July Update *VRA Level Up!* (Patreon)

Can you believe we're coming up on our 2 year anniversary and what a couple of years it's been!  We've come along way and we're just getting started!

Patreon Change

First things first, it's been addressed before, but can't have an update without addressing the elephant in the room.  We got our wrist slapped by Patreon, so know the home page is free of links and all old post are patreon only.  Any public post that we release will be deleted shortly after, mission impossible style.  So if you take a break from pledging just keep in mind there will be a couple public messages here and there, but that's not going to be the best place to keep up with what we have going on.

That being said we've been working on a complete resign of the website, vranimeted.com which should be going live this week and we've been working on the discord to make better use of it as well.  Patreon will mainly be a place for managing support and higher tier pledge content.  We're also working on integrating tier1+ reward access through the site.

We'll also be making the majority of archived content publicly available through the website.

Galactic VRA

Seems like I've been working on getting this out forever, but with an environment so large (and it is huge) putting it together has been quite the challenge.  The last half of June has been spent testing the latest version of Unity as well as patches for the previous version.  We've re-built the space station about a dozen times testing out different implementations.  We've also been testing multiple versions of character model work flows through Blender, which can reduce the file size of animated models by 10x.  Finding a balance has not been easy, but we're much closer to a much smoother workflow than we were when we started.

All this boils down to July being the debut of the Space Station.  It'll largely be empty and some parts will be locked, but we'll be filling it up with suggestions from you guys as well.  This will also combine the elements from the old space station with elements from VRA Theatre and the RWBY Trainer.  Again, the RWBY Trainer will be only one of the "themed" areas of the space station and there are 12 themed areas in all we can build towards.

POV

We're well on track with the weekly POV releases.  We made it fairly smoothly through June, even with the suspension and July is holding to the schedule as well.  To keep things flowing smoothly with those releases we'll be slowly implementing new features around those releases.  We'll keep these releases separate from the Space Station, but eventually those girls will be making it on board for play time.  Some of the features we're working towards adding into the already robust selection are bonus positions, skin color changes for the player and a better menu UI to name a few.

AI

We've been making some great progress around the more natural scenes and better interaction.  Voice Like Candy recently recorded another series of game play dialogue for us, which we're in the process of lip syncing.  We've built a new intro scene with v1 of the AI system, so every time you load an experience with it (including multiple loads of the same one), you'll never see Izumi perform the same actions in the same order.  We'll be releasing a preview version of just that so you can see the progress.  We're also planning out the first complex sex scene using this new system, which will be comprised of 30 separate but perfectly blended animation sequences that put control of the action in your hands.

Modeling & Animation

Along with everything else, the journey to increase our current skill set and learn new skills continues.  This translates to more characters to choose from, better looking characters, better animations, cooler environments, etc.

As always there's a lot going on, a lot planned and a lot that we've accomplished.  Thank you for taking this journey with us, for being vocal with your comments, concerns and feedback!  Putting all this together takes tons of programming, animating, modeling, voice acting, sound effect design, story planning, writing, asset creation, level design, optimization, etc. and it's all made possible thanks to your previous, current and continued support.  We're very grateful for your commitment to what we're trying to accomplish and will continue to work hard to try to live up to your expectations!