Christmas bells

Dear friends!

On a long road, one can encounter both successes and failures. We are glad that we’ve had no failures so far, and we are even gladder about one of our great successes – reaching the Kickstarter campaign’s goal. The financial side of the question is important, sure, but your support is even more valuable to us! Everyone who waits for “Love, Money, Rock’n’Roll” contributes to our cause one way or another, and we value both the money and the kind words. For them, we are immensely grateful!

 

The winter is at the doorway! And we are ready to cast the cold and blizzard out of your minds with a portion of good news!

After the end of the Kickstarter campaign, we’ve had some good rest and got down to work with renewed vigor. We are glad to tell you that the game’s development is going nicely and without delays.
In particular, not long before the end of the Kickstarter campaign, we promised to show you the new, improved versions of character animations. Today, we are finally ready to do so. Meet Himitsu!

Some technical details:
As you might have noticed in the video, we refused the idea of making pose-to-pose transitions. This is mostly due to the limitations and difficulties tied to Live2D, the tool we are using to animate our characters, and the existing assets we have to work with. While creating a single united model for a character is possible in theory, it ultimately takes too much time and effort, while the results leave much to be desired. After an intense period of trial and error, we made the final choice in favor of separate models for each of the characters’ poses without the transitions between them and decided to use the freed time on expanding the pool of animations and perfecting them. In the video above, you can see how that worked out.
What do you say, does it look good? We will be glad to hear any of your feedback.

We are also happy to announce the results of the fanart contest we’ve held in our Vkontakte group! We’d like to thank all participants and congratulate the winners! The choice wasn’t easy…

First place:
https://vk.com/photo-62816733_456243003
and the gif: http://puu.sh/supKD/fd7c827029.gif

Second place:
https://vk.com/photo-62816733_456244681

Third place:
https://vk.com/photo-62816733_456240895

Honourable mentions:
https://vk.com/photo-62816733_456240760
https://vk.com/photo-62816733_456240418
https://vk.com/photo-62816733_456243251
https://vk.com/photo-62816733_456241535
https://vk.com/photo-62816733_456242538
https://vk.com/photo-62816733_456242716
https://vk.com/photo-62816733_456242801
https://vk.com/photo-62816733_456242854
https://vk.com/photo-62816733_456243001
https://vk.com/photo-62816733_456243153
https://vk.com/photo-62816733_456243404

We’d also like to remind you about our IndeiGOGO campaign. With it, we are continuing to gather funds for “Love, Money, Rock’n’Roll”! If you weren’t able to support the project during the Kickstarter campaign, you can still do so here:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/love-money-rock-n-roll-animation#/

All of the money collected will go towards bringing the remaining stretch goals to life! More illustrations and populated backgrounds are the next on the list!

With love,
Soviet Games