Uncategorized

Backers,

Today we wanted to update you on the status of your physical Kickstarter rewards.

Due to unforeseen circumstances we were unable to hit our target delivery date of November. Expected delivery will now be a month later. While obviously disappointing, we are still happy to confirm our new shipment timeline ensures everyone will still receive their items by the end of December 2016.

Backers (UK): Before 25th December 2016
Backers (Worldwide): Before 31st December 2016

We apologise for any disappointment this may cause. We tried everything to mitigate delays with delivery. This happened due to an unexpected delay in gathering details from backers that were required to proceed with manufacturing. This in turn meant we weren’t able to talk to our suppliers and place orders. In the middle of this we also needed to change one of our suppliers due to time restraints. These situations had a knock on effect with certain specialist items like Rocky’s pants, Vinyls and Mick Rock rewards.

As such, we have also taken the decision to turn Ella’s flat into a storage warehouse to ensure shipment isn’t delayed any further. It is literally a box fort right now.

The whole team are excited to get these rewards into your hands. We can’t wait to see your tweets, pictures and messages in December. In other news, we are excited to confirm that the alpha build is 99.9% complete and ready to be put into the hands of our alpha level backers. More news will be sent out to appropriate backers shortly.

Questions or concerns? Do contact us on info@rockyhorrorgames.com, send us a Tweet or drop us a Facebook message.

Thank you for your immense patience, support and understanding.

You guys are freaking awesome.

Aaron, Ella & Oscar x
Rocky Horror HQ

Hi everyone 🙂

We’re holding a competition over on our Twitter page to win a selection of Rocky Horror: Touch Me! merchandise.

We have emojified (this word should totally be in the dictionary) a famous Rocky Horror Show song.

When you’ve worked out which song it is, simply tweet us the answer and RT our post. Done!

Five winners will be chosen at random from all correct entries on Friday 28th October and be notified via direct message. You must also be following @Rocky_TouchMe to qualify.

Good luck!

This competition is being ran and administrated by RocketLolly Games LTD.

Seems like just yesterday….

No heavy, black, and pendulous storm clouds in sight…

We had the absolute pleasure of attending the tenth Time Warp Picnic at Oakley Court this year, so we wanted to write a quick thank you message!

Firstly thanks to everyone at the Time Warp Fan Club for making it such a memorable and wonderful occasion. Steph and David were wonderful hosts!

We also would like to thank Oakley Court for letting us freely roam the hotel in all our attire for the event – the hospitality from all of the staff was second to none. The bar even made us our own ‘Dammit Jannet’ cocktails!

Be sure to read a full review of the event over at the Time Warp website.

The biggest thanks goes to all of the attendees. Everyone was incredibly warm and welcoming, each and every one of them reminded us just what a special thing the Rocky Horror brand is. What an honour it is for all of us to be working on the official game with such a beautiful bunch of people like you.

We hear from fans every day, and their passion is always astounding. This community is amazing. YOU’RE amazing, and we look forward to meeting new and old faces at all other future real world events that we’re going to attend this year. You’ll find out where we’ll be on Facebook & Twitter first.

IMPORTANT RAFFLE COMPETITION UPDATE

We donated a prize pack to Time Warp Fan Club for their raffle during the event, and have an update for our winner Hazel!

Don’t worry, we haven’t forgotten about you, we are still waiting for the T-Shirts to arrive back from the printers. We’re really sorry for the delay are are going to include full Beta Access as part of the prizes to make up for this. Unfortunately we didn’t get your email address so we couldn’t tell you personally. The prize will be on its way to you once we have those shirts!

If you know Hazel personally, please let her know and ask her to get in touch via info@rocketlolly.com.

Until next time…

Aaron, Ella & Oscar x

One of the best things about making a game about Rocky is that it gives me the excuse to think about how we create the different dances.Lets face it what would a dancing game be without the ability to animate your character.

This is no easy feat however, there are two basic approaches to animating dances:

Rag Doll: This is where you literally control the direction of the limbs as if they were puppets and allow the player to move them around at a whim. Which is funny and quite fun; but the dances aren’t usually convincing and it unfortunately stops being rewarding in the longer term as a game. However, the real problem is that the dances don’t look particularly convincing.

Animation Blending: Where we have a number of predefined animations and your interactions affect the way the character blends between those states. This looks really good, but can becomes quite limited in terms of the sense of personal involvement.

We decided a long time ago that the game would have to be based on the idea of Animation Blends; not least because of my experience watching what people playing Playstation Home managed to pull off with the combination of set dances and individual gestures; something which worked out a lot better than we had expected. However, this leaves us with a problem – how do we make the dances feel individual to the player. This was one of the problems that came to light when we showed off our initial prototype to people. There was some degree of interpretation but this needed more.

