January Update *End of Year - Start of Year Special Edition* (Patreon)

Hey Gearheads!

New year, new changes to the way we do things at VRA.  Changes for the better.  The most relevant one being the timing for the monthly updates.  Whether it's at the end or beginning of the month, it covers the same timeframe, but we've realized with the natural flow of people coming and going, more of you would get to see what's coming up if this was at the end of the month.  Maybe if you see something else you like come up then you'd be more likely to stick around for another month.

Lots of things to talk about so let's jump right into it.

There's a whole history on the journey the POV stuff has been through but it's a lot to put here, so I moved it to this separate document.  That way I can really go in-depth for anyone that's interested.

To sum things up, the POV content has gone through many different phases.  We've had voyeur sex positions, POV sex positions, POV sex scenes with multiple girls to choose from, and with multiple girls in the scene.  We've had striptease previews and story lead-ins.  We've had single platform supported builds, cross-platform builds, and platform-independent videos.  We've had anime characters, video game characters, anime video game characters.  We've had characters from movies and tv, catgirls, foxgirls, robots, and holograms.

The current POV video format is the best way for us to provide consistent high-quality content that can be viewed on any VR device.  It removes a lot of the control over the subject of the release, but with an outside animator doing the heavy lifting it allows us to continue weekly releases while we work on bigger projects, though quite a bit of time is still needed on the conversion process.  There's the scene setup, the graphical enhancements to the scene, the render time which can be days or weeks in some rare cases, the post-processing, the voice acting, and the audio SFX.

The majority of what has come through has been non-anime content, but every now and then we're able to afford a commissioned animation.  Mostly those have been for bigger projects, but at higher support levels we'll be able to commission more anime character animations.  My own animation skills are also to the point where I can throw in an animation every now and then myself.  The biggest hurdle for more anime content is the quality of the characters, but as more and more people move to Blender we should see more anime character options become available.  We're also looking into alternatives such as Koikatsu, VRM, High-Quality MMD conversions, modeler/porter commissions/models, and in-house 3D model conversions.

**Date Night Tier Replaced with VR Video Commission Tier**

The biggest POV change is going to be the date night tier.  Back when we first started the data night tier it went pretty smoothly with a few people choosing their waifu from the pre-tested list.  As it went on and as POV expanded we tried to meet the request for characters off the main list.  The more POV evolved and the more variety in the request the harder it became to fill those requests.  Where we would be able to finish a request in about a week, now it could take that much time just in the initial testing of a character and even then they might not be usable in the end.

So as we move to focus the POV experiences more on the current format, we'll be shifting the commissions to that also, as the best representation of what we can put out.  The Unity-based date nights will be replaced with VR Video commissions and at a price that more reflective of the time investment and the cost involved such as animation, voice acting, and/or SFX.  We hope people will still be as excited about this new tier, though we know the changes will make it available to even fewer people than before.  If we find a better conversion workflow we may revisit it in the future, but considering the current time investment, this plan makes the most sense and benefits the most people.

POV Format Going Forward

In 2021, we'd like to continue the VR video series as the main POV / steady flow content, with the majority being the standard format, some of the videos being longer/series animations and a better mix of character genres including voting for custom release characters.  We continued to create new relationships with animators and develop skills in-house which would also help with variety.

I'm planning on increasing activity and community-focused communication.  So there will be more WIPS, Pin-Ups, and Polls.  Patreon smacked us down pretty hard on raffles, but we may bring them back via Discord instead once things smooth out in general.  I'll also be posting creator-level content again and running polls on what content you guys want info on.  We'll also try to throw in the occasional bonus release like the Unity version of the Baron Strap Tifa Animation, VR Fap Hero, and stand-alone content for the Oculus Quest.

We've hit lots of significant milestones with the Huntress Hole, former the RWBY Trainer. Here's a breakdown of just some of the accomplishments of the year.

• Established a huge brothel as the scene for the action. 
• some work with AI so Salem could greet you at the door
• controller-based interaction by making it to where you could put a dildo in Pyrrha and watch her react to it
• Tons of Animation Testing and the introduction of several new custom animations for the BDSM room
• The introduction of background characters to help flush out the world
• A new fully controller-based locomotion system as the 3rd option for getting around including comfort options for controller "walking"
• Full performance optimization of the scene and props for faster loading and smoother operation
• A new and much-improved launch menu

We've been holding steady at the current support level, but it's significantly lower than our peak, which has made things challenging for funding larger projects.  We had to cut the majority of our Unity external support and while we're still working on the Huntress Hole progress has been slower than we'd like.  When you couple that with the speed at which things change for VR development on the backend it can feel at times like we're chasing our tails, but even when we're delayed by a foundational change, we still keep pushing forward with advancements in other areas and the acquisition of new techniques.

The biggest change for the year was the Huntress Hole finding a place to call home and controller support being added.  So things are queued up nicely for 2021 to be about changes that are easier to recognize, namely characters and interactions with them.  We're really excited about the project and look forward to what's just over the horizon.

The website is still a thing lol.  We've had it for a while now and it's mostly just served as a showcase to what the projects are and a link to some of the public projects from back when we started.

For a while there we tried to integrate Patreon into the website.  We ran a poll as to the best way to deliver reward content and the website was voted pretty high up there.  After a ton of research, we found a solution via the Patreon WordPress addon.  We added WordPress to the website and spent about 3 months of back and forth with the add-on developer, the web host, and Patreon before we finally narrowed the bottleneck to Patreon's backend for the VRA account specifically as we could get it to work with a test Patreon account.  Unfortunately right after we isolated the issue and brought it to Patreon's attention, they dropped the API support and told us we were S.O.L.

While trying to resolve the integration issue we got the Subscribestar up and running, which currently has a handful of people, and found alternative subscription options.  We have a huge list of tasks on the plate for January and if all goes well, we'll be making a major change to the support system.  Either way, we want to take better advantage of the website.