*August Update*

Hey Gearheads!

We got some great news and some not so great news, but let's dive right into it.

This month's support level is the lowest it's been in like a year.  I'm guessing part of it is COVID but another part is probably that it's been a bit since we've had a major release.  A lot more focus has been placed on the weekly releases.  So to compensate we're backing off the weeklies to focus more on the larger projects.  Instead of a major VR release every week, for August we're going to plan on 2 major releases and a bunch of mini updates and WIPs between, maybe even a Pin-Up or two.

I'm sure a lot of you are wondering, what happened to the Azula experience, now officially named Azula's Dark Desire.  We'll after reviewing it a couple of times and bringing in an amazing animator buddy to critic it as we well, we realized we could do a lot better.  We're weren't going for perfect as this is still the test run for the first in a series, but we found a lot of areas for improvement.

In the dialogue scene we fixed the animations on some of the background characters, fixed Azulas skirt and shoes, cleaned up a lot of the clipping, adjusted the lighting and added some depth to the outfits of the soldiers since there are so damn many of them.  In the sex scene, we took the whole animation back to the workshop and after that cleaned up a lot of the clipping, did a ton of clean up work on the penetration, adjusted a few of the background props, adjusted the lighting and added a creampie (fluid simulations are no joke).

The scene is finally ready for the public and more importantly you guys.  The full VR and 1080p (nonVR) versions will only be available here and we'll have a watermarked 720p version to use to market the whole experience.  Ideally, every major POV release will be done in a story mode like this.  Putting this one together took a writer, voice actress, Naysayer animating all of it and me producing it, putting it all together, handling SFX and rendering it.  As extensive as it is, it comes out to ~4 minutes, which is pretty good considering we usually work with 5-15 second clips.

Ideally, we'd increase support to the point where we can have longer scripts, multiple voice actors and multiple people (at least 2) working on the animation as it takes Naysayer about 4 months to animate these.  2 for dialogue and 2 for the sex scenes.

I know there hasn't been much news in the way of Huntress Hole aside from the tagline vote and BDSM mini previews, but the wheels have continued to turn behind the scenes and we'll try to keep you guys in the loop more.

Unity has been doing some crazy things.  A new major release is out of beta (2020), but it doesn't have VR cross-compatibility, so we can't move to it yet.  The method we were using was a much older one to get things working on Vive as well as the Oculus and a fix has come out for that, but it's not really stable or reliable.

We've been continually testing different VR input systems to try to find the best one for the Huntress Hole.  The previous one was pretty good, but you had to hit a button multiple times to teleport and even then it only worked like every other time.  We're currently testing one that should let you have a body, teleport and pick things up, which would replicate all the features of the most recent version but with more stability.

We've also been in talks with a new writer to help keep things rolling for the Huntress Hole and POV story-based experiences.  To start out we had him write a couple of promo pieces and got one of them voiced.  We'll release some sample clips this month.

One of the biggest hold ups has been optimization.  Filling such a big environment with furniture and characters is a challenge and we've been looking for ways to keep things running smoothly.  Usually, there is are multiple departments doing just this, but we're making do with what we got.  One of the biggest differences is the use of multiple specialized characters and not having super optimized versions of them, which you'd usually get from making custom models.  So we're working on alternative methods to get our un-optimized versions of the characters into the game.

Either way, this month we'll have a release with the new environment, multiple characters, a full VR input system and hopefully some significant improvements around optimization.

I really appreciate you guys hanging in here with me.  Times are tough, but when you can't go outside or interact with people we'll still make it so you can have an immersive and intimate experience from the comfort and safety of your home.  I've been really pushing to have some significant releases to market to people and help grow our community and Azula's Dark Desire is the first of such releases.

Things will only be getting better from here and I hope you guys are as excited as I am!