fitting Room Playtest 4.5 - Coming Soon

Hey everyone,

We've been making some progress to Fitting Room, alongside working on Takayama High campus environments. This won't be as large of an update as with previous builds as our focus as switched primarily back to Virtual Novel, but we've added a few new options and items.

We've overhauled the Expressions menu to allow for fine control over character expressions. It's now possible to layer mouth shapes to create new shapes out of c...

Week 2 Progress Update - Locker Rooms

Yo,

We've been making more progress with the Gymnasium level, working this week on one of the sub-enviros that makes up part of the gymnasium building - the Locker Rooms. The locker rooms attach to the side of the main gym building and will be accessible from the poolside outside, and the gym hall inside. There's male and female locker rooms, which differ in color scheme and a few other details.

2017-07-15 22:18:52 +0000 UTC View Post

Week 1 Progress Update

Hey everyone,

Thought we’d share what we’ve been up to this week :)

We mentioned last week that we’re working on refining all of the incomplete elements of the school campus, until it’s a complete and fully explorable level. We’re starting with the School Gymnasium, a 90ft by 180ft building that serves as the school’s sports hall and auditorium. 

The Gymnasium level contains multiple environme...

Discord + Our goals for this month

Hey everyone, 

Thanks for the feedback on Fitting Room build 4 so far, we're happy to see that bug reports are in very few numbers! Seems like its mostly a matter of improving content quality and quantity now.

This month and the coming months, we're focusing our efforts on the school campus, and we think we've come up with a good way of making development progress while sharing playable builds -

We'll be working on sub-enviros within the campus and releasing play-test builds o...

Fitting Room PlayTest #4

Hey everyone,

Apologies for the radio silence this month! We've been busy working on some behind the scenes game engine stuff in prep for Virtual Novel story mode things, which can't really be shown off in screenshots or clips sadly. 

Will be back on social media next month with some news and progress shots of Takayama High, along with some previews of our inventory system which we think people will like :D We will aim to releases a non-Fitting Room build too, but no prom...

June Dev Plans

Hey Everyone,

Since we got the first build out for Fitting Room we have had a lot of great feedback that we are working on fixing (Eye dropper bug, general UI fixes and user-improvements etc) whilst we continue moving forward with the story,  environments, and main cast of Virtual Novel. 

We’re planning to develop Fitting Room alongside Virtual Novel in parallel, with smaller updates, fixes and content additions coming to Fitting Room (rather than whole new featu...

Fitting Room Playtest#3 This Evening

Hey guys, Fitting Room playtest #3 is done and the links will be up soon! The header image is a few examples of characters we made, you guys can probably do better though. 

We've had a huge amount of new supporters this month, so here's some basic instructions / tips on how to get around in Fitting Room for new people, and some known bugs to look out for at the end -

• Long pressing the Vive menu button or the Touch A button brings up your settings, with th...
  2017-05-31 17:38:17 +0000 UTC View Post

Fitting Room Playtest #3 next week - a feature list of what to expect

Hi!

Fitting Room play test #3 will be out next week, all the features we want are now in, and now we're just doing final quality and bug testing. We Tweeted a clip of some of the new stuff in action. 

Thought I'd write up a post with a changelog and features now rather than on the release, to tease all the new stuff :D Some of these features we've mentioned / demonstrated before, but w...

Long hair + hair physics teaser

Sup everyone,

Thought it would be cool to share this: a recent beta update of the game engine we use (UnrealEngine4) includes a built in cloth physics system, so we've been playing around with it a little. 

Some of you guys have inquired about long hair styles, as pretty much all of the hairstyles so far have been short / shoulder length. This is because long hair styles would look sup...

Midweek Update :D

Hey guys,

We added some cool stuff in prep for the upcoming build,

First, we added specular highlight size and contrast controls, a feature request by one of our Patrons, Adam. Will now be possible to control the size and gradient falloff of specular highlights to fine tune your character's hair. Example in the header pic of some looks you can achieve with these new controls, it should be possible to really fine tune hair now, which now have 11! editable...

Weekend progress update, new test build soon!

Hi everybody, 

Another preview clip of our progress with new features, with the hair selection system completed - the clothing system is also on its way to being finished after a bit of polishing to make it more presentable, you can see the concept / prototype of clothes changing system in the clip too!

After that, we're on to internal bug and quality testing, and then Fitting Room Pla...

Mid-week progress update :D

Sup everyone, apologies for no weekend update! We have been a little quiet, but still as busy as ever working towards the next Fitting Room playtest.

The movable menu system is now completed, suggested by Przemek and DrathFox, and probably a few others. Should resolve a few people's gripes with wanting to see both the sliders / colors and their character in the same view, and people wanting to modify their character from a distance. Menus can be teleported or walked with, and will automaticall...

Fitting Room - Midweek progress teaser

Hey everyone,

Just a little mid-week progress report and more teaser footage of the upcoming update, which will include a few new sliders and settings, and the accessories and clothing system.

Along with that stuff, we're working on all the community suggestions, bug reports and feature requests for the next playtest - you can see a few examples in the video but I'll outline them here as well:

Turntable suggestion from Przemek Pokorski, Bomblord an...

Weekend Progress Update : )

Ohayou,

Thought we'd show off our progress with Fitting Room since last week's playtest build. In the next update, players will be able to save their characters. Up to 5 characters can be saved, and these saves will go into the player's save game folder as CharacterSave01.sav, CharacterSave02.sav etc - which means it's possible to back up your saved characters, or upload and share them!

