Announcing Luna in the Tavern: Animated and November results

Hi folks! Happy start of winter!

I’m happy to announce something we’ve been working on for a long time already - an animated remaster of Luna in the Tavern. It’s a very big and personal event for me, so I’d like to give you some context. Let’s start from the beginning.

Adding animation is a very attractive idea and a difficult choice that every author faces. Beginner developers ask me for advice sometimes, and all of them ask me about animation. I persuade most of them not to add it, at least to the first few releases. Everyone likes animations, everyone wants to see them, but working with them is a real challenge for any developer. I also like animation a lot and have wanted to add it to my games for a long time. A long, long time. Does anyone here remember the release of Windranger’s Wanderings? The very first scene I made for that game was an animated scene between Axe and Lyralei. Back then, I had little experience in drawing or animation, so I had the naive idea that I’d handle everything easily and stand out. It was beyond my abilities, however. Drawing frame-by-frame animation takes a lot of time and effort, so future scenes were all static.

Then, when I returned to WW after some time in the form of WW: Midforest Episode, I also started with adding animations, thinking I had enough experience already. The very first update was fully animated - the scene with Luna and the loggers and all the sprites of Luna and Lyralei talking. The problem snuck up from another side, however. The RPGM MV engine I was using back then did not support animations natively. I added them using some workarounds, which brought down the game’s performance heavily. I didn’t have the skills to fix that or friends to help me with it. Once again, I turned away from animations after having already spent a lot of effort on adding them.

While already working on Luna in the Tavern, somewhere around Lyralei’s book arc, I started considering animations again. We even got an offer from a beginner animator who was willing to do frame-by-frame animation. But since I was working with a team this time, I didn’t want to follow my personal desires again and break the third project’s back with the extra effort required. I had finally grasped what I did well when it came to development, so I decided not to include animations again, willingly this time. Now I understand that it was the right decision.

Last winter, the animation question came up again. It turned out that we had the time and opportunity to actually come up with something in that regard. There were a few options and we decided to start with the safest one - adding the “jerk-off mode” as a few separate scenes in the gallery. They were well-received and we liked how they turned out, so we decided to dig deeper in that direction. We hired people to animate two test scenes in Spine using our pre-made materials and tried to integrate them into the engine. I cannot express how many technical tasks Flamie had to solve to make everything work how it should, but we really liked the result. We agreed that the entire game would look much better like that. But those tests also made us certain that such an undertaking would require material investments, technical upgrades, some changes in the narrative and adapting scenes to animation.

So… Meet Luna in the Tavern: Animated! It’s an entire separate project whose updates will follow the path of the original Luna in the Tavern. Every scene, every character, every interaction will be animated. Such a body of work is a very expensive and time-consuming thing that requires an individual approach, its own branch of development for art, code and even the script. That’s why we decided not to add full-fledged animations to the existing project or create “alt-versions”, to prevent us from accidentally breaking something we’ve already created with great effort. The Animated remaster will come out separately, with its own patches and updates, and give us a clear view of your interest in animations in general.

A valid question you might have is “Do moving pictures instead of static ones really require all of that?” Our first tests say yes, they do. The moment we tried to add animations to existing Act 1 scenes, the narrative and tempo started falling apart. Animations just didn’t fit the style the first versions of Tavern were made in - I’ve already mentioned before that a single scene used to be able to fit in 20 technical lines back then while scenes today are usually hundreds of lines long. I’ve long been interested in rewriting the entirety of Act 1, which is the face of the game, but waved the idea off, thinking it a personal want and not a necessity. There was no reason I could name this time, so… I rewrote the entirety of Act 1 (and will probably make some edits to 2 and 3), making it about three to four times bigger. I have grown a lot as a scriptwriter over these years, so I’ve used all of my skills to modernize Act 1 and bring it to the level Acts 4 and 5 were written in. Besides that, Act 1 of Tavern was a time of artistic experimentation and searching for my visual style - you can still see traces of my work on Midforest Episode in it. That’s why almost all the scenes were redrawn and brought up to the actual level of art in Tavern while being adapted to animation. You can already see some of them in… the trailer! Yes, we have prepared a trailer for you to see what all of this is even about. Enjoy! (It has a lot of lewd content, so it’s in a separate locked post.)

https://www.patreon.com/posts/luna-in-tavern-117086454

Flamie and I have been working tirelessly for months to bring animated Luna to life, to delight our existing patrons and bring in new ones. We’re confident in the results now, so the first Animated version isn’t far off - but in 2025!

November was an unwelcome surprise with my health problems. I already feel much better, and I’m slowly getting back to work, so I hope the regular updates won’t be delayed any longer either.

Thank you for your support! If you enjoyed the announcement and the trailer, subscribe!