What I’d tell you? He was bound to get funded within the month, it was only a matter of time. While not as fast as Squigly, Big Band’s crowdfunding took a little over two weeks to reach its mark, $400,000 for the whole campaign. Big Band himself was funded a couple of days ago, but today both his stage and story has been fully funded, marking his campaign a full success. Like Squigly, Big Band will be free for the first three months after release and you’ll keep him after the time is up if you managed to get him.

In the process of the crowdfund, Lab Zero announced new initiatives for the campaign and updates on the characters. For the campaign, more perks were added beyond their initial perk, which now goes as high as $7,500 and comes with a trip to EVO with the Lab Zero team. Second is that several additional voice packs will become available for Skullgirls, which include a Robo-Fortune voice pack and a Female Announcer voice pack, both for free.

In character news, Squigly and Leviathan now have a voice. Squigly will be voiced by Lauren Landa and Leviathan will be voiced by Liam O’Brien. Big Band’s voice will be that of Rich Brown. With both Big Band and Squigly funded, all sights are set on the final, 3rd character in the campaign, which will be chosen by fans. The third character will cost as much as Big Band since this one too has not been worked on as far as Squigly before the collapse of Reverge Labs. Since our previous article, the newest characters revealed for voting are:

• Regina, the animal tamer from the same circus troupe as Cerebella
• Beatrix, Cerebella’s rival
• Ottomo, a henchman or Lorenzo that is controlled by a little dragon
• Eliza, and Egyptian-themed nightclub singer in New Meridian
• Yu-Wan, one of the background characters in Ms. Fortune’s stage

All is not over though. If the third character is funded now, another character, fourth character, can be funded. It’s the same situation as Big Band and will also cost $225,000, bringing the stretch goal to a whopping $825,000 for creation, and another $25,000 for stage and story.

There is one more initiative if they manage to get that far, and it has something to do with another dev team. If the campaign can amass $725,000, Lab Zero Games will give Mane6 a license to use the Skullgirls engine. To bring you up to speed, Mane6 were developing a very good looking fangame called MLP: Fighting is Magic which pitted the ponies of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic against each other. Initially the lawyermans of Hasbro had no problem with the game in the two years it’s been in development. That is, until February 2nd when Hasbro sent a Cease & Desist to the dev team.

Since then, Mane6 have a attempted to start from scratch. In the process, Mane6 is getting help from none other than Friendship is Magic creator Lauren Faust, who is offering the team completely new characters to work with. Mane6 has been using an “old but versatile” program called Fighter Maker 2000 to make Fighting is Magic and presumably this new game they’re making. Thing is, like I said, it’s old, and the team had to do some tricks to get the thing working right. On their blog within the comments, they said that if they get the engine, they can do a lot more for their game than FM2K can do (obviously), though it’ll be a tough task to change engines. However one of the devs, Jay Wright, stated “but we are confident we could transfer the mechanics over and clean them up without too much fuss. We’re fast learners.”

Keep Skullgirls Growing [Indiegogo]