We want to add the ability to rename saves at some point so that pla...

Fitting Room demo video - 2nd Test build coming soon!

Hi everyone,

2nd test build of Fitting Room will soon be out for Patrons after some quality and bug testing! Will hopefully be early next week so look out for the post :)

In the meantime, we put together a brief video of some of the editable params players will have control over. I think there is 40+ options for now, with more to come in the coming updates.

This build only includes character body stuff, so a few categories & parameters are locked out until the Clothi...

Mid-week update!

Yo,

A brief update on how we're getting on with UI-chan!

Many of the character parameters are now programmed in. The three types of parameters (colors, sliders, and modes) update the character in real time right in front of you.

For Skin and Hair we thought an 'overall color' option would be a good idea. This changes multiple parameters at one time for people who don't want to really spend time tweaking individual params. 

For people who do want to spend time doing that,...

Fitting Room Progress! Now with actual character customization :)

Hey!

We've been making great progress with the character creator. We've finished up UI design and are now going full speed ahead on actual character creation functionality, which you can see a brief clip of  at our Twitter

Player will be able to re roll the random number generators to get a new character, since hair style changing, cloth...

Hype

Hope everyone's having a great week :>

Look out for more info about character creator progress on Sat, incl what features will be available in the next test build.

-devs

Character Customization - Color Picker!

 Hii

Just a small update on Fitting Room. We're full speed ahead on programming in functionality for the actual character customization now, beginning with one of the most important features - a color picker!

When this feature is completed, it will include swatch presets for categories like eye colors, skin tones and some others, so that players can easily pick colors out from a pre made selection. For players who want to go a bit more custom, the color picker can also sampl...

Fitting Room Enviro Progress #3 + Test Build Date

Hey guys,

We're finishing up with the character creator enviro, and will be moving onto programming of some of the NPC customization features shortly! 

As we mentioned last week, the player has the option of tweaking some visual elements of the environment. The wallpaper, the flooring, and leather seating have a few options to choose from to allow the user a color palette and mood that suits them. We decided on this feature because we want Fitting Room to feel like a pers...

Fitting Room Enviro Progress #2

Hi again,

Time to share our progress on Fitting Room, along with some more info on features which patrons will get to check out in person very soon :)

One of our Patrons, Adam, made a feature request that we really loved the sound of - the ability to add in photos from your harddrive to use as references for your character creations. We're hoping it becomes possible for players to create homages to anime characters they love, or at least have the ability to style some elements of their c...

Fitting Room Progress Update #1!

Hey everyone :)

At the beginning of the week we announced Virtual Novel's character creator mode, and since then we've been busy finalizing our environment and discussing the kind of features we want to put in, so here's a blog-style update with some screenshots and info (●ᴗ●✿)

The enviro design of the Fitting Room is inspired by elements of home dressing rooms, walk-in closets, high end outfitters, and fashion consultants, since we wanted something a little more away from expose...

Fitting Room

Hey Patrons,

Thanks to everyone who's been taking part in our Navigation and Interaction tests! We're now moving onto an important part of the game which has received a large amount of community interest in our polls, and some of you have also asked us about recently: Virtual Novel's character creator mode - Fitting Room.

Fitting Room will allow players to design, save and share characters in Virtual ...

Nav Test fixes and updates for the next build

Hey guys, thanks for your feedback with the 2nd Navigation Test, here are some fixes and improvements we have made / will be making for the next release which should hopefully be before the end of the month -

The new touch to travel and push to run for Vive wasn't very popular, we've reverted back to push to travel for now, and will explore other options for speed.

We've changed the 'Game' tab to 'Player' and added 2 options to the rotation method. The previous rotate method was to hold ...

Scale adjustment update + few fixes

hi guys,

thanks for your feedback so far, we're trying to iterate these builds super fast so are implementing community suggestions and fixes as soon as you email them to us.

A couple of you had some issues with the height adjuster and suggested we scale the world / player rather than just add camera height offset. We tried this out and it seems to work great and feels very natural, so I've added in a separate option to do this. 

The old height adjustment has been changed to <...

Navigation Options Demonstration

Hi everyone,

We've nearly completed our navigation / locomotion overhaul and thought we'd share where we're at with it with a short demo vid.

________________________  

Some key changes -

The teleport no longer deactivates when you point the teleporter further than the allowed distance. Now instead we're using a curved beam which simulates where the teleporter should "land" as if you threw a ball. This ...

Eye Control Demonstration

hey guys, I'm the technical artist on Virtual Novel. Some of your feedback was about eyes and eye variations / the ability to create older and younger looking characters based on head sizes and eye sizes. Head size is already in but i thought eye size variations was  a great idea

I've added 3 editable eye params for height distance and size, as well as the actual eye shape options this should make for a ton of variation. I think we are adding in more eye shapes on top of that too  2017-02-08 03:04:14 +0000 UTC View Post

Level Streaming + Some other things

Hey everyone,

We recently Tweeted a clip of Unreal Engine 4's Level-Streaming system, and wanted to elaborate about it on here to explain what this means for Virtual Novel.

To get the technical explanation out the way real quick, UE4's level system allows for many maps or levels to be added into one 'master' (or 'Persistent') level, and loaded in and out during gameplay - with no...