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 auditorium, locker rooms, and pool. While playing this test build, please remember that not all environmental and sound work is final, and we'll be making improvements over the next few months until the entire school campus is finished to production level!

The gymnasium and accompanying sub-environments take up the south-east section of the school campus, and will be where most of the sports based mini-games and challenges will take place in Virtual Novel. The gymnasium doubles up as an auditorium, and is also where school productions will take place. 

Playtesters can play around with a few props, which are some examples of things we'll be expanding into full mini-games and mission challenges, where you'll compete alongside and against the 2Ds of Takayama Highschool.

Please feel free to try out basketball -

The tennis ball machine (touch your controller against the switch panel to activate it) -

And the pool -

And touch your motion controller against the radio sitting on the stage for some previews of Virtual Novel's official soundtrack, played through the stage speakers.

Known issues:

Please forgive some bugs and quality issues in this early preview build! 

The map isn't complete, so wondering too far will lead to inability to walk

Lighting isn't complete in some areas, such as very dark sections of the environment

Walking on the gymnasium balcony can cause some locomotion issues where you slow down

Hitting tennisballs at speed can cause physics to react incorrectly. This is an engine issue unfortunately, hopefully it will be fixed in the future. Trying to bat tennisballs "smoothly" can help.

Some walls and doors don't have collision

Some doors open the wrong way, and lighting on dynamic doors looks incorrect

The tennisball machine will shoot an infinite amount of tennis balls unless you turn it off

Thanks to Shanie-senpai and Infaerina for these great in-VR screenshots! <3

Special thanks to Patrons Shanie, Bomblord, Infaerina and Reimu for early bug testing, to make sure that the play-test build worked correctly for the rest of you <3

Please let us know through email, comments or in our Discord channel if you have any reports, suggestions, or general feedback.

Thanks everyone!

Love,

Virtual Novel developers