Last month, we asked you to design a set in one of three categories: interior, exterior, and modded, using any content packs you chose. The variety of sets you came up with, from science fiction and fantasy to contemporary streets and other familiar locations, took us by surprise. Picking a winner was hard, and we’re really pleased to see some new faces amongst them.
Here are the winners in each of the three categories congratulations to you all!
We’ll be asking the three winners if they are prepared to let us have their sets and share them with you in the next couple of weeks.
And now…as voted for by the users, for our next competition we’d like you to make a short movie with a surprise ending. Surprise or twist endings are a staple feature of movies and literary fiction. They often contain ironic references or conclude plot twists in the preceding story.
Your surprise ending movie could be comedy, a thriller, a detective story, or just a story about something that happened to you. Use any content packs you like, and any mods. Maximum length, 10 minutes. If you need some inspiration, have a look at this wikipedia article and make sure you check out some of the references at the end for more great examples of twist endings.
Competition closes on Friday, 27th of March at noon GMT.
Or buy all three as a bundle and pay just £15.98 - in other words, we’ll throw in the Street Dressing for free. And - as if that wasn’t enough - when you buy the bundle you get five extra sets that use elements of all three packs.
Special Streets bundle deal - pay £15.98 for all three packs!
If you buy the Street Bundle, due out on Feb 25, you just pay for the Buildings and Cars, and we’ll throw in the Street Dressing for free.
How’s that?
To whet your appetite still further for the new content packs, here’s what you get in each one.
Town Buildings (price £7.99)
The townhouse is divided into several set objects, each of which is highly customisable. Townhouse Ground Floor
- 10 Wall textures (of which 4 are tintable)
- 17 Window styles each with tintable frames and curtains
- 20 Door styles, each with wood and tintable variations
- 6 Porch styles with tintable paintwork
- Edging at ground level
- 5 Edging designs at top
- 9 Dirt Maps
In order to give you maximum compatibility with the existing Moviestorm content, the 20 door styles are available as variations of normal Moviestorm doors, the 17 window styles used in the Ground Floor are all available as normal Moviestorm windows, and the 4 casement windows can be opened. The 10 new wall textures are available for normal Moviestorm walls, and the 6 porches are available as set objects.
Townhouse Upper Floor
- 10 Wall textures (matching the Ground Floor)
- 15 Window Styles each with tintable frames or curtains
- 5 Edging designs at top (matching the Ground Floor)
- 9 Dirt Maps
Townhouse Roof (7 different roof shapes).
- Tintable roof tiles or roof slates.
- 10 Wall textures (matching the Ground Floor, for those roofs with walls)
- 5 Chimney textures
- 9 Window Variations each with tintable frames or curtains
- 8 Dirtmaps (separated for walls and roof tiles)
General Cars (price £7.99)
8 Different cars, which can drive around in Moviestorm. They each have customisable colours, customisable number plates, rotating wheels, headlights/rear lights which can be turned on and off during movies.There are 6 different driver/passenger variations, based around either Families, or Boy Racers. Each person has tintable clothing, and variants on skin and hair colour.
StreetDressing contents (price £4.99)
Road Markings
- Road Arrow
- Road Zig-zag White
- Road Zig-zag Yellow
- Road Corner Double Yellow
- Road Corner Single Yellow
- Road Crossing
- Road Parking Bay
- Road Stop Markings
- Road Stripes 100cm Double White
- Road Stripes 100cm Double Yellow
- Road Stripes 100cm Single White
- Road Stripes 100cm Single Yellow
- Road Stripes 250cm Double White
- Road Stripes 250cm Double Yellow
- Road Stripes 250cm Single White
- Road Stripes 250cm Single Yellow
- Road Stripes 500cm Double White
- Road Stripes 500cm Double Yellow
- Road Stripes 500cm Single White
- Road Stripes 500cm Single Yellow
Road Signs
- Diversion Left
- Diversion Right
- Police
- Road Closed
- Warning Men Working
- Warning Woman Working
- AFrame TriAngle WorkMen
- Dead End
- Do Not Enter
- Give Way
- Motor Vehicle
- No Entry
- No Left Turn
- No Left Turn US
- No Right Turn
- No Right Turn US
- No Through
- No U Turn
- No U Turn US
- Road Work Ahead
- Road Works
- Speed Camera
- Speed Camera US
- Speed Limit 20, 30, 40
- Speed Zone 20, 30, 40
- Stop
- Yield
Other Street Dressings:
- TrafficCone 3 styles
- 3 Bar Barrier 3 variants + single post versions
- Bench 3 variants + tint
- Bin Bags 3 variants + tint
- Black Metal Bollard 3 var + tint
- Bus Shelter Large 6 variants + flat or curved roof and customisable posters
- Bus Shelter Small 6 variants + flat or curved roof and customisable posters
- Concrete Bollard 3 variants + tint
- Crossing Lights 4 way 3 variants x different light colours
- Pedestrian Crossing 3 variants x different light colours
- Crossing Light Single 3 variants x different light colours
- Crowd Barrier 3 variants
- Dumpster 3 variants + tint
- Litter Bin 3 variants + tint
- Litter Pile 2 variants
- Road Cone
- Stainless Steel Bollard 3 variants + tint
Animated objects:
- Traditional English Phone Booth 4 var
- Modern Phone Booth 4 var
Animations for characters using the Phone Booths
- Dial Number
- Enter Phone Booth
- Hammer On Phone Booth
- Leave Phone Booth
- Pick Up Phone
- Replace Phone Gently
- Slam Phone Down
- Talk On Phone
I toyed with making you some hot car action to tease you with over the weekend, featuring our new vehicles tearing up the streets. But then I realised it wouldn't be safe to raise your blood pressure like that, given there's still twelve days to go before you can get your hands on the new packs.
