Old School Building Enviro (Patreon)

As you might have read last month, we're moving from our newsletter format to a more casual blog style thing. We're going to be using Patreon more as a way to share our progress and get your feedback.

To help us gain exposure, news posts like this one will be public and visible to everyone including non-patrons, but test demos and builds will be kept to patrons only. We're also going to be more actively involving supporters in Virtual Novel's development as we move towards story and writing.

So to kick it off, we have some news and some HR screenshots to share about 2 things we're real excited about - one of Virtual Novel's new (old) enviros, and some progress with our procedural NPC generation. 

On the north side of Takayama Highschool's campus sits the remnants of Takayama's old academy; a historically significant building that was renovated, rather than being demolished. The old school building is affixed to the main school via an outside walkway, and is mainly used for clubs and storage. 

We're hoping to stage some really interesting scenes here, and it will be home to the photography and music clubs so it should be a really great VR environment with lots of props. As the old school building is used for extra curricular and student-lead activities, it should be a nice change from the more classroom based scenes that happen in the main school.

The design is based off of a few references of old abandoned Japanese schools we found on Google, with a lot of inspiration from Japanese carpentry - especially interior cross-beam structures which seem to be common in traditional Japanese interiors. The annex with the exposed stairwell and vertically rising beams was a choice specifically for VR, since our brains seem to love geometric detail like that; this section of the school campus is one of the most presence inducing locations.

Some other things in the school take inspiration from K-On!, such as the room-number plaques and stained glass doors, and more K-On! inspiration will probably make it in once we start building the music room environment. 

Along with environment design, we've been working on optimizing our modular characters and building a powerful NPC randomizer to allow us to populate the school, procedurally. Every character in these screenshots is procedurally generated, and fully modular. As we've mentioned in newsletters in the past, modularity is a huge part of Virtual Novel, and our characters are split up into many separate pieces to allow for different combinations of clothing and hair styles. It's our plan to have Takayama Highschool fully populated with NPCs, with each being fully unique in appearance! 

Please feel free to comment, let us know if there's anything you'd like us to cover or elaborate on! :)

A side note, we are now in contact with Japanese translators, and it seems like a very real possibility that Virtual Novel could feature seiyuus if we keep gaining support here on Patreon. We've already had some of our script professionally translated, and our game's website, which you should check out here even if you can't read Japanese, because it looks really beautiful (´・ω・`)