Cartoon Cinematic

I've had an idea for a short Unreal demo in my head for a while and finally took some time to develop it. I prototyped the gameplay and it felt solid and fun. But there was this feeling that it needed an introduction cinematic to establish the characters and set the tone.

So, I created a rough draft or "pre-visualization" in one day, and I was happy with it. It contained every scene I needed to tell the story, and I threw together scratch audio all at once, to get the timing right.

Then came the decision to commit to the rough and actually illustrate and animate it. I have this nagging feeling that, with the rise of AI-generated content, this type of hand-made animation will become a thing of the past. But I embraced it and gave it my all.

Here is a video of the rough next to the final. I'm very pleased that the original timing and framing of shots survived.

It's helpful for me to keep track of how long things like this take to do. So, I logged the hours:

• Rough Draft: 6 hours
• Final Illustration: 115 hours 😅

*Quick note: The music is a temp track that I do not own the rights to. I plan on re-doing the audio before putting out a playable version.

This was just a quick look at the cartoon cinematic process. I'm not announcing the game yet, but I hope to have an early access version to post soonish. Here's a sneak peek at some of the game levels in development: