Stick Puppet Theater

For Global Game Jam 2023, I teamed up with Tommy Huynh (designer) and Dylan Smit (developer) to make 'Rooting VR You' in 2 days. It's a VR movement rhythm game in which the player roots for others. In front of the player is a scene in which a person is struggling with a task. By successfully matching your hands with the prompts, you give them enough cheers to complete their tasks. I was responsible for art, VFX, and animation.

We only had enough time to implement 3 scenes: cashier scanning, triangle playing, and table climbing. My inspiration for the assets was YouTuber Noodle, who uses paper stick puppets in his videos. His style allows for simple assets and simple animation. For a quick workflow, I made a texture per scene, converted the png's to vectors, then to geometry to make 3D boards, used a decimate modifier, and lastly, planar UV'd them. Animations were made in Unity and are made to match the song we used.

The game can be found here: https://devdunk.itch.io/rooting-vr-you.