Hey all

So I know we have been a bit quiet lately so we thought we needed to come back to you.

Over the first half of the year we were gearing up for our soft-launch in June, which we managed to acheive! BUT! that’s when the hard work started.  Going into soft launch we discovered that there were issues with our swipe controls, dance creation and the first time user experience.  There isn’t any real excuse for this. Sure we had a tight budget and were trying to compromise in order to get the game live in front of mass-market players but we didn’t have the kind of polished flow that is needed for the hugely competitive mobile games market.

Despite that given our experience watching people playing the game (and how competitive they got) we still believe we have something with great potential – if we can fix those three issues.

However, we also know that without a fresh set of eyes, from people who have worked on Dance games, we couldn’t make the changes needed.  So over the last few months we have reached out to friends and contacts in the industry and there under my nose I realised one of my friends worked on the original Guitar Hero!  It’s strange the way things happen…

Alex (Thanks matie!) introduced me to two of the designers who worked on the UI and Dance creation of Guitar Hero. They gave us some incredible feedback as well as sharing some of their own experience getting the balance right for that amazing classic title. Seems they went through a similar set of issues getting the balance right for UI and highlighted that we need better ways to create predictable patterns of dance moves. This was invaluable for us to work out how we can turn what we have around. What’s more we are delighted that one of them has agreed to work with us to help fix the control scheme and approach to creating new dances.

We also discovered a great UX designer who has a flair for First Time User Experience whilst consulting on another game… and who also agreed to work with us on fixing the flow in the game.

That left us one major issue. How to fund the additional work. We have been working on other projects to gain some funds for the game but although this helps it wasn’t going to cover what we need to do next. So we had to go back to the investors to ask for more support. The great news is that they have agreed and we start the design work in the new year!

Some of you may have noticed that we have been a lot more quiet on social media recently; sadly Aaron was offered a job he couldn’t refuse (and we wish him all the success possible – he deserves it!!). However, with the support agreed with the Investors we hope to be able replace him in the New Year.

In other news we have managed to deliver the majority of physical rewards to our backers, but we know a small number of people had problems with missed deliveries or who unfortunately didn’t reply to our original survey until quite recently. We have attempted to fix this (in some cases we have sent out 3 times) but hit a snag in October when our courier lost a whole batch.  These late and lost deliveries have been quite costly for us but we are determined to get our backers their rewards!

Whilst things have taken longer than we have planned; hopefully you can see that a lot of work continues behind the scenes.

So as the Holiday season arrives Dr Frank’n’futer’s servants are preparing the Castle for seasonal indulgences and we hope that you give yourselves over to absolute please…

Watch out for what comes in the New Year!

Exactly a year ago we completed our Kickstarter Campaign and got to properly start working on our beautiful creature.

Its been a long road and we have hit a number of roadbumps along the way… but today on this anniversary we are testing our release candidate build.

– and its all thanks to All of You!!

The plan is that later today we will release that to the Beta community and pass it to our testing partner Testology for one last check.

But we also plan to submit it to Apple and Google to go live as a soft launch in Sweden, Demark and Ireland.

We are going to try to keep the Beta versions working so that you can carry on playing but there is a risk that we might have trouble because of the way those store operate.

In the soft launch version if you spend money – or watch Ads – you will actually be really spending money and watching real ads… Which will be good for us (it all helps us make more with the game) but we felt it was important to warn you. Beta Level Kickstarter backers and above need to be careful about this as you will be getting all of the premium content for free as soon as we can implement the system which will identify you from the game.  That part is proving a little tricky but WILL come before the full launch.

You should also keep the items you have unlocked so far in testing. Now we aren’t 100% sure this will work – but if you have logged in using Facebook before reinstalling the coming version that should work.

We will also be wiping all existing shared dances currently live on the service.  The reason is that there is a lot of test content we’ve created and some dances that don’t work any more because we changed the TimeWarp (we cut the speaking at the beginning of the track because it took too long to get started).

If you will be willing to help us create dances for other people to play over the weekend please remember to ‘Share’ then (there is a button on the Rewards Machine) so we get a videos of your gameplay to watch too.

