Wow, what? A year! 2023 has been great to us with new top talent joining the team, and the launch of our disruptive new service - Animate Anything - able to rig and animate users’ static models in a matter of moments. And we’ve spread the good word of Anything World far and wide, helping creators to do more of what they love: creating! We’ve also casually doubled our user base this year to almost 25,000!
Before we dive in, we’d like to take this opportunity to say a huge thank you to ALL of you for being great supporters and creators - for using and enjoying our products, giving us valuable feedback and for maintaining impeccable standards of personal hygiene despite increasingly hectic schedules. We’re ready to make 2024 an even bigger year and continue to bring you superfly AI products that truly make a difference for you.
Products & Games
This year saw the launch of some MAJOR products and games. Sending Animate Anything out into the world was the highlight of 2023 - a culmination of all our finely tuned ideas, insight and development. It’s brought cool relief to developers and creators alike: upload any version of your static 3D model within a vast choice of categories, follow a few simple steps to check the rig, mesh and rotation of the model - and see a fully animated 3D model pop out. It really is as simple as that. We were over the moon to see it climb the ranks to second place on Product Hunt - no mean feat when you consider around 20,000 apps are launched on the platform every month.
We added an entire menagerie of beasts and birds to our 3D model library this year: humans, ground and flying insects, arachnids and crabs. Yet more quadrupeds - turtles, alligator-ish reptiles, rat-like creatures (oh yes - more of these please) and grizzly bears. Flyers and waddling birds. We managed to squeeze out a few kangaroos and half the cast of Jurassic Park before the year's end so you're just a click away from unleashing their roar into your 3D world. Find T-Rex, Parasaurolophus and Spinosaurus in our library now!
In October Spilt Milk Studios launched the super duper Super Picture Cross game powered by our animated 3D libraries. Andrew Smith - Founder and Creative Director of the studio hailed our tools which “made it possible for us to do a couple of really exciting things that we couldn't otherwise have achieved: they provided an enormous raft of amazing assets in a consistent style, ready for an entire game in the minuscule timeframe we had available to us.” Whoop! Happy to help - lay your hands on it here for endless gameplay.
We’re ending the year flying high with the launch of another fantastic new game powered by Anything World: Word Warrior: Zombie Typocalypse. Unashamedly non-festive, just in time for Christmas nevertheless. The game has just been released by the relentlessly creative US games studio Choice Provisions. Co-founder Mike Roush said “Choice Provisions would never have made a game like this without Anything World. Having an essentially limitless supply of objects to play with has empowered us to make this quirky game that would never have otherwise been made. By using their unique technology we were able to bring this to market!.” Head over to Steam to get your hands on the Zombie goodies and get stuck into some hilarious light-hearted gaming over Christmas and far into 2024.
Unreal & Unity
Over 2023 we’ve really consolidated our presence on both Unreal and Unity engines with our AI Creator featuring on both. Users can now use voice and text to add, move and remove models to scenes in a jiffy. Our SDK launched on Unreal so there’s no need to ever leave, and we launched on the Unity Asset Store too. We’re all about handiness here.
Jay Santos, chief of our developer relations repped us at both Unite, the Unity Developer Day and Unity Creator Day. Dedicated to supporting and inspiring all creators working in industries as broad as engineering and manufacturing. Not forgetting…gaming of course.
Events
We got behind a bunch of high-profile events starting with Game Dev London at the beginning of the year. In the Spring we blitzed the behemoths SXSW and GDC in the States before dashing home to drop in on WASD, the heart of video games at the London Games Festival, and the headline festival itself. Gordon, our Co-Founder and CEO presented at TechChill Riga. The cornerstone of the Baltic tech scene was pretty cool indeed. Bbrrrrr.
Early summer Gordon hopped on a panel at London Tech Week about the “Future of Creative Work: How AI is Changing, Accelerating & Upending Creative Industries” - very much in our ballpark. It was then Anything World’s other Co-Founder, Seb’s turn to take to the stage at the balmier AWE in Singapore - enlightening this particular boom town about “How AI is Powering a Golden Age in Games Development.”
Peak summer, Gordon hopped across The Pond to Animation Magazine’s World Animation Summit to present how AI can ‘automate away’ problem areas for creators to free up time for more creative development. Even the most traditional animators began to warm up to the idea of how AI tools can be transformative - taking on the tasks they’ve never particularly relished doing.
In the midst of all this speaking, we took in all the heavy hitters - Develop Brighton, GamesCom and Dev Com - some of our fave events. The frost caught up with Seb at Slush in Helsinki. Actually, he had a very warm welcome at the annual Finnish tech startup event. We hopped into bed with Into Games for a month-long game jam filled with fun, fervour and creativity.
The takeaways from all these events are that people really enjoy using our tools, and really love how much time they can save (!) Our swag goes down a treat too - so rest assured, we’ll continue the fluoro merch into 2024 - stickers, hoodies and maybe, just maybe the free ice cream will reappear.
So that’s all folks. We’re looking forward to 2024 with so much in the pipeline. Watch this space for the latest news. For now, Happy Christmas, and Happy Holidays and have a great New Year bursting with creativity!