So talking to Nick the animator we cam up with a plan to increase the emergent experience. First we will have two idle states, rather than one. This is the basic movement that say Riff Raff or Janet does between your moves. Its how we hope to help you keep in mind the beat as well. So now there will be a low energy movement and a high-energy movement.  That means that the more rapidly you make moves the more active the dancer will be and this will slow down during the dance. The other thing we want to experiment with is allowing players to change their mind to get different movements out of the character. So lets say you start moving top left this kicks off an initial movement to take the say Brad’s right arm up to his right; but then you switch curving the line you draw down. We want this to then blend between those animation states to show something unique. We don’t know if this will work – that’s why we will experiment ;0)

That still means we have to spend a lot of time thinking about each of the potential dance moves so that we can we sure that we can recreate all the great songs, not least The Timewarp! Thats harder than you might think – give the way that our control system works to enable the game to still work on smaller phones screens. Last week I spent time with Nick and Ruby to work that out and make sure we had everything planned out for using existing canned animations where we can; and what we will have to capture using MoCap in a couple of weeks time.

Until next time here are some still from our time in Ruby’s dance studio…

Oh What A Night… Last night (Monday 8th) Ella and I managed to sneak out way into the London Production of another Richard O’Brien Musical, The Stripper.  As some of you may have noticed we ran a competition for the production company of the show to help promote it and they were kind enough to give us a tickets – I even got to take my family with me.

The setting was perfect, they built the stageset directly in the bar, making it feel like we were in the Club Extravaganza itself, it was a seductive experience and it was only through careful observation that we noticed some of the people milling around the bar whilst the band played were wearing microphones, subtly placed.

Suddenly the lights go out, and a spotlight is focused on Lt. Al Wheeler (Sebastian Torkia) our iconic gum shoe who introduces us to a piece of classic pulp noir by Carter Brown (aka. Alan Geoffrey Yates). The tongue is firmly in the cheek, but the mystery remains sleazy but compelling. The songs are timeless, even if the sexual politics remain firmly in the time the play is set. However, that blatant, almost carry-on style, naughtiness acted as a perfect counter-point to the criminal context; making the whole thing hilarious. There is a self-knowing quality to the way that Torkia seduced the crowd (which was particularly hilarious when it was focused on Ella – who couldn’t stop laughing!) or when Gloria Onitiri, as the titular stripper Deadpan Delores Keller, decided to find a new way to use my hat…

The whole cast are supremely talented, switching flawlessly between multiple characters – there are only 5 of them playing 12 roles with Marc Peckering, Hannah Glover and Michael Steedon completing Benji Sperring’s cast. Sperring also directed last years smash version of Rocky (s)equal, Shock Treatment (which O’Brien also co-wrote with Richard Hartley).

It was a great moment in our journey making The Rocky Horror Show: Touch Me to be able to get a taste of another Richard O’Brien classic

Despite the sweltering weather here in the UK work at Castle Transylvania doesn’t cease.  You faithful handifolks have been hard at work preparing the next development stage for the game and making sure that everything fits into place.

Last week we were at the highlight of the UK games industry calendar, Develop Conference, in Brighton. This was a great chance to catch up in person with so many of the great teams making amazing in the UK right now. And for many of the team to meet up in person too. In particular it gave me time to spend with Nat, our UX genius. We have had a lot of feedback about the way the user interface works and although its kinda ok when you know what you are doing – its takes too much explanation. So we have decided to take a really hard look at how it works and change things for the better. We don’t know what this will look like yet, but we know we want to focus more on the character and less on the lines around them. Nat is looking into all kinds of options and we will share them with those people who backed us on Kickstarter at the right tier soon. We need you guys to help us make sure we make the right choices.

The main topic of this week has been to look into animations. We want to create a real sense of emergent dance from the way you swipe on the screen and I’ve been talking to Nick, our incredible Animator and Simon, our Tech Director to find ways to blend between different animations so that we get a much more fluid experience that feels created by you.  This includes ideas to change to the way the automatic dancing between moves works which we think we allow you to play about with the ‘energy’ of the dancer making the whole thing much more interesting to watch as well as try to replicate.

Next week we will try to finalise all the budgets for the next build and allow us to see more of the concept art come to life. We are also going to start looking at how we can get you backers involved and suggest some dates where we can start getting your input on our design choices.

Thanks to all for sticking with us – we know we have that spark to make this game great!

Oscar