Fitting Room PlayTest #4

Hey everyone,

Apologies for the radio silence this month! We've been busy working on some behind the scenes game engine stuff in prep for Virtual Novel story mode things, which can't really be shown off in screenshots or clips sadly. 

Will be back on social media next month with some news and progress shots of Takayama High, along with some previews of our inventory system which we think people will like :D We will aim to releases a non-Fitting Room build too, but no promises just yet.

Thank you also to the influx of new Patrons this month, sorry that your timing coincided with Patreon's terrible site redesign lol. We'll probably be changing our front page up a little soon since it seems to have broken the format... anyway

A new build of Fitting Room will be released tomorrow, and contains the following changes:

• The Expressions submenu is now unlocked and has a few facial expressions to play with. These aren't final and will be improved and added to!

• 2D faces have been overhauled and improved

• There is a temporary change to the sliders in the Face menu that previously adjusted character face shape, there is now only 'face length' slider for this build, as we're experimenting with a powerful shape system. This should allow for specific aspects of the face to be adjusted, such as nose and chin sharpness, the ability to create chibi faces etc. This is part of our new in-progress NPC generator that we're gonna be using to populate Takayama with dynamically made 2DQTs, just needs a bit more work before showing off.

• The Fitting Room UI menus can now be navigated from a slightly larger distance

• Fitting Room UI sliders can now be used much more easily without having to look at them, as player's controller cursors will 'lock' to the slider

• Placing objects and accessories near the UI, and the behavior of the UI intercepting your trigger presses - sometimes disallows you to drop / pick up objects near them - has been overhauled and improved.

• The color picker has been overhauled and is an example of how we'll be handling interactive props throughout the game from now on. To use it, pick it up the way you'd pick up any other item, and press Trackpad / Thumbstick on the controller that you're holding it with to color swatch. The color picker can be picked up and dropped similar to accessories and photos in Fitting Room, and no longer has a fixed 'stored' location - letting it go will leave it floating in mid-air. Hopefully this is a lot more convenient!

• When passing your controller near a grabbable item in Nav mode, it will now temporarily switch to Grab mode so that you can pick things up without having to manually switch modes. If you were in Nav mode with that controller, it will switch back automatically once you drop or move your controller away from the item, so players can more conveniently use two controllers to handle props and other movable items.

• Texture quality setting in the Graphics tab of the Settings Menu has been removed, and in its place is Atmospheric Light Shafts, which creates god-rays through clouds, and dusty light shafts through windows. 

• The feature request from one of our Patrons: 'disable traditional locomotion' has been added to the Player tab of the Settings Menu, which removes the ability to traverse the game with the Trackpad, an extra step that sim-sickness sensitive users can perform to make sure they don't accidentally move in traditional mode and become nauseated in VR. This button is the 'Nope' icon in the Locomotion Forward Vector category.

• Some animations have been added when changing clothing and hair, these aren't final and will be improved! They're currently proof of concept and part of an AI / response system that we're building for the 2Ds, which will be expanded to allow them to react to player touches, player proximity, and other misc player actions.

What isn't in this build of Fitting Room:

• Headpatting, gomen Bomblord.

We will (hopefully) be iterating faster on Fitting Room builds now rather than releasing 1 build per month, as the bulk of the work is done and now we can develop and add to Fitting Room on the side while we focus mainly on the story-side of things. Feedback is encouraged, and if feature requests are made early enough (and if they're reasonable!) we can try squeeze them in.

Thanks everyone and again, sorry for the lack of updates and social media presence this month D: Look out for Build links tomorrow unless something terrible happens during final testing.

Love, 

Virtual Novel devs