Preparing for v0.75 (Patreon)

The release of v0.7 was a bit rocky and I had to release a few hotfixes to address some problems. But it should be in a playable state now. Shout out to Eidensz and asdfghjk for working with me to find bugs to squish at the last moments.

One of the reasons it was sort of difficult to have a ready to go stable release on day 1 was because of the paradigm shift the game went through for handling objects. Since its inception, Viva Project has managed item handling in a very traditional static way. As in, the object gets parented to your hand model and that was it. But with the introduction of cooking, items had to be handled in a way that also responded to physics. This is something that the "static" way of handling objects would run into trouble as it would cause spontaneous physics glitches and jumping. You may have encountered it if you tried out the early v0.7 betas. I was able to alleviate it by turning the hands into actual physics objects but I had to do a lot of code refactoring so that these new hands would work with everything else in the game. And thus I did it all in a week and a half which led to some bugs which have now been ironed out (spazzy headpatting and hands freezing in mid air to name a few).

Item handling is actually a very important talking point for the game's development because it will only get more significant as the updates come. It's a slowly evolving game that along with other games that are also exploring uncharted gameplay mechanics, like Boneworks, it learns from. Nobody really knows what the "best way" of handling items in VR is but games like Boneworks have offered good solutions. Still, even that game comes with occasional physics glitches and a disconnect from your virtual and real hands. There just is no perfect system, yet at least. So moving forward, everything will have a more physics based approach. I think VR is heading towards that sort of "hyper-interactive" future.

As you can see in this post's thumbnail, v0.75 will be the next update for this game. It will revisit existing behaviors and mechanics and flesh them out more. I personally think bathing was left somewhat half finished and I plan to fix that. I do not want this update to take long and thus it will be rapidfire improvements with 1 week of development allotted to different aspects of the game. That said, I will be spending 2 weeks for the new town and 1 week for a new loli behavior, hugs. I will be opening up a poll for week 4 to decide which aspect of the game to improve (horses, cooking, clothing, poking, etc. you choose). I'll be open to suggestions as well.

I also hopefully plan to release the game's launcher to make downloading and extracting the game less of a pain point. It is personally very annoying and tedious to upload this game in parts on Patreon and then a full single file on itch.io. The game's launcher will also be used to distribute betas to supporter tiers. I will be testing it with some other devs this weekend. Also, the launcher's design is being designed by an artist who worked on Azure Lane. She also made the game's official character which I plan to ship in the game as well.

There will be one last hotfix for the game (v0.7.6) coming tonight which will address the last minor bug that needs to be patched. Also will include some hints on what to do for cooking. This weekend I will be refactoring the codebase for a more robust framework for physics based interactions and thus v0.75 will start on Monday.

In the first 3 days, the game had over 1,673 downloads on itch.io!

Stay tuned!