So instead, we'll keep everything down to earth, and stick with some purely functional, boring, working class housing. It's inspired by some of the tenement buildings I saw in East Berlin when I went there in 1999 doing research for a game set in the Cold War, but could be adapted easily to fit into much of Northern Europe, from Paris or Manchester to Denmark or Finland. Just change the bricks, change the windows, change the porches, and there you go. It's built with exactly the same kit of parts as the Georgian terrace I made earlier this week, and took just under an hour to create the entire set.
The varying height of roof lines was quite deliberate. As bits of the buildings crumbled, they sometimes just took the upper floor off, and replaced it with a flat roof.
Oh hang on, just a sec... what's that I spy up on the roof? Could it be... a roof garden? So it is... Somewhere for the apparatchiks to sit out and admire the view over the steel mills and the tractor factories. What's in the back of my mind now is pigeons and Forrest Whittaker and some sword animations... you know what I'm thinking of, right?
Would you like to see it move? You would? OK, then...
We’ll shortly be launching our next competition, but we can’t decide which of the various ideas we like best. Then we realised, it really doesn’t matter what we’d like to do, it matters what you’d like to do. So we figured we’d just ask you straight out.
# A monologue. Any subject, but it has to be one character, talking straight to camera. It could be a joke, a political speech, something topical, or whatever. Just one person.
# A short film about change. Take the idea of “change” and present it any way you like. It can be serious, drama, or any other way you can think of to approach the idea.
# Surprise ending. Do whatever you like, but give your movie an unexpected ending.
And while you’re at it, suggest any other competition ideas for the future.
Here you go, you lucky, lucky people. Another screenshot from the Streets bundle, this time with more of an American styling, as you can tell from the people driving on the wrong side of the road!
To answer the questions you raised in the forums, blogs, and elsewhere, yes, you can have taller buildings, road markings, and US-style street signs. And, just to prove that we still have some surprises up our sleeves, we threw in some road works for you as well.
You can get your hands on the three Streets packs in just two more tantalizing weeks.
Inspired by the Royal Crescent in Bath, near where I’ve lived for most of my life, here’s another example of what you can do with the upcoming Town Buildings pack, due out on Feb 25. It’s Georgian terrace in the early evening, and with a little modification could easily be Islington, Edinburgh, Paris, Boston,or many other places.
The cars and lights are from the old Urban Exteriors pack, and will be replaced by the new Street Dressing and General Cars packs, which will also form part of the Streets bundle.
We’ve been dropping tantalising hints for a while now about several upcoming packs, and we’ve always told you they’ll be ready when they’re ready.
Well, at long last, they’re nearly ready.
On February 25, we’ll be releasing not one, not two, but three new Moviestorm content packs.
First up, we have Town Buildings, which includes a kit for constructing your own buildings from parts. Then, we have Street Dressing, which gives you road signs and other street furniture. Pioneers will welcome the return of the phone booth, which made an appearance some time ago, but was later dropped. And to round off, we have General Cars, which has a selection of vehicles to hurtle up and down your streets.
You’ll be able to buy all three packs as a Streets bundle, which will give you all you need to make everything from dingy alleyways to quiet suburban roads.
Stay tuned for more information over the coming weeks!
We’ve just put the finishing touches to Moviestorm 1.1.4. It’s a free update for all Moviestormers. You can update your copy of Moviestorm by clicking the Update button at the bottom of the Moviestorm Launcher.
The highlights of 1.1.4 include the return of customization options for character accessories (such as glasses and headphones), the ability for characters to use different gaits while walking through doorways, and a new ‘dead’ mood which stops a character from breathing and fidgeting - finally, corpses that actually stay still!
There are updates to a few Moviestorm Content Packs too, mainly providing code support and new audio files in readiness for future upgrades. As always, these updates are free for everyone with a licence to those Content Packs.
The students on the Creative Media Diploma course at Long Road Sixth Form College have been using Moviestorm to bolster their movie-making skills. That’s pretty convenient for us, since - like us - they’re based in Cambridge, UK.
We sent Dave and Johnnie round to their class last week to talk about Moviestorm, low-budget film-making and what working for Short Fuze is really like.
We have no idea why Dave and Johnnie are sat in front of a greenscreen. Nor do we have any idea why Johnnie looks as if someone just shot his dog.
As well as being forced by curriculum to listen to Dave and Johnnie talk for an hour, the students also managed to get some time to play with Moviestorm.
You can read their reactions and comments on theirblogs, but they’ve also uploaded a few of their first Moviestorm movies to YouTube. Our favourite - simply because of the incredible amount of giggling that accompanied its creation - is The Life Of Will Smith.
