Happy Christmas, everyone, see you in 2010!

Woah, what a totally crazy week that was! We shipped you:

• Moviestorm 1.2.0.1
• Female Monster Heads
• Photostorm Holidays
• Greetingstorm
• Photostorm Holidays Live
• Content rentals

And we managed to squeeze in a Christmas party! We've got one more little thing we're aiming to get out of the door before everyone takes their winter holiday, but otherwise, that's us pretty much done until 2010.

Thanks for all your support during the year. It's been busy as hell, but the difference between what we have now and what we had at the start of 2009 with is amazing. There's always more we would have liked to do, and there's already plenty on the schedule for 2010. And thanks most of all for all your feedback, here and in the forums - it's really good to know how you feel about what we do.

Happy holidays, everyone - make something cool so we can see it when we get back!

Christmas mayhem - update

• 1.2.0.1 - check!
• Monsters - check!

Now we're going to have our Christmas party, then we'll try and get some more stuff out to you by the end of the week.

Pre-Christmas Moviestorm mayhem

With just a few more working days before we all take a Christmas break, we're aiming to ship a whole bunch of stuff out to you very soon indeed.

• Moviestorm 1.2.0.1 - mostly a patch release, addressing a few bugs. It's mainly little things, but the main issue is that text to speech should now work properly. You should get that any time now.
• GreetingStorm - along the same lines as Photostorm. This'll be free, for now, and includes the Christmas outfits - just in time for the Christmas competition!
• Female Monsters - this will be a real squeeze, but we're going to try and get this out to you if we possibly can.
• Content rental - we're aiming to get a first version of this running by the end of the week. It may be a little unpolished, but it would be good to get some early feedback from you.

And we're still working on the PayPal / Amex / Visa issues. Sadly, they're not proving at all straightforward to fix.

It's Christmas - let's party!

OK, Santa baby, time to shake it!

A few shots from the 2009 Christmas Party at the Moviestorm Mansion.

The wicked ladies

A few weeks ago, we gave you a bunch of Halloween monsters created by the Marvellous Mister Ollis. Quite rightly, a number of you observed that they were all male. This is because we are all - apart from Lisa, of course - well brought-up English gentlemen who would never, ever think of a lady as monstrous, evil, or anything less than entirely beautiful, wonderful, and charming. Even when they're dead.

However, we recognise that for dramatic purposes, it may sometimes be necessary to depict ladies in an unflattering light. So Chris went home and locked himself in the cupboard under the stairs for a month with nothing but old Hammer movies and absinthe, and here's what he came up with: a vampiress, a zombie, a witch, and Mrs Frankenstein.

These are renders of the original 3DS Max models, not the actual Moviestorm heads we'll be shipping, but you get the idea. They're all morphable, just like the guys. And they'll be available soon.

Payment systems - update

When we rolled out the new marketplace last week, we had a couple of problems with the payment systems.

1. We can't take American Express. This is due to some issue between PayPal and Amex. To be honest, we don't entirely understand it, and suspect it's as much a corporate issue as a technical one. We use PayPal Pro to handle the actual money transfer, and until they sort it out, we're completely in their hands. The latest prognosis is that we won't be able to accept Amex until 2010.
2. We can't take PayPal at the moment. We're still working on it with PayPal and our billing provider, we think we have a working system, and we'll know in the next day or so whether it's all fixed now. If it is, we'll get it out to you right away. If not, it's back to plan B. Or is it Plan C by now? (And yes, we do see the irony in using PayPal Pro and not being able to accept PayPal...)

We'll keep you updated - thanks for your patience.