$Games
Games invite the user to engage deeper with the systems and mechanics of interaction. In the context of my work, games are often vertical slices that have laid the groundwork to be built on top of.
This is an overview of the commercial projects I did at denkwerk; for personal game projects, check out Flickjam, Three.js Racer, or Pico Skate.
Brand Game (2025)
Building on the Forever—Endless Runner Engine for Unity, we created a WebGL game. I took the lead role in the project, defined goals, developed the art style, and created most of the 3D assets for the project. I helped program some game mechanics and came up with our system for the placement and randomization style of the procedural levels. Most of the music and sound design was composed and created by TRO, who also composed the original brand song. They did a complete new game spin on the sound, and we did agree on using stems from the song. That way we rendered the song dynamically at runtime, reacting to the state of the game loop.
Best played live here.
One of the most interesting things was the setup of multiple builds for the game for different audiences. The game always built four versions; one axis of variation is the usage of marketing partners inside the game’s assets, and the other axis is a full replacement of the brand logo and name for the market in another country.
The in-game character was then also reused for promotional material and rendered offline for social media. Having already built the full animation rig, the character and scooter could easily be posed and rendered.
Concept art development for a smooth low poly look. The style of the emotions was taken from one of the animes I watched at the time. But in the end this emote system did not make it into the game loop.
Social Multiplayer (2022)
My teammate Joshua did build great multiplayer prototypes with the normcore. So in 2022 we took things into our own hands to create a little Cologne carnival celebration.
My role was mostly coordination, design oversight and creation of all 3D assets. For the look I refined my soft low poly look with minimal textures. I set up a roster of characters – each split in three parts – which then could be freely combined by the players as their avatar.
The character designs were created as an extension of the character designs I animated for my little cell animation Looom short film (2020). As it was a research and development project, I was happy to put my own designs in.
