Our studio, after 10 years in animation for advertising, is diving into the world of creating a video game.

‍

About the game

The game is called Torn Apart, a cinematic puzzle platformer in 2.5D sidescroller. The player controls a small origami paper character, brave and determined to reunite its family, who has been blown away by the wind.

Using clever origami techniques, our character will progress through everyday environments transformed into surreal and beautiful landscapes. He will quickly find his kids and progress through most of the adventure protecting them and collaboration with them.

The gameplay emphasizes emotional storytelling and innovative puzzle mechanics, all within a poetic adventure that challenges the player’s ingenuity and reflexes.

The game’s visuals will be one of our main focuses; although technically 3D, it will look very pictural and illustrative, our goal being that it looks as organic and delicate as possible.

→ We are using Unity3D

→ See some early concept arts at the bottom of this page

‍

About the characters design, modeling, rig & animations

The character itself will always be fairly small in-screen so we don’t need a very high level of detail. Also it will always be seen from the side so its aspect from front & back are very secondary.

We imagine its size to be ≈ 2 inches high when in human form, and be made out of a very regular A4 sheet; so paper will look fairly thick at its scale. Also we want the paper to look organic, so it needs flaws here and there, it needs to be twisted and irregular.

‍

‍

Since the concept of folding/unfolding paper in origami style is central to the experience, we want the character to be not only animated like a standard humanoid (running cycles with legs, arms, etc), but also to feature clever folding animations here & there:

• for example, his legs would fold frontwards & backwards when he runs instead of just bending
• or when he needs to turn back, he doesn't do like a human would, instead he folds himself to change its morphology and face the other direction).

The characters will be firstly designed and animated in 2D, so there will be 2D animations to use as references for (almost) every action.

Here’s a list of the first animations we need. They concern the protagonist, the parent we are going to control. These transformations are fairly quick animations (just a few frames) as they need to feel smooth and satisfying in terms of game feel.

‍

BASIC ACTIONS WITHOUT TRANSFORMATIONS

• Walk & Run
• Turn back
• Jump
• Climb
• Crawl on the ground
• Curling up into a ball

‍

TRANSFORMATION ANIMATIONS

• Human to boat origami
• Humain to stairs/accordion
• Human to frog origami
• Human to swan origami

‍

Early 2D animations & concept arts