New 2D Faces on 3D Characters – 2D Live Euclid

CES 2015 happened last week. Beautiful tvs, new laptops and tablets, a lot of car-tech… but I’m going to talk about an innovation from about a month ago that’s more up my alley.

Most of the posts on this blog makes it clear that I like 2D animation. My first game (which got Greenlit on Steam recently, I’ll talk about that more in a few weeks) is one of the first truly 3D games that has a hand-drawn character. I did this because I am annoyed that no one has really done that before. However, “Live2D” is a company that has been trying hard to make it easier for developers to do that, and so their latest effort, “Live2D Euclid,” comes closer than ever. Their website is available here: http://www.live2d.com/en/ , and a video of their latest technology can be seen here:

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2015…

Happy new year!

Yes, it’s already 2015. What have I done in 2014? Let’s see… I did finish and release my first independent game “Drew and the Floating Labyrinth.” It was nice to have finally finished something I was proud of, and to learn about self-promotion and different distribution sites. Expect a detailed report in post-mortem posts later in January. I got that Bachelor’s degree, and am on track to finish a Master’s degree within a year. I submitted one research paper to another academic conference in the states. I got over 1,000 twitter followers, and yet barely any action from my Facebook company page (note to other developers: don’t bother making a Facebook company page). Not too bad, although looking back, I think I was hoping to do more…

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November’s Over Already?

Wow, time flies. And to think, I planned to give a brief teaser of what games I was working on for November 1… even now, I’m not at where I wanted to be with that. I guess I have a fair excuse: research projects and marking lower classes as a University student has kept me busy, and I may be the new programmer for another indie developer’s game due early in 2015 (more on that later). But darn, I really hope I can get back into my own projects soon. Expect fewer and fewer blog posts until I have more progress.

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What Have I Been Working On?

I promised some weeks ago that I would get around to mentioning exactly what I’m working on at the moment. “Drew and the Floating Labyrinth” has been released about two months ago, and since then I’ve been hard at work at other exciting projects. And school… mostly school.

The result is that I don’t really have anything concrete to show. Sadly. I’m disappointed in myself. But anyway, I’ll stop your curiosity and mention stuff here:

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“Hullabaloo” About Successful IndieGoGo 2D Film Project

Around the time of this writing, IndieGoGo campaign “Hullabaloo” will end.

“Hullabaloo” is a 2d animated film project. It features a strong female lead in a steampunk world. It basically hopes to accomplish what Disney and other big-name animation studios haven’t done for over a decade. Yes, it’s technically a series of short films, but it’s success may also lead to a feature film if we’re lucky.

I pledged just before it ended (for the record, IndieGoGo made it incredibly easy to pledge even without an account, making me like it even a bit more than Kickstarter). I’m excited for this project. Not just because I love 2d traditional animation. I’m excited because, when asking for $80,000 on IndieGoGo, it raised over $450,000. That’s a lot.

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