Self-employed, available on Steam
Got a great story in your mind but neither time nor the skills to produce it? Turn your movie idea into reality in real-time with Puppet Play. Using your own movement in VR, quickly and easily animate a wide variety of characters (not only puppets) and props to realize your idea in minutes.
Trailer
Playable demo available on store page
My Contributions
I am doing this project as an indie developer with two friends helping me create the assets.
- Creative Director
- Game Design
- UX Design
- Development
Fellow team members: Christin Gan (Character Art), Niklas Rüffler (Envrionment Art)
Design
The goal of this tool is to allow everyone, no matter the prior experience, to quickly turn their ideas into movies. This is done by animating characters in realtime with the tracked motion of your own body. These movies can then be exported as mp4 files and shared on the internet.
To place everything in a familar and understandable setting, the tool is designed after traiditonal puppetry and set in a movie studio.
The biggest challenge designing this project was the balance between user friendly and depth of tools.
Several tools support the player in their quick and easy creation process.
Animation Process
Once you press record, the movement of everything you hold in your hand is being saved as an animation
Animate in multiple takes: Animate a first character in the first take, go back to the start and add the next one. Repeat until your movie is done
Animation Support
Puppet Complexity
Characters have different animation complexities. The more complex a character is, the longer it takes to animate. Depending on the time and effort the user wants to invest, they can choose their set of characters. For example a puppet on a stick only needs one animation, while a figure with individually animatable limbs needs at least 5.
Mocap
Users can become the character and articulate the virutal body directly with their own.
Remote Control
Already moving characters are hard to animate, therefore users can spawn a remote control. This remote is an exact copy of the puppet, but without any animations. Manipulating limps of the remote applies their position to the target in local space to the root stick.
Full body inverse kinematic system
To make movements more realistic and animating easier I developed custom Full body IK systems, that automatically move spine and shoulders according to the positions of the hands and head.
Some puppets are controlled from the head, these also use a custom IK system I created.