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[thebarryman]

Psynchrony is a cinematic rhythm action game for the iPad. You play as Kay, a young writer whose path through life has come to a crossroads. In order to break free from the rigid rhythms of her daily routine, Kay must reach the center of her inner dream world and confront the shadowy figure who has haunted her since childhood.

As you tap the screen, Kay takes action. The longer you can keep Kay's actions in sync with her thoughts, the more layers of story and music you will uncover.

[s-spooky g-g-ghosts]

[thebarryman]

Heh heh...

Rest assured, there is much more to the game than teeth brushing! This is just a temp animation I put together so we could work on the gameplay and animation systems.

The current plan is to shoot the game (like a movie) at the end of January. After that's done, we'll start cranking out final animations so you'll be able to see more of the full range of actions.

Here's a video I put together that explains the animation system:

http://vimeo.com/109984176

[Strkl]

Very interesting visual result!

Looks like rotoscopy but, also looks like 3D!

I would love to know more about how you achieved that style

[thebarryman]

Thanks!

The animations are indeed rotoscoped. Each animation is made from a certain number of vector shapes, or "cels." For each keyframe, we set the control points of these cels. Then blending between the control points of frames, animations, and views is done procedurally.

For the teeth brushing animation, there was only 6 key frames. The running animation/shoulder block character has 32 keyframes -- 3D characters take a lot more keyframes (one per view, per animation, per frame).

Some of the 3D look also comes from the radial gradients we can apply to each cel -- you can see this on the tooth brushing character's jacket and fingers.