Play Online: https://tavern.titdang.me

Hi folks! 

So, here are the results for April! The first release of Luna in the Tavern: Animated finally took place, marking the culmination of all the work from the past month (and several months before it). There has been a small delay – we wanted to release it around the middle of April, but technical surprises don’t care about your plans. As usual, the launch of a pilot version is much more difficult than regular updates. 

This is a big milestone for us. I’ve already mentioned before that I’ve wanted to add animation to my games for a long time, all the way back when I was working solo on Windranger’s Wanderings. And it’s a big milestone for you too because every player loves animations. And our animations are so good I’m sure you’ll love them for more than just being animations. I’m serious, look at Luna’s shiny, sweaty, bouncing titties in the main menu – everything in the game is on the same level (except the spilled beer scene)! It was a very pleasant surprise for me to realize how well my visual style works with Spine (rigging animation software), which we used here. The unpleasant surprise, however, came from my old art files that were made with the idea that no one was ever going to open them again. You might ask me why I saved them if I was never going to open them again, and I might refuse to answer. 

Now, a little more seriousness. Animated Luna was a huge and interesting challenge to us both artistically and technically, forcing us to use all the experience we’ve gained over the years. Initially, we thought we’d be able to just make the remaster out of what we already have. 

Judge this well-thought-out plan for yourselves: send the images to the animator, loop the resulting animations, and put them up on the web, which has supported .webm for a long time, as every rule34 site visitor knows. As simple as making a sandwich. But the problems started as early as the preparation stage when we compared the art style of the first and most recent versions and had to accept that we needed to bring the game to one unified look – the visual of the first few versions is so radically different from the rest of the game. Besides that, because of the way the art asset files were structured, they needed a lot of extra work to be adapted to animation, which is why every scene needed to be edited and reassembled. We realized that this was not going to be a quick in-and-out deal. 

I didn’t have any experience in preparing static images for animation, so I’ve learned a lot while communicating with our animator. Speaking of him, you won’t believe this, but finding a professional animator and asking him to just do it isn’t enough to produce a high-quality erotic video. You also need to explain what you want, in detail, which references should be used (and what you should and should not do), which specific motions make your pants twitch, and why the highlights on those titties should move this way and not that way. Thankfully, I made use of my knowledge of animation basics, which I learned years ago, and a massive, professional, practically encyclopedic library of watched 18+ videos on the green site, so we successfully collaborated with our animator friend. And you should be the ones to judge the fruits of our union. 

One day, Flamie and I were sitting down, drinking some black Sicilian Citrus tea (pyramid bags), discussing what we could handle in terms of video. “We can loop the video from one specific moment to another!”, we said. “How about a transparent layer, the .webm format supports it!”, we thought. “It would be cool to add effects like with the static images”, we dreamed. Reality is full of disappointment, various video codecs, different browsers with their own quirks, and strange, conflicting web libraries. Despite this armful of obstacles, we’ve achieved almost everything we wanted. Some things were harder than others, and some were done not quite how we wanted them to be. But if you ever think “Is this really supposed to look like that?”, our answer is “Of course! That was the intention!”. It’s true. Mostly.

But Flamie will tell you more about the technical parts. I’d like to stress that we are very proud of the animated version – the change in format was a breath of fresh air. It’s up to you to judge and review it.