I know much of my weekend will be taken up creating those and them Aaron and I will select the best examples to become our ‘Featured’ dances.

Even if you don’t want to create a dance; playing them and then rating them as ‘Easy’ ‘Hard’ or ‘Bad’ will be really helpful.  However, best to wait till you know we have cleared down the original test content.

So here we go – moving into the next stage of our amazing journey… This is a time for us to celebrate – and we will be raising our collective glasses on Tuesday 6th June – the same day we plan to put the game into soft launch (if all goes well). We are delighted that Andy Leighton, original music producer of the show; Kristian Lavercombe, UK Tour Riff Raff; Dominic Andersen, UK Tour Rocky have told us they will be joining us as well as Stephanie & David Freeman from Timewarp UK.

We are also super grateful to our partners GameSparks who are generously helping us with the party as well as providing the backend we use to manage the game. Check out their update about the party

If you are in the UK we do have a few spare regular tickets left:

https://rocky_touchme_launch.eventbrite.com

We’d love to have you join us.

In the meantime here is a shared dance to whet your appetite:

The Soft Launch Party is approaching, and it’s going to be a very special night!

June 6th marks the culmination of nearly 2 years of non-stop effort since we first started to make our homage to Richard O’Brien’s seminal cult musical. From conceptual art. Kickstarter. Motion capturing dance moves. The expected highs and lows of the development process. Showing iterations of the game to hundreds. It has been an amazing journey.

We want to celebrate what it has taken to get to this point by inviting industry friends, games & theatre press, backers and fans to a private viewing of the game. This will be the final version of the game before we push the button on soft launch. Details below!

🗓 June 6th 🗓
⏰ 7:00pm – 2:00am ⏰
🎟 Free Entry 🎟 / 💎 VIP Tickets 💎
📍 Lucky Voice Soho, 52 Portland Street, London, W1F 7NQ 📍

Today we are also delighted to share plans to support SpecialEffect. The incredible charity that puts fun and inclusion back into the lives of people with physical disabilities by helping them play video games. They are a charity close to many’s heart.

We are going to dedicate one of the rooms to www.SpecialEffect.org.uk and record (only willing) participants singing songs from the show. We will then get the internet to vote on three champions from each categories:

👍 Best Effort (No Talent Required) 👍
🎭 Funniest Performance 🎭
🎤 Karaoke Superstar 🎤

Costumes are purely voluntary (but there will be prizes), and there will be space for people who just want to have a drink and network with others who helped support this project too.

A small number of tickets are FREE for a very limited time, with VIP tickets also available. Click HERE for all the details!

We are giving one lucky person the chance to win a pair of VIP tickets (inc. entry and drinks all night – or at least till the tab runs out!) in our latest Twitter competition! Two runners up will also receive a goody bag containing 1 of 100 limited edition Touch Me! pin badges. Entering couldn’t be easier.

Simply work out the popular Rocky Horror song that we’ve Emojified….

HOW TO ENTER

1. Reply to @Rocky_TouchMe with the title of the song
2. Retweet this original Tweet from @Rocky_TouchMe

This competition closes on Monday 27th March at midday, and winners will be chosen at random. The winners will be contacted on the same day and asked to confirm their attendance. Please note you must be able to attend Lucky Voice Soho on June 6th 2017 and be over the age of 18. ID may be required to enter the venue.

Good luck!

Boring Legal Stuff:
The ‘WIN VIP TICKETS’ competition is being ran and managed by ‘ROCKET LOLLY GAMES LTD.’ and is not affiliated with Londons Games Festival, Lucky Voice or any of their partners. Travel and accommodation is not provided. Entrants must be over the age of 18 years old and ID may be required to enter the venue. If the winner fails to respond in 48hrs the prize will be issued to another person. Prizes are not transferable, refundable and have no cash value. No purchase necessary. Full details by writing to info@rockyhorrorgames.com

To say it has been a tremendous journey to get to this point would be an understatement. We’ve achieved a hell of a lot in a short space of time, and we owe it to you – the communities who have been so supportive and delightful to work with. Gamers, theatre goers, fans, and industry professionals. We’ve had the support from such a great network of people.

Open Beta is still under way, but we’re almost ready to embark on the next phase of this journey. This time we want to invite YOU to help us celebrate, get hands on with the game, and meet the team behind the project in person. There may also be special appearances from familiar faces too. ??

Where better to celebrate the launch than during London Games Festival and at Lucky Voice Soho? Especially as they already have the songs readily available to sing on demand. Perfect for any impromptu duets, sing offs and performances. Don’t worry, karaoke and costumes are purely optional – except for Ella and Oscar who are contractually obliged.

Find out more on the event page here: https://rocky_touchme_launch.eventbrite.com

?? WIN VIP TICKETS! ??

Win a pair of VIP tickets (inc. drinks all night – or at least till the tab runs out!) in an exclusive Open Beta competition. Two runners up will also receive a goody bag containing 1 of 100 limited edition Touch Me! pin badges.

Entrants must be able to attend Lucky Voice Soho on April 4th and be over the age of 18. ID may be required to enter the venue.

HOW TO ENTER:

1. Play the Open Beta (email info@rockyhorrorgames.com with your preference of iOS or Android to play)
2. Email aaron@rocketlolly.com a screenshot with your score. The subject should be ‘competition entry’.

This competition closes on Monday 20th March, and winners will be chosen at random. The winners will be contacted on the same day and asked to confirm their attendance.

Good luck!

The ‘WIN VIP SOFT LAUNCH PARTY’ competition is being ran and managed by ‘ROCKET LOLLY GAMES LTD.’ and is not affiliated with Londons Games Festival, Lucky Voice or any of their partners. Travel and accommodation is not provided. Entrants must be over the age of 18 years old and ID may be required to enter the venue. If the winner fails to respond in 24hrs the prize will be issued to the next person. Prizes are not transferable, refundable and have no cash value. No purchase necessary.

For the past couple of weeks we have continued working with our backers to keep testing, tinkering and tweaking the current build ready for our invite only open beta stages. Now we have a couple of new updates to share with you….

OPEN BETA

It’s almost time to unveil this wild and untamed beast to a select number of participants with our open beta! We hope you will join us!

This will be our first chance to completely test the social aspects of the game. Our Backers have been incredibly supportive and helped us with their invaluable feedback so far. We’ll continue to keep them involved in the process along with new selected testers. We true need fans of Rocky Horror who will give us their honest feedback and spend time testing every nook of the game. Where are certain testing limitations, we do plan to incorporate daily challenges, weekly competitions, regular updates, feedback sessions and chances for you to win some shiny new goodies too.

Want to get involved? Simply email info@rockyhorrorgames.com and request an invite either for iOS or Android.

Invites will be sent to a select number of people on Wednesday 22nd Feb.

PRINTING ERROR UPDATE

Due to an unforeseen printing error with certain rewards, a small number of backers required replacement items. As such, backers located outside the UK had their rewards held back while our fulfilment team rectified this for those small number of people. Shipping will proceed in the next week or two. Those with misprinted items who are located in the UK and already received their packages will receive a replacement automatically.

Thanks again for your incredible support, we couldn’t have done this without you!

Our physical Kickstarter rewards have been rolling out to the UK. It has recently come to our attention that some of our “MADNESS TAKES ITS TOLL” t-shirts reserved for our Kickstarter backers unfortunately contained a printing error. We have since made our printers aware and explored other avenues to produce these. We want to avoid this happening to anything else we produce. As this isn’t the quality we strive to achieve, we are going to reprint these backer shirts and send replacements to those who have a misprinted one. You won’t need to do anything, you’ll automatically receive a new one.

In other news, the whole team have been working hard behind the scenes to make sure we get the strongest beta version we can possibly have.

The game continues to go through it’s regular internal and backer alpha stages with our lovely backers giving great feedback. They’re helping us shape the game’s direction to make sure this wild and untamed beast is something we – and every Rocky Horror fan – can be proud of. We’ve got a huge UI overhaul coming soon and some big news on how you can get involved even more too. We’ve also got another competition in the works, because you can never have too much Rocky Horror Game swag.

I’ve probably said too much, but exciting times ahead for all.